Articles |
Independent Elements in the Verbal System of Maskilic Hebrew Fiction
University College London
This paper examines the ways in which the verbal system of Maskilic Hebrew prose fiction written between 1857 and 1878 is independent of its biblical and rabbinic antecedents. It proposes that some Maskilic verbal features are entirely without precedent in the canonical sources, and that many others with biblical or rabbinic counterparts are employed in an original manner. It first surveys independent Maskilic verbal morphology. This consists of the long yiqtol form, apocopated unconverted yiqtol, unapocopated wayyiqtol and infinitive construct of verbs with yod and nun as their initial root letter. It then analyses original Maskilic syntactic phenomena. These include the treatment of the wayyiqtol and weqatal, the use of the particles 
and 
in combination with the infinitive construct, real conditional constructions and constituent order. Examples from texts by P.Smolenskin, Y.L. Gordon, A. Mapu, I.M. Dick and D. Frischmann are used to illustrate these points.