#aramaic — Public Fediverse posts

Ashkenazi Jews

Author’s Note: This post has mentions of Nazis, the Holocaust, & Nazi Germany. We completely understand if you wish to skip over this post. We’ll catch you in the next one!

Also known as Ashkenazic Jews, Ashkenazis, or Ashkenazim.

This is a form of distinct ethnic subdivision of the Jewish Diaspora. Emerging from the Jewish communities that consolidated during the 10th century in the Rhineland (Western Germany) & northern France. They migrated there from centers such as the Italian peninsula & the Southern Levant. This includes present-day Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, & Jordan.

After numerous massacres of Jews during the Crusades (11th-13th centuries), they began a gradual eastward migration due to mounting restrictions within the Holy Roman Empire & the favorable policies of Casimir the Great & others.

This diaspora ramped up after the persecution during the Black Death of the 14th century. The bulk of the Ashkenazi Jews had migrated to the Kingdom of Poland (which includes modern-day Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, & parts of Russia). This area became the main center of Ashkenazi Jewry until the Holocaust.

Ashkenazim adapted their traditions, rites, & customs to Europe. They traditionally followed the German rite synagogue ritual & until the Holocaust primarily spoke Yiddish, an offshoot of Middle High German written in a variety of the Hebrew script, with significant Hebrew, Aramaic, & Slavic influences.

The Yiddish language progressively declined in prestige, in favor of national languages & Hebrew, being stigmatized by assimilationists & later also Zionists. Though it was spoken by over 11 million people worldwide before the Holocaust. The Yiddishist movement, which sought to preserve & revive the language, faded through the 20th century. Including Duolingo adding Yiddish as a language.

As a proportion of the world Jewish population, Ashkenazim were estimated to be 3% in the 11th century, rising to 92% in 1930, near the population’s peak. The Ashkenazi population was significantly diminished by the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany during WWII, which killed around 6 million Jews. Before WWII, the estimated worldwide Jewish population was 15.3-16.7 million, with 92% being Ashkenazi. As of 2023, the population of Ashkenazim was estimated to be around 10-13 million out of 15.8 million total Jews.

The name Ashkenazi comes from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz. He’s the 1st son of Gomer, grandson of Japhet, great-grandson of Noah, & a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations. The name for Gomer has often been linked to the Cimmerians.

The Biblical Ashkenazis are usually derived from Assyrian Askuza, a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates. The name Askuza is identified with the Scythians.

In Jeremiah 51:27, Ashkenaz figures as 1 of 3 kingdoms in the far north, the others being Minni (or Mannaea), an ancient kingdom that flourished in northwestern Iran, & Arrat (corresponding to Urartu), called on by God to resist Babylon.

Ashkenaz is linked to Scandza/Scanzia (usually identified with Scandinavia), viewed as the cradle of Germanic tribes, in the 6th-century gloss to the Historia Ecclesiastica of Eusebius. In the 10th century, in the History of Armenia of Yovhannes Drasxanakertci, Ashkenaz was associated with Armenia.

As it was occasionally in Jewish usage, where its denotation extended at times to Adiabene, Khazaria, Chimea, & areas to the east. They’re also identified with the Slavim or Slavs. In keeping with the custom of designating areas of Jewish settlement with biblical names, Spain was called Sefarad (Obadiah 20), France was called Tsarefat (I Kings 17:9), & Bohemia was called the Land of Canaan.

Given the close links between the Jewish communities of France & Germany following the Carolingian unification, the term Ashkenazi came to refer to the Jews of both medieval Germany & France.

In later times, the word Ashkenaz is used to designate southern & western Germany, the ritual of which sections differs somewhat from that of eastern Germany & Poland. Thus, the prayer book of Isaiah Horowitz (a prominent rabbi & mystic), & many others, give the piyyutim (a Jewish liturgical poem), according to the Minhag of Ashkenaz & Poland. A Minhag is an accepted tradition or group of traditions in Judaism.

In a religious sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is any Jew whose family tradition & synagogue ritual follow Ashkenazi practices (German rite). Until the Ashkenazi community 1st began to develop in the Early Middle Ages, the centers of Jewish religious authority were in the Islamic world, at Baghdad & Islamic Spain. German Ashkenaz was so geographically distant that it developed a minhag of its own.

The counterpart of Ashkenazi is Sephardic. Since most non-Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews follow Sephardic rabbinical authorities, whether or not they’re ethnically Sephardic. By tradition, a Sephardic or Mizrahi (a.k.a. Oriental Jews; Jews who lived in the Muslim world) who married into an Orthodox or Haredi (a.k.a. ultra-Orthodox) Ashkenazi Jewish family raises her kids to be Ashkenazi Jews.

On the other hand, an Ashkenazi woman who married a Sephardi or Mizrahi is expected to take on Sephardic practices & the kids will “inherit” a Sephardic identity. Though in practice, many families do compromise. A “convert” usually follows the practice of the rabbinical court (beth din) that converted them.

Culturally, an Ashkenazi Jew can be identified by the concept of Yiddishkeit, which means “Jewishness” in the Yiddish language. Before the Haskalah (a.k.a. the Jewish Enlightenment) & the emancipation of Jews in Europe, this meant the study of the Torah & the Talmud for men, & communal life governed by the observance of Jewish Law for men & women.

From the Rhineland to Riga (the largest city in Latvia) to Romania, most Jews prayed in liturgical Ashkenazi Hebrew, & spoke Yiddish in their secular (worldly) lives. But with modernization, Yiddishkeit now includes not just Orthodoxy & Hasidism, but a broader range of movements, ideologies, practices, & traditions in which Ashkenazi have participated & somehow kept a sense of Jewishness. Although pockets of Jews still speak Yiddish, Yiddishkeit can be identified in manners of speech, styles of humor, & in patterns of association.

As Ashkenazi Jews moved away from Europe, mostly in the form of aliyah to Israel. Or immigration to North America, South Africa, Europe (particularly France), & Latin America, the geographic isolation has given way to mixing with other cultures, & with non-Ashkenazi Jews who, similarly, are no longer isolated in distinct geographic locales.

Hebrew has replaced Yiddish as the primary Jewish language for many Ashkenazi Jews. Although many Hasidic & Hareidi groups still use Yiddish in daily life. Aliyah is the immigration of Jews from the diaspora to, historically, the geographic Land of Israel or the Palestine region, where the State of Israel was established.

France’s blended Jewish community is typical of the cultural recombination that’s going on among Jews throughout the world. Although France expelled its original Jewish population in the Middle Ages, by the time of the French Revolution, there were 2 distinct Jewish populations.

One consisted of Sephardic Jews, originally refugees from the Inquisition (which no one expects! Sorry, we’re Monty Python fans here.) & concentrated in the southwest. While the other community was Ashkenazi, concentrated in formerly German Alsace, & mainly speaking a German dialect similar to Yiddish.

The 3rd community of Provencal Jews living in Comtat Venaissin was technically outside France, & was later absorbed into the Sephardim. Comtat Venaissin (called Comtat, for short) was a part of the Papal States from 1274 to 1791.

But after emancipation, a sense of a unified French Jewry emerged, especially when France was wracked by the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s. (We’ll be doing a post about the Dreyfus Affair.) In the 1920s & 30s, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe arrived in large numbers as refugees from antisemitism, the Russian Revolution, & the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.

By the 1930s, Paris had a vibrant Yiddish culture, & many Jews were involved in diverse political movements. After the Vichy years & the Holocaust, the French Jewish population was augmented once again, 1st by Ashkenazi refugees from Central Europe, & later by Sephardi immigrants & refugees from North Africa, many of them francophone. Francophone refers to people/organizations who use French (language) regularly.

Ashkenazi Jews didn’t transmit their traditions or achievements by text. Instead, these traditions were passed down orally from one generation to the next. The desire to maintain pre-Holocaust traditions relating to Ashkenazi culture has often been met with criticism by Jews in Eastern Europe.

In an ethnic sense, an Ashkenazi Jew is a descendant of the Jews who settled in the Central European region of “Ashkenaz.” For roughly 1,000 years, the Ashkenazim were a reproductively isolated population in Europe.

Despite living in many countries, with little inflow or outflow of countries from migration, conversion, or intermarriage with other groups, including other Jews. Since the mid-20th century, many Ashkenazi Jews have intermarried, both with members of other Jewish communities & non-Jews.

Religious persecution of the Jews in Western & Central Europe led to a significant migration of the Ashkenazi Jews into Eastern Europe. This resulted in a major cultural divide between Western/Central & Eastern Ashkenazi communities. In particular, this was reflected in the division of Yiddish into Western & Eastern Yiddish dialects. As well as in other cultural distinctions: traditions, food, dress, etc.

Initially, the Jews of Eastern Europe enjoyed relative freedom in terms of movement, being invited by the kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Over time, the situation was reversed. By the 19th century, the Jews in the West had gradually been integrated into the general society.

While the Eastern Ashkenazi maintained their strict Jewish traditions & were mostly confined to ghettos, especially in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, which incorporated a considerable amount of land where the Eastern Ashkenazi lived: Poland & Lithuania.

Well-known differences in practices include:

• Observance of Passover (Pesach)
  • Ashkenazi Jews traditionally refrain from eating legumes, grain, millet, & rice. Quinoa has become accepted as a food grain in North American communities. Sephardi Jews typically don’t prohibit these foods.
• Notwithstanding stricter requirements for the ACTUAL slaughter, Sephardi Jews permit the rear portions of an animal after proper Halakhic removal of the sciatic nerve. While many Ashkenazi Jews don’t.
• Ashkenazi Jews often name newborns after deceased family members, not after living relatives. Sephardi Jews often name their kids after their grandparents, even if those grandparents are still living. An exception to this is among Dutch Jews, where Ashkenazi for centuries used naming conventions otherwise attributed exclusively to Sephardim, such as Chuts. Chuts is the name given to Jews who immigrated to London from the Netherlands in the 1850s-1860s.
• Ashkenazi tefillins are wound toward the body, not away from it. Ashkenazim put on the tefillin while standing up. Other Jews generally do so while sitting down. A tefillin(s) is/are sets of small black leather boxes with leather straps having scrolls of parchment written with verses of the Torah inside.
• The prayer shawl (tallit/tallis) is worn by all Ashkenazi men AFTER marriage. Except for Western European Ashkenazi men who wear it from the bar mitzvah. In Sephardi or Mizrahi Judaism, the prayer shawl is commonly worn from early childhood.

The term Ashkenazi also refers to the Nusach Ashkenaz, the liturgical tradition used by Ashkenazi Jews in their siddur (prayer book). A nusach is defined by a liturgical tradition’s choice of prayers, the text of prayers & melodies used in the singing of prayers. 2 other major forms of nusach among Ashkenazi Jews are Nusach Sefard (not to be confused with the Sephardic ritual), which is the general Polish Hasidic nusach, and Nusach Ari, used by those in Chabad.

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New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New publications and podcast

Busy year for publications (think that’s it for me this year):

Semitic *ʾilāh- and Hebrew אלהים‎: From plural ‘gods’ to singular ‘God’ (Open Access)

Abstract: The Biblical Hebrew word אלהים‎ is plural in form. Semantically and syntactically, however, it can be plural or singular. The stem of this noun can be reconstructed as * ʾilāh-. As already noted by Wellhausen, this looks like a broken plural of *ʾil-, the Proto-Semitic word for ‘god’. This article takes Wellhausen’s observation and uses it to explain the plural morphology of Hebrew אלהים‎. I argue that *ʾilāh- should be reconstructed with redundant plural suffixes in some parts of the paradigm. This reconstructed paradigm is preserved virtually unchanged in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. The reconstructed paradigm also explains the almost complete replacement of *ʾil- by *ʾilāh- in Aramaic and Arabic and allows us to reassess the reasons for the association between the lexeme ‘god’ and plural number. Consequently, earlier suggestions that see אלהים‎’s plural number as a reflection of pre-Yahwistic polytheism or as a marker of abstractness are no longer tenable.

The varying size of the Sodom coalition in Genesis 14 (in FS Tigchelaar; email me for a PDF)

Trying my hardest to find something that might interest newly retired KU Leuven professor Eibert Tigchelaar, I used some Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature as well as other textual and linguistic evidence to seek for order in the number of kings on Sodom’s side in Gen 14. Turns out that this closely aligns with other indications of different layers in this fascinating chapter: one about a local raid, one that may be a reworking of a lost epic, and a third one building on the combination of the first two. If you understand Dutch (or want to practice!), also check out this brand new episode of Timo Epping’s Oudheid, all about this question.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Canaanite #GeEz #Genesis #Hebrew #Hosea #linguistics #news #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic

The Real Names of Jesus and His Disciples
✝️
During the Christian Holy Week, a look at the names of the apostles & their leader through the lens of linguistics
https://medium.com/@weareji/the-real-names-of-jesus-and-his-disciples-d0d95460396a?sk=91ccdaea74b9f86f341266828dbcea7d
⛪️
#language #linguistics #Easter #Bible #Jesus #Apostles #Disciples #Christianity #HolyWeek #GoodFriday #PalmSunday #Palestine #Aramaic #Greek #Hebrew

The Semitic languages show a regular correspondence of p in some languages and f in others. For instance, ‘mouth’ in Akkadian is p-ū; Biblical Hebrew pe; Biblical Aramaic pūm; Ge’ez ʾäf;1 and Classical Arabic fam-. (Modern South Arabian should have an f too, but has replaced this word.) This sound is uncontroversially reconstructed as Proto-Semitic *p, as in *p-ūm ‘mouth’.2 Traditionally, the change of *p to f was taken as a diagnostic feature of the South Semitic languages.

[p] to [f], a plosive changing into a fricative, is an example of lenition. Lenition is a common type of sound change, so we tell our students, so it makes sense that *p is the older sound and it changed to f. So far, so good.

While preparing my first couple of classes for Comparative Semitics this year, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about this anymore. Two things bother me:

1. The examples of p > f I know about are all part of a larger change affecting other plosives too, like Grimm’s Law (Proto-Indo-European *p, *t, *k, *kw > Proto-Germanic *f, *þ, *h, *hw and related changes) or Aramaic and Hebrew BGDKPT-spirantization. Is just p turning to f really so common? How about just f turning into p?
2. Most scholars don’t accept the family tree above anymore. In the current model, the changes look more like this:

Now we need three or four separate instances of *p > *f—just as I’m starting to doubt how common that change is. Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), who argue for this second family tree, explain this as an areal change that spread through contact. But what kind of a contact scenario should we think of here? Did f spread from Ancient South Arabian (if those languages even had it) to all its neighbours? It’s not like we see enough other shared contact features to confidently posit a South Semitic language area or something.

Looking at Afroasiatic, things don’t get better:

• Berber has f, not p
• Cushitic has f, not p
• Egyptian has p and f, but we don’t know which one corresponds to Semitic *p (if either)
• Chadic: same as Egyptian, to my knowledge
• (I’m not sure Omotic is Afroasiatic, still reading up on this)

So if we posit Proto-Semitic *p, either we need two more independent cases of *p > *f (Berber, Cushitic),3 maybe more (Egyptian? Chadic?), or we reconstruct *f for Proto-Afroasiatic and say Proto-Semitic changed *f to *p. At which point, why not cut out the middleman and keep *f, then change it to *p in East and Northwest Semitic? Just two changes instead of the minimum of six you need otherwise.

So, are there any good arguments to reconstruct Proto-Semitic *p—or should we press *f and leave behind this relic from theories that believed in a South Semitic subgrouping?

1. Probably influenced by Cushitic, but we can still take it as related to the other Semitic words. ↩︎
2. In my opinion, the only word known so far with a superheavy syllable, exceptionally permitted because the word is monosyllabic. ↩︎
3. I’m also really starting to doubt that Cushitic is one family. So maybe make that four (Berber, Beja, Agaw, East/South Cushitic). ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/11/07/froto-semitic/

#Afroasiatic #Agaw #Akkadian #Ancie #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthAr #Omotic #ProtoSemitic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

Hebrew is somewhat famous as the most successful attempt to bring a formerly dead language back to life. But when did Hebrew die out in the first place? Up to the early 20th century, scholars thought that basically all speakers switched to Aramaic during the Babylonian Exile (sixth century BCE), killing off Hebrew in the process. The Hebrew literature written after that point would then have been composed in a language that was no longer in spoken use. Since then, however, a better appreciation of the vernacular status of Rabbinic Hebrew as well as epigraphic finds have shifted the consensus. Today, most scholars believe Hebrew died out as a spoken language after another dramatic event: the failed Bar Kokhba Revolt (second sentury CE) and subsequent deportation of most Jews from Jerusalem and the Roman province of Judaea (renamed Aelia Capitolina and Syria Palaestina for good measure).

In two recent papers (and more to come?), Ivri J. Bunis argues that Hebrew persevered even longer, surviving in Palestine into the late Roman and (say it with me) Eastern Roman period. Both papers focus on Palestinian Amoraic (not Aramaic!) Hebrew, that is: Hebrew from Palestine (mostly Galilee) from ca. 200–500 CE. A summary of his arguments:

In his 2020 paper, Bunis shows that sequences of imperatives, especially with verbs of movement, are mostly expressed without ‘and’ (e.g. “go see”) in both Biblical Hebrew and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, while Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew mostly does use ‘and’ (“go and see”), like the earlier phase of Rabbinic Hebrew, Tannaitic Hebrew, which is now generally considered to reflect a living language. This shows that the people writing Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew weren’t just writing Aramaic with a thin Hebrew veneer or basing themselves on Biblical Hebrew. In my opinion, this mainly shows that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew is indeed a form of Rabbinic Hebrew, continuing the earlier, Tannaitic stage of the language. But especially with subtle, syntactic things like this, it would be very easy for a scribe who was dominant in Aramaic to slip up and get it wrong. This paper also has a detailed review of the scholarship on the survival of Hebrew in previous literature.

A stronger case is made in Bunis’s 2022 paper on Rabbinic Hebrew hallā– pronouns. (Conflict of interest: I hope to present something on these pronouns together with Ivri at a conference this summer.) Bunis does a really quite excellent job of showing that the use of these demonstratives evolves throughout the attested stages of Rabbinic Hebrew. Hopefully without oversimplifying or getting too much wrong, the picture looks something like this :

Bar Kokhba Letters (some of these forms aren’t attested as such and some other variants occur)

Eearlier Tannaitic Hebrew

Later Tannaitic Hebrew

Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew

So: the hallā– pronouns are quite common in the 2nd-century Bar Kokhba Letters; Tannaitic Hebrew innovates a much more productive set of distal demonstratives based on ʔōṯ- and later restricts the hallā– pronouns to substantive use; and Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew loses them altogether, except for plural hallā́lū, which gets repurposed as the adnominal counterpart of proximal plural ʔḗllū for morphological reasons. All of those developments, including the ones in Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew, look perfectly natural, like the kind of thing speakers would do in a living language. And while Bunis doesn’t spell this out as much as in the 2020 paper, there’s nothing at all in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic or Biblical Hebrew that would motivate this.

Based on the second paper, especially, I think I’m convinced that Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew had some kind of living status. I’m not sure Bunis has shown that it was a living language in the strict sense, with children acquiring it as their first language; it could still be that it was only used in an academic setting, so to speak. But either way, it clearly had some kind of life of its own: speakers were apparently still learning to produce Hebrew very fluently, whether as a first or second language.

So, should we revise the date of the death of Hebrew once again? Both papers can be read for free on Bunis’s Academia page, and while they’re fairly long, I think they’re well written and easy to follow. So if you want to form an opinion on what might be a big development in the historiography of Hebrew, do head over there and give hammaʔămārīm hallā́lū a read.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/bunis-on-the-survival-of-hebrew/

#Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #Rabbinic

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

While reviewing proofs for an article that should appear soon, it struck me that the shape ordinal numerals like ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ take in Semitic provides some evidence for subgrouping that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Quick recap: most scholars today accept something like the following family tree for Semitic, as compellingly presented by Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

I’m generally skeptical about West Semitic as a group because I think everyone’s favourite West Semitic innovation, the *qatala perfect, may be a retention from Proto-Semitic. But among some other innovations (I particularly like relative/demonstrative *θū > *ðū), this subgroup is supported by the shape of the ordinals. Akkadian has a *CaCuC– pattern, as in:

• Old Babylonian šaluš– ‘third’, rebu– < *rabuʕ– ‘fourth’, ḫamuš– ‘fifth’
• Old Assyrian rabū-t-um ‘the fourth (f.)’, rabū-ni ‘our fourth witness’, ḫamuš-ni ‘our fifth witness’

In West Semitic, the normal ordinal has a different, *CāCiC- pattern, as in:

• Classical Arabic θāliθ-, rābiʕ-, ḫāmis-
• Ge’ez śaləs, rabəʕ, ḫaməs
• Mehri (Modern South Arabian) śōləθ, rōbaʕ, ḫōməs
• probably also Sabaic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫms; Ugaritic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫmš…

In the rest of Northwest Semitic, one trace of this pattern might be found if the consonantal spelling tltʔ in Daniel 5:16 (Biblical Aramaic) stands for *tālítā ‘as the third one’ (Suchard 2022: 224). Otherwise, Aramaic and Canaanite have a different pattern: *CaCīC– followed by the nisbe suffix, which has a special shape in Aramaic. Examples:

• Biblical Hebrew šlīšī, rḇīʕī, ḥămiššī (probably influenced by šiššī ‘sixth’, itself a new formation for expected **šḏīšī)
• Syriac tliṯoy, rbiʕoy, ḥmišoy

So, we have three patterns: *CaCuC-, *CāCiC-, and *CaCīC–īy/āy-. Which one is oldest and which ones are innovative?

Interestingly, Ge’ez and Modern South Arabian both have a special set of numerals that specifically refer to periods of time like days:

• Ge’ez śälus, räbuʕ, ḫämus
• Mehri śīləθ, rība, ḫayməh

In the article I’m proofreading, I argue these can all be reconstructed as *CaCuC-. This also matches Biblical Hebrew ʕāśōr ‘tenth (day)’ and may be related to dialectal Arabic names for the days of a the week like ʔaθ-θalūθ and ʔar-rabūʕ (borrowed from Sabaic???). This matches the Akkadian pattern for the normal numerals, which also happens to be attested with reference to a period of time in Old Assyrian ḫamuš-t-um. It’s more likely for an old formation to be preserved in a specialized use like referring to numbers of days than for something specific like that to be generalized for ordinals in all contexts. *CāCiC– also has an obvious origin, as this is the productive pattern for active participles and we can imagine a kind of shift from ‘being third’ as a participle to ‘third’ as an ordinal. So in terms of innovations, this looks like:

1. Proto-Semitic: *CaCuC- (preserved in East Semitic/Akkadian)
2. Proto-West-Semitic: innovates *CāCiC-, preserves *CaCuC- for counting days etc.

*CaCīC–īy/āy– is so restricted that it is most attractive to see this as a late innovation shared by Canaanite and Aramaic. If so, that would support Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s (2018; paywalled?) argument on other grounds that these two families form a subgroup within Northwest Semitic.

1. Proto-Aramaeo-Canaanite or Aramaic and Canaanite as an areal grouping: innovate(s) *CaCīC–īy/āy-, cleans up *CāCiC– with remarkable efficiency

An intermediate *CaCīC– pattern without the nisbe suffix added might be attested in Biblical Hebrew šālīš, which not only means ‘one-third (of some unknown measure)’ but is also a military rank that has traditionally been explained as the ‘third man’ on a chariot besides the primary warrior and the driver.

This pattern also forms fractions in Aramaic, as in Imperial Aramaic rbyʕ and Syriac rbiʕ-t-o ‘quarter’. So maybe we should see the pre-Aramaeo-Canaanite development as a shift from still very active-participle-y *CāCiC– to more productively adjectival *CaCīC-, with the extra adjectival nisbe suffix being added later for good measure. Maybe that last step took place after the ordinals had started to shift in meaning to fractions (which are nouns, not adjectives), giving something like *rabīʕ–īy– an original literal meaning like ‘quarter-y’.

In conclusion, an ordinals-based family tree ends up looking like this:

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/03/ordinal-numerals-as-shared-innovations-in-semitic/

#Akkadian #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic