What is it about?

Hebrew is known to have been influenced by Aramaic among Jews in antiquity. Aramaic became especially dominant in the Land of Israel, the region where Hebrew was spoken alongside other languages, in the six century BCE, after the establishment of the Persian empire. Eventually, Aramaic even fully replaced Hebrew as a spoken vernacular among the Jews of Palestine some time before the Arab conquest in the seventh century CE. While those developments are well known, very little attention has been devoted to understanding to finer details of the contact between Hebrew and Aramaic among the Jews. At least some of the Aramaic dialects of the Jews are known to be different from neighboring non-Jewish dialects of Aramaic. Nonetheless, scholars have not seriously considered how the differences between Jewish and non-Jewish dialects of Aramaic relate to the distinct linguistic situation of the Jews: they continuously used their ancestral language Hebrew alongside Aramaic; they may have employed language as a means to differentiate themselves as an ethnic and religious group. The present article aims to add to our understanding of the specific linguistic situation of the Jews by identifying and analyzing a linguistic feature, the lexeme ʾpšr, which is unique to Jewish dialects of Aramaic and to Hebrew. Through this analysis, the article reveals that in antiquity Jews adopted linguistic features that distinguished their languages and dialects as uniquely Jewish.

Featured Image

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Distinct Linguistic Reality of the Jews in Late Antique Palestine and Babylonia as Reflected in the Lexicosyntax of ‮אפשר‬‎ ʾpšr, Journal of Jewish Languages, June 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/22134638-bja10044.
You can read the full text:

Read

Contributors

Be the first to contribute to this page