Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Will Parsons <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>]

Jack,

Forgive this somewhat belated response to part of your post below:

On Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:33:03 -0600, "Jack Kilmon" <jkilmon AT historian.net> 
wrote:
> 
> In the Galilee, Aramaic was pronounced differently and Galileans dropped
> their alefs and ayins like Cockney English drop their H's. Jesus' Galilean
> friends would have called him Yeshu.  In Judea and formally, his name was
> Yeshua, yehSHOO-ah (kind of a gulp), and in the Galilee his name was
> pronounced Yeshu, pronounced YEHshoo.  Because of strong Hellenistic
> influence in Palestine at the time, some Jews with the name of Yeshua used a
> Greek transliteration of the name.  Yeshua ben Sirach was one of them who
> went by the name Ἰησοῦς, pronounced YAYsoos.  Greek had no sound for SH and
> the masculine ending S was added.

I'm puzzled as to why you think there was an accent on the initial syllable of
both the Aramaic and Greek forms of the name?  The Greek form clearly has an
accent on the last syllable, and as far as my (very limited) understanding of
Aramaic goes, the same would be true of the Aramaic form.  Thinking about this
a little more, I think the accent on the ultima must have persisted in Vulgar
Latin, even though such a pronunciation would be at odds with normal Latin
accentuation rules, otherwise where do the Spanish Jesús and the Italian Gesù
come from?

-- 
Will Parsons