Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Jack Kilmon" <jkilmon AT historian.net>]

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From: "Will Parsons" <wbparsons AT alum.mit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 4:55 PM
To: <jkilmon AT historian.net>
Cc: <sesamox AT hotmail.com>; <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Accent on Yeshu(a) [was: Hebrew pronunciation before the Masoretes]

> 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


Hi Will:

Obviously I have given that a lot of thought over the years, beginning as a 
kid,  concerning how pronunciation in Galilee would have changed from the 
penultima yeSHOOa' with the pretonic tsere and dropping of the final glottal 
ayin to leave the final syllable a long vowel. That would make me think 
Jesus' name in the Galilee would be pronounced yeSHOO with the ultima as 
tonic.  It seemed clumsy to me and when I was a kid I studied how 
differently tones were placed in Samaritan and began to wonder if it was 
different in archaic Aramaic and Hebrew.  About 30 years ago I was on the 
island of Samos and could not help but notice the difference in the way they 
pronounced Greek and became interested in "pockets of archaism" that may 
have been the case in Judean vs Galilean.  I had the opportunity to speak to 
a Yemenite Jew in K'far Saba some years back and got the same impression. 
We also have the additional factor of Yeshua itself being a truncated word 
from Yehoshua.  After looking at other ultima-penultima shifts in words 
spelled the same way with the same consonants. I finally determined that we 
really do not know for sure how this was handled. I went with what was 
comfortable and more liquid in the Galilean accent, YEshoo.

Regards,
Jack

Jack Kilmon
San Antonio, TX