Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On Sun, 5 Jun 2011 18:28:33 +0200, "R. Lehmann" <lehmann AT uni-mainz.de> wrote:
> Not at all.  There is sufficient evidence that at least Old Testament times
> Hebrew and Aramaic were incompatible foreign languages to each other, and in
> my opinion it is well-proven that the phonemic repertory of both languages
> was well distinct and different throughout Old Testament times.  However,
> the tricky point is the specification "Biblical", and the question whether
> we deal with "languages" at all. Is there "a" Biblical Hebrew language, or
> are there some and more Biblical Hebrew languages, and, what is more, is
> Biblical Hebrew a language at all (? See for the last question the important
> papers of the late Edward Ullendorf, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, in: Is
> Biblical Hebrew a Language? Studies in Semitic Languages and
> Civilizations. Wiesbaden 1977.3-17, and Ernst Axel Knauf, War
> "Biblisch-hebräisch" eine Sprache? Empirische Gesichtspunkte zur
> linguistischen Annäherung an die Sprache der althebräischen Literatur: ZAH 3
> (1990) 11-23.  The same can be debated with Biblical Aramaic.

Your point is well taken that what constitutes "Biblical" Hebrew or Aramaic
can be open to interpretation.  Certainly Hebrew changed throughout the long
period of the composition of the OT.  Unfortunately, I don't have ready access
to the references you cite above (and wouldn't be able to read the German ones
anyway), so I don't know why there should be a doubt that Biblical Hebrew is a
language (or a language continuum).  To return to the point at hand, I don't
doubt that in pre-exilic times Hebrew and Aramaic were as distinct
phonologically as well as in other respects as any two Romance languages.  My
doubt is that that situation could survive in an environment where Hebrew was
being learned as second language by those whose mother tongue was Aramaic.

You state above that "it is well-proven that the phonemic repertory of both
languages was well distinct and different throughout Old Testament times".
That would include later portions of the OT written in Aramaic.  May I ask
what is the nature of the proof?  If, say, the pronunciation of the emphatics
differed between Hebrew and Aramaic, how would we know that?  Even more so, if
the vowel phonemes were different between the two languages, how would we
know?

> BIBLICAL Hebrew and BIBLICAL Aramaic look so similar and contiguous only
> because they both were, as being "Biblical", encoded by the same system (the
> masoretic) and in a time (9th-10th century CE) when both languages in Jewish
> tradition had melted to a certain extent.

Sure.  By the time the Massoretes added pointing to the consonantal text, the
pronuncation of Hebrew had been assimilated to that of Aramaic.  But I think
that had probably already taken place much earlier, not as far back as when
both Hebrew and Aramaic had vigorous communities of native speakers, but
starting when Hebrew speakers became bilingual as a matter of course in
Aramaic.

> > 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).

-- 
William Parsons