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  • From: Trevor Peterson <abuian AT access4less.net>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Aramaic
  • Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2005 15:36:51 -0500

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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