Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011 10:30:35 +0000, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au> 
wrote:
> French and Italian. Clearly related, and yet still morphologically and
> phonetically different enough to sound very distinct.

That's probably a reasonable comparison with respect to morphology and
vocabulary, but is it true on a phonetic level?  I rather think that once
Hebrew became replaced by Aramaic as a native tongue, it is unlikely there
could have survived a native Hebrew phonemic system distinct from that of
Aramaic.  So, in this respect Hebrew and Aramaic would be closer to each other
than to even such closely related languages as Spanish and Portuguese (or
since the original question came from [I believe] a Catalan speaker, Spanish
and Catalan).

> From: Pere Porta <pporta7 AT gmail.com<mailto:pporta7 AT gmail.com>>
> Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 11:39:50 +0200
> To: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org<mailto:b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>>
> Subject: [b-hebrew] Similar to......
> 
> Dear b-hebrew listers,
> 
> I need to know some answer to this question:
> 
> The relation between the biblical Hebrew and the biblical Aramaic.... what
> is it like, compared with today languages?
> 
> Is it similar to the relation, say, between English and German?
> Is it similar to the relation between Spanish and Portuguese?
> Is it similar to the relation between French and Italian?
> Is there a better comparison than these?
> 
> What do you think?