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  • From: Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Distinguishing between Aramaic and Hebrew
  • Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 20:20:36 -0600

On Wednesday 25 June 2003 19:09, Christopher Kimball wrote:
> Both Hebrew and Aramaic passages appear in Jewish prayer books. Would
> someone offer a short list easy identifiers so that a Hebrew beginner can
> realize he's looking at Aramaic, not Hebrew?

A quick-and-dirty method that I use sometimes is to scan for a lot of words
ending in the letter Aleph, since that is the Aramaic definite article. The
average Hebrew passage doesn't have a whole lot of words with Aleph as the
final radical, so if there are quite a few in the space of a handful of
sentences, it's probably Aramaic.

--
Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
"God does a lot of things in the Psalms
that He can't get away with in systematic theology."




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