I know that in Biblical Hebrew, take a word like "Vaydaber." "Yedaber" = "He will speak"; the "v" flips the word from future tense to past, so it's "he spoke."
Most translations understand the "v" ALSO means "and"; so in most translations of the Bible (Jewish included), you'll see:
And the Lord spoke ...
Though R' Aryeh Kaplan's translation leaves out the "and"s. (Is that him just making it more readable in common English? Or that the vav's were never intended as "ands"?)
I suppose one could hold "the vav sometimes means and" instead of "always does" or "never does" too.
What are our sources on this?
Answer
1) I once heard a proof that the "vav ha-hipuch" also indicates "and", from the fact that Targum Onkelos includes these "vav"s even though the "hipuch" function is unnecessary in Aramaic. For example, ויאמר is translated as ואמר, even though the Aramaic word אמר is already past tense.
2) The Sefer Klalei Taamei HaMikrah states that in most cases the vav ha-hipuch also functions as a "chibur," with only a few exceptions. One exception is the vav in the beginning of a sefer, e.g. ויהי אחרי in the beginning of Sefer Yehoshua, which cannot be a conjunction (see Radak there). Another exception is a posuk such as ביום השלישי וישא אברהם, where the vav is clearly only for hipuch. He quotes the following sources, which I have not checked:
ספר הזכרון הקדמון, ספר דקדוק לרמח"ל דף ק"ג (ובהגהות שם סק"ד), אבן עזרא פרשת וירא- כ, ט"ז
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