Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:27 PM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> >> …. The theory
> >> of an 'artificial Mishnaic Hebrew' was the wishful thinking of Avraham
> >> Geiger,
> >> 1845.
>
> > Who on this list advocates an ‘artificial Mishnaic Hebrew’?
> > What do *you* mean by that?
>
> Geiger argued that mishnaic Hebrew was not a language spoken by
> 'the people', that is as a mothertongue that anyone grew up with. Instead,
> he argued that it was a language created by the rabbis who
> naturally spoke Aramaic and tried to make it into a Hebrew.
>
> Looking at the reference you gave on the history of Mishnaic Hebrew
studies, I find that he taught “the language of the Mishna is a continuation
of Biblical Hebrew”, i.e. not an artificial language. Further, he claimed, “it
remained, like Latin in the Middle Ages, a religious language of scholars
during the period of the Second Temple, and during the two hundred years
that followed.” That reference is to Medieval Latin, a language that was
vibrant, evolving, a continuation of Roman Latin, used in religion, law and
high literature. If it were not for the historical references, would we have
known from the surviving literature that it was spoken by nobody as a
mother-tongue? There was a similar example in China up into the 20th
century. So likewise Mishnaic Hebrew by Geiger’s own description was not “a
language created by the rabbis” and it had an active group who spoke it
regularly.

An artificial language is something like Esperanto or Klingon, languages
that have no native speakers, rather were made up.

However, I think that there are clues that show as early as the return of
the Exiles from Babylon, that the majority of them spoke Aramaic instead of
Hebrew, at a time when there were still mother-tongue speakers of Hebrew,
but that they studied Hebrew and spoke it for religious and, after the
reestablishment of Judea, nationalistic reasons. Hence this is not an
artificial language.

Are there any languages that don’t have at least some diglossia between
formal, written speech and colloquial speech? I think you make too much of
this.

Karl W. Randolph.


>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
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