Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

Karl ta`an
>Not necessarily. Things like this tend not to cross linguistic lines except
when one language falls out of daily usage.>

Well, this statement is a presupposition, a claim, not evidence.
And not very compelling.
I can think of many examples where the opposite is true.
Arabic has words for the months, but in
newspapers and around the world we see western names penetrating
Arabic and being used. Is it because people have forgotten Arabic, that
people don't speak Arabic anymore? Or is it because international
commerce is a powerful influence and some of the words in use
pentetrate into a spoken language? Did Greek penetrate into Aramaic
( 3c BCE to 6c CE) because people had forgotten Aramaic or because
Greek was the international prestige language? And your French examples
seem to follow this pattern since they come with the conqueror and elite
of society.

So your Babylonian  'evidence' shows contact and penetration, technically
'from above' sociolinguistically, not language death.
I think that Ezra might even be surprised by this kind
of 'evidence'. He wrote Aramaic letters to the 'king' because that was the
language of government, not to teach future generations about the home
language of Judean hilldwellers. Sociolinguistics has also shown that
language/code switching in bilingual societies often follows a trigger,
like writing this letter, and then conversation may stay in the language
for sometime before reverting, which is exactly what we see in Ezra.

shana tova
Randall




-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicalulpan.org
randallbuth AT gmail.com
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