Biblical Hebrew Forum

[James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>]

Thanks for that. That was an interesting post. I think you are right  
in many respects. Aramaic speakers can still be found today in small  
pocket society's in Iraq. They, to this day, resist the Islamic faith  
and it is perhaps their language which has helped them exclude  
themselves from the ethnic majority in the country in which they  
reside almost as alien residents.

Their culture is an interesting one with many parallels the kind of  
impression we get about John the Baptist and his pre-Christian  
following. See this wiki article about the mandaeans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandaeism

I think their culture may be an interesting case study in this kind of debate.

James Christian

Quoting Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>:

> > I've tried to stay out of this but I can't resist any longer.
> >
> > Basically, these are the simple linguistic facts of the matter:
> >
> > 1) We know Hebrew mainly through Greek
>
> maybe for you, it depends 'what you mean "we"?' to quote the famous
> Tonto and Lone Ranger joke.
> Otherwise not true, not for the Second Temple Hebrew speakers,
> Qumranians, mishnaic speakers, geonim and piyyutim, and finally
> the medieval Hebrew grammarians.
>
> > 2) We know Greek mainly through Latin
>
> Again,  maybe for you.
> Not true, for the Greeks themselves who have a three-thousand
> year partially documented, continuous history, tons of papyri
> and inscriptions, and even ancient grammarians who said things
> like BOAI ('we don't pronounce the iota').
>
> > 3) We know Latin mainly through our translations from Latin
>
> I'm not sure the Vatican would agree.
>
> > 4) When we transliterated Hebrew names from Latin the limitations of
> the naturally sounding sequences of phonemes and of our alphabet
> caused us to lose/change features of the latin vocalisation
>
> Irrelevant.
> This is not what was operating within Hebrew itself, or
> within any of the languages themselves, and each language must
> be interpreted internally in a linguistically consistent manner, while
> at the same time being compared to contact languages that are
> themselves being interpreted internally in a linguistically consistent
> manner.
> . . .
>
> Several Semitic languages have been in continual use for three millenia
> namely Hebrew, Aramaic, and presumably Arabic. (Arabic did not appear
> "out of nothing" during the Second Temple period, and from its structure
> it is clear that it branched off from "Western Semitic" BEFORE the split
> between Canaanite-Hebrew and Aramaic. (Hebrew and Aramaic are
> much tighter dialectically, which attests that their mother remained together
> in a proto-Western Semitic longer than Arabic's mother. And of course, one
> must also distinguish between borrowings and genetic relationship.
> Both occur.)
>
> For some 'hard data', consider that the begedkefet phenomena entered
> the Aramaic language between the time of the ZKR inscription and
> Jeremiah.
> for this to be "hard" data one must understand phonological systems
> and their development.
> And one must recognize underdifferentiated alphabets,
> where a language community (Aramaic) borrows an alphabet (Phoenician
> Canaanite) that does not fit exactly. Aramaic still had the proto-Semitic
> interdental (probably fricative) phonemes in its system and it chose to
> write yathub 'he will return' with a "shin", not a bad choice since it is
> close in the mouth and fricative. "yatub" was apparently rejected as
> being too hard. The 'why' of their choice is irrelevant. Ditto for
> writing dhahab 'gold' as z.h.b.   What matters is that
> by the time of Jeremiah a systematic change took place and 'he will
> return' and other words of that sound patten started getting written
> with 't', and the 'dhahab' "gold" words starting getting written with 'd'.
> This can best be explained as evidence of the fricative begedkefet system
> entering the language. The "th" of yashub starting sounding like any
> old intervocalic 't', so it was re-interpreted as a 't' and   
> thereafter written
> yatub" (now pronounced yathuv).
>
> It is also a reasonable deduction from the above that the begedkefet
> phenomenon was not an original feature of Phoenician alphabet.
> Begedkefet were originally all 'hard'.
>
> Now the above does not answer many little questions about transitions
> throughout the above languages, but at least it puts a historical perspective
> on the existence of 'begedkefet' in antiquity in a closely related language
> written without dots and over a millenium before
> people started writing little dots in texts to add precision to the text of a
> closely related language (Hebrew).
>
> > I've tried to stay out of this but I can't resist any longer.
>
> `atta uxal le-exol aruHat ha-boqer be-shalva.
>
> Randall Buth
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
> _______________________________________________
> b-hebrew mailing list
> b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew



--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.