Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Dave Washburn <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

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."