Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 6:50 PM, K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > So rather than being wrong, as Randall avers,
>> > phonetically written Aramaic reflected the local dialectal varients
>> > of Aramaic, not “wrong” Aramaic written by people who spoke
>> > another language.>
>>
>> In other words, he is not willing to accept it as Aramaic, AND
>> he knows what he is talking about. Of course, it is true
>> that labelling it a mistake is an interpretation. A person must
>> compare the text with the hundreds of other texts in order to
>> make a reasoned judgment.
>
> And that is exactly what we don’t have, sufficient documentation to rule out
> a local dialectal use of Aramaic. We have enough data to make a course
> grained analysis, but not fine enough to rule out that such a dialectal use
> could have been used in a local area, a single valley for example, for a
> limited time. All we can say for certain is that it is not normal,
> broad-based Aramaic use.

Karl, you are free to believe that it represents a real,
honest-to-goodness dialect from who-knows-where. But it is a
singularity. In text-criticism people learn to be suspicious of
singularities because they are most commonly plain old mistakes. (In
fact, that is how copyists get evaluated--how many and what kind of
'singular readings' do they produce.) In this case it is exactly the
kind of mistake made by beginning outsiders (like students) who are
learning Aramaic. So we can never rule out the absolute possibility
that it might have been part of a sub-standard dialect somewhere. But
we actually have thousands of examples of the plural noun "sons, sons
of" in Aramaic.

So the grain is actually quite refined. It looks like a simple mistake
and until and if some support comes from somewhere, that is the most
reasonable conclusion Aramaists can make.
Singular 'bar' plural 'bnin, bney'. True for targumim, jerusalem
talmud, babylonian talmud, et al., syriac, and inscriptions all over
the Middle East. Except one.

by the way, we also have an inscription, a different one, where a
daughter is called 'bar' instead of bra, berta, bert-. Is this another
unknown dialect? what should we say about probabilities?



-- 
Randall Buth, PhD
www.biblicallanguagecenter.com
Biblical Language Center
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