Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 18:56:24 -0500, Dewayne Dulaney 
<dewayne.dulaney AT gmail.com> wrote:
>  > While the people would leave the written Hebrew text unchanged, because 
> it
>> had no vowels, they would give it the Aramaic vowels as they read it.
> 
> That might be the case if people stopped using Hebrew entirely, but
> clearly they didn't. You are aware that several books of the OT canon
> were written after the exile (Ezra, Nehemiah, possibly 1-2 Chronicles,
> Zechariah, Haggai, Malachi), in Hebrew, aren't you? (I accept the
> conservative dating of Daniel, which is partly in Hebrew and partly in
> Aramaic, and thus don't include it as post-exilic.) Not to mention
> evidence of Hebrew usage at Qumran, Hebrew inscriptions (even at the
> Temple itself, such as famed "place of the trumpeting" inscription),
> ostraca, usage on coins by the Macabbees, etc. And while I grant you
> don't accept the Massoretes' vowel pointing as accurate, do you think
> they just made them up out of thin air? There had to be some knowledge
> of Hebrew pronunciation passed down, even if imperfect, for them to
> work with.
> 
> As for Hebrew and Aramaic being totally mutually incomprehensible, I
> doubt that. They were in the same language family. So, for that
> matter, are Arabic and Hebrew. I only know a few Arabic words and
> phrases (oral form only; I haven't learned the script yet). Yet
> several of them were immediately obvious to me due to knowing Biblical
> Hebrew (I only know a smattering of modern Hebrew, so couldn't draw on
> that), The common Arabic greeting "Salaam alekoum", for instance, is
> clearly equivalent to Heb. שלום עליכם.

I think I agree with your assessment of the mutual intellegibility of Hebrew
and Aramaic.  More on this below.

> I only know a little Aramaic. Yet when I saw the Mel Gibson film "The
> Passion of the Christ", I understood the majority of the Aramaic
> dialogue without relying on the subtitles because of its similarity to
> Biblical Hebrew.
> 
> Another example: I have never studied Italian. I only know a handful
> of Italian words and phrases. Yet because I have studied Spanish,
> French, and Portuguese, all related to Italian, and have studied
> Latin, the ancestor of Italian, I can recognize and understand at
> least 60-70% of spoken and written Italian I've been exposed to (in
> movies and articles online).

Some time ago, I had occasion to work with an Swedish/Italian/Argentinian
colleague, i.e., he was Argentinian by birth and culture, of Italian
extraction, and (at the time I knew him) a resident and citizen of Sweden for
ten years.  He had relatives in Italy whom he visited.  In response to my
questions about language issues, he seemed to consider that there was no real
language barrier between Italian and Spanish, their being so similar.  From
my point of view, as a native English speaker and an outsider, Italian and
Spanish are obviously closely related but also quite distinct languages.
I wonder if such a situation might have obtained among speakers of Hebrew
during the period of transition into Aramaic, i.e., even though looking from
the outside Hebrew and Aramaic may seem distinctly related but separate
languages, from one on the inside, Hebrew and Aramaic may have seemed to be
dialects of the same language.

-- 
Will Parsons