Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 13:03:19 -0500 Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
writes:
>Out east, you had almost the exact
>opposite:  an centuries long tradition of doing things the Greek way,
>and IIRC
>the number of colonia was much fewer, partially because the East was
>already
>heavily populated. (Although after the Fall of Jerusalem to Titus in
>70, Jerusalem
>itself was made into a Roman colony, with a Roman temple to Jupiter
>Capitolinus
>and all, IIRC, so...).   So... the story is complex, as you can see.
This brings up another probably implausible concept i was thinking of
with Judean....the adoption of articles.  From what other people have
said, the modern Romance definite articles are descended from words
meaning something like "this"?

I was thinking, would it be possible for articles to just simply be
adopted from a previously-known language that has them?

So for instance, using Ray's absolute-plural form _ponteru_....if the
Hebrew article was adopted, "the *ponteru" would be _happonteru_ (with
gemination of the P).

Is something like that happening at all possible?  And if it is, does
Greek have articles that could be used?

>> If you want the -m then it can only come about if we imagine that
>for some
>> reason a group of Aramaic (or Aramaic & Greek) speaking Judeans
>decide to
>> learn Classical Latin from written form only and then, for some
>strange
>> reason, they or their descendants actually start speaking it.  I'm
>finding
>> that a difficult scenario to envisage.
>Right -- the literacy levels around that time were something no more
>than, like, 5% or so, IIIC...
Not trying to self-inflate or anything, but literacy levels among Jews
have always been substantially higher than in the surrounding
populations, because of the emphasis in Judaism on the study of religious
texts, such as the Torah, the Talmud, etc. .  And i seem to remember
vaguely learning that one of the leaders of Judea during this period
instituted some kind of public education system....my notes from last
year aren't that detailed, though, unfortunately.

>=======================================================
>Tom Wier <artabanos@...>

-Stephen (Steg)
 "God punishes - humans take revenge."

___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com/getjuno.html
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]