Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Randall:

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Randall Buth <randallbuth AT gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Karl, you are free to believe that it represents a real,
> honest-to-goodness dialect from who-knows-where. But it is a
> singularity.


Yes, it is a singularity, but it is a singularity in a context where we
cannot rule out a local dialectal use. The problem is that we don’t have
enough data, so we can neither say for certain that it is a mistake, nor
that it is dialectal.

In this regard, I’m an agnostic, not a believer in either side.


> … 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 here it appears you agree with me.

>
> 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.
>

What you need to do is to go to the village where the deceased family was
from and find out what was the dialectal use in that village at that time.
Seeing as that is now impossible, all we have is a singularity that has more
than one possible correct answer, next to which we merely put a question
mark, then ignore and move on.

As far as textual criticism where we have multiple copies, that’s a
different issue.

>
> 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?
>

See above.

>
>
>
> --
> Randall Buth, PhD
>

Many years ago I lived for a year in a small village in Landkreis
Heidelberg. From what I have heard from other Germans, the normal village
(as contrasted to the cities where people speak proper high German) way of
saying “you have come” was “bisch koma”, which is not far from “du bist
gekommen”. But in the village I stayed in, I heard on the street “hasch
kuma” which is incorrect grammar for German. But it was correct for that
village when I was there.

So the same way, in order to rule out dialectal use for the singularities
above, one will need to get down to the village level granularity for late
Second Temple era, which is impossible today. Therefore in the context of
this particular example, we can say neither that it definitely is a mistake
nor that it definitely is dialectal, all that we can say for certain is that
it is a singularity.

Karl W. Randolph.