Advocating for the implementation of the qatal/yiqtol nomenclature in verbal searches

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

First of all, I am all aware that this issue has been discussed a few times on the forums by now, but it is my opinion that it deserves to be reviewed every now and then. Not because of constant shifts within scholarship (and least of all my own personal bias when it comes to the Hebrew verbal system), but rather because that the current nomenclature "perfective/imperfective" indeed represents a certain position within scholarship - that the Hebrew verbal system is aspectual. This becomes even more evident when one performs a verbal search; in the list of choices, "aspect" is one of them.

 

While this is a position with which many scholars agree to this day, there are still a great deal of scholars who oppose it for varying reasons. As such, I would once more advocate for switching to the qatal/yiqtol system in Accordance in spite of the many programming issues that apparently would accompany this change.

 

As stated before in older threads, the main reason that this is a preferable system to the current one is that it's as close as we'll probably ever get to a "neutral" terminology for the Hebrew verbs: A qatal does not indicate in itself that the verbal form is temporal or aspectual and so on - instead, it would be up to the individual user to decide how to understand the qatal. Anyway, I'd really like to hear everyone's opinion on this again.

 

With kind regards 

 

Peter Christensen