Biblical Hebrew Forum

[dwashbur AT nyx.net]

On 26 Oct 2007 at 0:28, Yitzhak Sapir wrote:

> On 10/25/07, Dave Washburn wrote:
> >  And I'm not sure when we agreed that Hebrew did "survive in
> > some small cities that people could visit to learn Hebrew."  I have never
> > suggested such a thing; all along I have said that Hebrew "survived" as
> > a religious language, which is to say it fell into narrowly specialized 
> > use.
> > In this regard it "died out" just the same as Latin did at the end of the
> > Roman period.  It only "survived" as  a religious language, restricted to
> > specialized usage.  That's not survival in the linguistic sense.
> 
> Perhaps you should reread what I wrote?
> 
> I wrote, in part:
> 
> > Both Eastern and Western varieties of Aramaic still survive
> > in various communities in Arab countries, despite the lingua franca having
> > been Arabic for a thousand years.  Can we deny that Hebrew did not
> > similarly survive, slowly dying out over centuries in various communities?
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > This appears to be a straw man argument, because I don't know of
> > anyone who actually claims it died  out *completely*.
> 
> Just in case it is not clear, Neo-Aramaic survives as a spoken living 
> dialect
> of various towns, not restricted to simply a religious language.

I confess  I'm really not sure what this has to do with what I wrote.  I said 
nothing at all about 
Neo-Aramaic, or any other kind of Aramaic.  Last I heard, we were talking 
about Hebrew.

Dave Washburn
Why do it right when you can do it again?