[b-hebrew] Aramaic
Trevor Peterson
abuian at access4less.net
Sat Mar 12 15:36:51 EST 2005
cmeadows3 at verizon.net wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> Anyone here familiar with David Marcus' grammar or the volume on "Galilean Aramaic" by Caspar Levias? Perhaps the Bergstrasser and Brockelmann give a good overview of Aramaic?
Are you talking about Bergstrasser's Introduction to the Semitic
Languages? It's good, but obviously not as thorough as you'd get from a
book-length grammar.
>
> I feel pretty confident with Hebrew and I'm mostly concerned with the biblical era (non-Syriac) Aramaic. It seems that most of the available grammar just concentrate on the small portions of Aramaic in the bible and ignore the DSS, Targums, and other important writings.
There seems to be some confusion here. (Maybe it's on my part.) You ask
about Brockelmann (his grammar of Syriac, I assume), then you say that
you're not interested in Syriac. You're interested in the biblical era,
which you clarify by saying "non-Syriac," but Galilean Aramaic would be
roughly the same era as Syriac. You also reference the Targums, which is
a bit vague, since the Targums span a rather wide period of time,
overlapping quite a bit with Syriac. I would classify BA as a type of
Standard Literary Aramaic, which also includes Qumran material and the
Targums of Onqelos and Yonatan. Bauer & Leander is the only real
reference grammar on BA, and that's about as good as it gets for SLA in
general. There are some good articles you could read to fill in some of
the gaps. Also, I wouldn't completely discount studying the later
dialects. Since they tend to have the largest bulk of evidence, they
provide a lot of useful comparisons. That's actually a lot of the reason
that I didn't restrict the Aramaic list (already referenced by Peter) to
any subset of Aramaic.
Trevor Peterson
CUA/Semitics
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