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  • From: James Read <J.Read-2 AT sms.ed.ac.uk>
  • To: Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>
  • Cc: Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Is Hebrew a Dead Language?
  • Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:20:24 +0100

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
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