Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

I'm following what you are saying here Randall with one exception. You  
have assumed that the Hebrews spoke and used Greek and Aramaic during  
the second temple period up until the revolt of Bar Kochba.

Now with Greek there is certainly a significant amount of manuscript  
evidence that Greek was used in this period. But Aramaic? Are you just  
assuming this because that is the conventional opinion? Or are you  
basing this assumption on any primary source evidence?

The only evidence I am aware of (correct if I am wrong) that the  
Hebrews used Aramaic are the Syriac Christian writings which begin  
many centuries after the return from Babylonian exile. However, the  
Syriac Christian writings (as the Greek ones) were written in that  
language because of the international quality of the language.

So, just what are you basing this assumption on? (I am genuinely  
interested as I have heard this stated many times but have yet to see  
any form of evidence)

James Christian


Quoting Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>:

> > > 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.
>
> > Agreed! I know of none.
>
>
> Yes, written language and spoken language is always technically different.
> Just turn on a tape recorder, write an essay, and turn the data over to a
> competant linguist, and there will be differences.
>
> On the other hand,
> "Diglossia " is a term in linguistics that is used for noticeably
> different dialects
> with different morphology or syntax or vocab or sound, that are recognized by
> the language community. This is of course, a gradient not a 'black and white'
> all or none phenonmenon. think Swiss German and written Deutsch, a
> colloquial Arabic and 'Modern Standard'.
>
> On Geiger: one must remember the whole picture. He also said:
> "Hebrew ceased to be a living language; nevertheless, it remained, like Latin
> in the Middle Ages, a religious language of scholars during the period of the
> Second Temple" And mishnaic scholarship today considers that mistaken.
>
> A turning point (not to mention immediate criticism during the 19th c) --
> "Segal’s celebrity is linked to his works on the Mishna: first of all
> an article
> which ...  by a rigorous demonstration showing that Mishnaic Hebrew had to
> be a vernacular;  . . .All the previous writers had built up their   
> grammars on
> the linguistic differences between the two periods, connected solely from a
> diachronic point of view. Segal took a different approach. If Mishnaic Hebrew
> was a spoken language, if it represented a colloquial level of language,
> it would be natural for a large proportion of its vocabulary to be absent
> from Biblical texts. The relationship between the two corpora is no longer
> simply diachronic (as was said explicitly or implicitly by the authors in the
> earlier periods) but the two forms of Hebrew necessarily coexisted; thus
> there were not two successive states of the same language but rather two
> different synchronies, "
>
> And the consensus of mishnaic scholarship today:
> "Mishnaic Hebrew is today considered to be an autonomous state of the
> Hebrew language, the outcome of a dialect spoken as of the time of the
> First Temple, and ... was spoken in Palestine, alongside Aramaic and
> to a lesser extent Greek, up until the time of the Bar Kochba revolt. The
> disappearance of the intellectual centers of Judea ensured the victory of
> Aramaic as a spoken language, but at the same time Mishnaic Hebrew
> became a written language used to establish the Tannaitic corpora."
>
> And as the article also mentioned, this research is now mainly recorded
> in Hebrew. That's quite reasonable for a language community. Scholars
> need to be able to read the modern dialect in order to access this
> information. There are some extra benefits to this, that most discover
> along the way.
>
> blessings
> --
> 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.