Re: Dental Fricatives

Be'27 Feb 2003 wektaba Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>

> Actually, the intro (|kidna teimerun lehom|) is also Aramaic.
I generally recognise Aramic by the fact that (a) every other word ends
in 'aleph and (b) about every fifth word is "diy"  :-)

> That's SO
> WEIRD!! :-P  What the heck is that Aramaic doing there??? :-S  (=confused
> smiley)
You've got to address the ungodly in the venacular, "say these (very)
words to them ...", but yes, you'd expect the intro to be Hebrew, all
the rest of the book is.

The other places where Aramaic turns up in the OT (Ezra IV 8 - VI 18,
VII 22-6, Daniel II 4 - VII 28, any more??), the writer always says
something like "and these are the very words in Aramaic ..." (referring
to a petition, proclamations or somesuch), quotes the document, and then
rambles on for pages and pages in Aramaic, before remembering to change
back to Hebrew. It's exactly like the way a conversation can get
switched from one language to another. To me this suggests that the
writer was far more at home in Aramaic, and had to make a bit of an
effort to produce Hebrew. The guys who pointed the texts, several
hundred years later, would have been even more familiar with Aramaic, so
can we rely on features of OT Hebrew that are _only_ shown by the
pointing, like p~f, b~v etc. and the sin/shin distinction. These might
just be features of Aramaic that scholers unconsciously introduced into
their Hebrew,
cf the thread on Mod. Hebrew, Yiddish etc.

Nentátam,

Keith Mylchreest