Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

How many times and in how many ways do I have to repeat myself that I think
that the Jewish returnees from Babylon spoke Aramaic is a conclusion, not a
presupposition, before people stop turning it around? Again you accuse me of
making it a presupposition.

Furthermore, it is a conclusion based on the linguistic and literary
patterns found in post-Babylonian Exile books of Tanakh, not on what
happened later in Mishnaic times.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 1:54 PM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> >I think the loss of the Hebrew names for the months is one of the
> evidences
> that the Jews who returned from Babylon had already adopted Aramaic as the
> language of the market and hearth, and that Hebrew had already attained a
> similar status as medieval Latin: no one learned it at his mother?s knee
> but
> that it was the language of government, religion, high literature and
> commerce.>
>
> There are two logical problems with these arguments.
>
> One, is that it applies something influenced from one area of
> sociolinguistics to
> another area. In this case, it applies something from an area of government
> and
> international law and commerce--the months as would be used under the
> Persian
> hegemony and commerce--
> and applies them to family speech. The Babylonian names simply
> prove outside contact and influence, and in sociolinguistics these kind of
> things
> come in from the 'high' level, from strata of power in a society,
> they do not predict the 'low level' language, though they do penetrate into
> the low
> language.
>

Not necessarily. Things like this tend not to cross linguistic lines except
when one language falls out of daily usage. I take this as just one of
several clues that lead to my conclusion that the daily use of the Hebrew
language was lost.

>
> Secondly, the Latin connection is a good comparison, but the data is
> misapplied.
> In medieval Latin people wrote 'high Latin' and spoke 'low Latin'.
> Proto-spanish,
> proto-French, et al., were none other than spoken Latin dialects.


Only during the early period, even before the Roman Empire finally
collapsed. By the medieval period, people knew the differences between
French, Spanish, etc. and the sign of an educated man was one who could
speak Latin as Latin, though at that time it was already a low Latin,
recognizably different from the Latin of the Roman period.


> If one
> wants to
> compare to Hebrew, then one must explain the two-register nature of Hebrew,
> with a 'high Hebrew' and a 'low Hebrew (Mishnaic)'. To say that Hebrew was
> like
> Latin would suggest that Hebrew was also in two registers, which is true.
> Again, sociolinguistics would suggest that the two-register nature of
> Hebrew
>
> would naturally develop as Hebrew developed a 'low, spoken Hebrew' distinct
> from 'high Hebrew'. And Mishnaic Hebrew is that low Hebrew. Mishnaic Hebrew
> was not a high Hebrew.
>
> what is happening above is somewhat strange. It assumes something "Hebrew
> was not a mother-tongue", and then applies arguments like the two above
> that would naturally have led in a different direction. It has the 'high's
> and 'low's
> mixed up or obliterated.



Seeing as my *conclusion* is based on pre-Mishnaic patterns, I won’t
speculate on the why of the patterns found during the Mishnaic period. They
are irrelevant to my conclusion.

>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
> www.biblicalulpan.org
> randallbuth AT gmail.com
> Biblical Language Center
> Learn Easily - Progress Further - Remember for Life
>
> Karl W. Randolph.