Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] 5th century BCE to 3rd century CE sociolinguistics minor point bre-
Date: Mon, 16 May 2011 08:50:27 -0700
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.