Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Stoney Breyer" <stoneyb AT touchwoodcreative.com>]

Just to clarify, I'm not asserting that the revenants spoke Hebrew as opposed 
to Aramaic or to what you would call a "creole" of the two tongues - or for 
that matter, French or Esperanto.

My objection is methodological. Your original assertion was that "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." If I encountered this in a dissertation I was directing I 
would tell the dissertanda that the sentence could not stand unless she:

a) Established a general rule that month-names are more conservative -that 
is, resistant to lexical change- than other linguistic elements
b) Established that Hebrew names were in fact lost, as opposed to
        i) previously non-existent (which is, I believe, the position Yigal 
initially put forward), or
        ii) co-existent but absent from the extremely limited textual record
c) Established that alternative causes were not operative, such causes to 
include
        i) actual calendar change
        ii) conformity with higher-prestige usage
        iii) polyglossia 

Absent these demonstrations, the most you can say about the month-names is 
that they are consistent with linguistic shift, not that they are evidence of 
linguistic shift.

And by the way, I did supply you with "replacement names [in an] unchanged 
calendar within an unchanged language", videlicet the supersession in 
Standard Modern German of the Carolingian month-names by Latinizing names.

Stoney Breyer
Writer/Touchwood Creative