Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 3:51 PM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Other than Hebrew, which we are disputing, where can you find an example
where the names of months within a language were exchanged for those from an
outside language without it being either a) the adoption of a different
calendar for whatever reasons and with that adoption the adoption of the
month names from that other calendar, or b) a creole, a mixture of two
languages so that the resulting language is neither one nor the other
language, but a combination of the two, as English is a combination of
medieval French and Anglo-Saxon with French dominating? I know of none. Can
you document any?


> 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?


This is an example of a) above, and I can cite other, similar examples. This
is not what we are talking about vis-à-vis the Hebrew adoption of the
Aramaic month names. Or do you claim that the Hebrew months were different
than the Aramaic ones, and there was a substitution of one calendar for
another, and with it the substitution of the names as well?


> 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.
>

That both Daniel and Ezra wrote in Aramaic shows that both expected that
even in remote villages in the Judean hills, they expected the people to
know Aramaic. Add to that that history records that two generations grew up
in Babylon; that the stylistic differences between pre- and post-Exile
writings indicating that those who wrote post-Exile wrote in a simplified
style of those who were not themselves native speakers of Hebrew, rather
spoke Hebrew as a second language; that several Hebrew terms were forgotten
by the time the LXX was written: all the clues taken together point to that
those who returned from Babylon were native speakers of Aramaic, not Hebrew.

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