emotional

</strong>

The comment does apply. See my post above. Arabic is like Hebrew in having only two aspects, perfect and imperfect, whose tenses are generally inferred or guessed through context. Future in Arabic is expressed the same as the present, using the imperfect aspect, though there is a prefix saufa or sa- which can make it a certain future: saufa yaktubu or sayaktubu means unambiguously "he will write".

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A noun with an adjective looks similar to a nominal sentence, but there is one difference: the adjective must agree with the noun in having a definite article. "The good man" is literally "the man the good" in Hebrew, whereas "The man is good" is literally "The man good":

hammelekh haggadol = the great king

hammelekh gadol = the king is great

Indeed so. The vowels are inferred by context alone. In the course of the ages, the memory of the correct reading of Hebrew canonical texts faded, so a tradition of vowel-pointing - writing points above or below or inside the consonants to denote a vowel or lack of it - developed. The vowel-pointing reflects what the tradition-makers thought appropriate. Whether you read miswoth "commandments" or massoth "pieces of unleavened bread" is up to the canonisers.

Sauron

Not to pick a very small nit - but according to Ziadeh & Winder, An Introduction to Modern Arabic, the information I provided is correct.

Farhat J. Ziadeh is professor emeritus at the Dept of Near East Languages & Literature at the University of Washington. Besides being a judge in Palestine during the Mandate years and a reknowned expert on Arabic language, he was also my mentor during my BA in Arabic Lang & Lit at the U of W.

Here's an article on the debate about tense and aspect in Arabic (and other languages):

<a href="http://www.yusuf-abufara.net/Contrastive%20study%20of%20aspect%20in%20English%2 0and%20Arabic.html" target="_blank">http://www.yusuf-abufara.net/Contrastive%20study%20of%20aspect%20in%20English%2 0and%20Arabic.html</a>

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: Sauron ]</p>

emotional

They must be talking about demotic (spoken) Arabic, whereas I was talking about the literary (written) language. Demotic Arabic, at least the Palestinian dialects I know, has a rich tense-system, in contrast to the two-aspect literary language.

Sauron

Yes, that's correct. The written language has two tenses (aspects), which are separated by the question of whether the action has been completed yet, or not.

lpetrich

I wonder if Modern Hebrew also has multiple verb tenses.

And the creation of multiple verb tenses in modern Arabic is a case of grammar getting more complicated over time.

Something like that has happened in the Germanic languages; English has a simple present and a simple past -- and numerous compound tenses that were invented over the centuries and that were lacking from Old English. The simple present and simple past were most likely an aspect system -- as in Semitic.

These are counterexamples to one curious creationist contention: that grammars of various languages have been getting simpler over time. This is an extrapolation from such cases as Latin-to-Romance, or at least the continental western Romance languages (it's much easier for me to find stuff on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than on Romanian; there are introductory grammars in various places in the Internet). Latin had 3 grammatical genders; all the Romance languages have only 2. Latin had several noun cases; the CWR ones have no noun cases, though they have some pronoun cases. However, the Romance ones have invented new ways of forming various tenses, like the future tense. French j'aimerai ("I will love", literally "to love I have"), for example.

Examples like this show how morphological complexity can appear -- as run-together compound constructions. And that's a likely explanation for some of the grammatical complexity of some of the older Indo-European languages, like Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. Thus, Latin amabo ("I will love") is likely originally a compound tense. As a consequence, ancestral Indo-European is usually reconstructed as having only two or three verb tenses -- at least an imperfect and a perfect.

emotional

An occasional "to be in past" + "verb" is used for conditional and habitual functions. Hayiti kotev (lit. "I was writing") could mean "I would write" or "I used to write".



The tense-system of demotic Arabic, specifically the Palestinian dialects I know, is elaborate:

ana fataht - I opened
ana baftah - I open / I am opening
ana rah aftah - I am going to open
ana aftah - I should/may open (subjunctive)
ana faateh - I have opened
ana kunt aftah - I used to open
ana kunt baftah - I was opening
ana akoon aftah - I shall/should/may be opening

That makes about 7 synthetic constructions, as opposed to just 2 in classical Arabic. To be sure, classical Arabic does sometimes use kaana "to be" with verbs for a habitual or continuous aspect. It's just that the modern spoken language makes it part of regular use.

The auxiliary verbs now used to form compound tenses used to have independent meanings in the past. For example Old English ic wille gan meant "I want to go" and ic sceal gan meant "I have to go".

Old English is a fascinating language to study. The similarities with Modern High German are simply striking. "With a beating heart" is mit klopfendem Herzen in Modern German, and in Old English it is mid cloppandum heortan.