Not at all. There is sufficient evidence that at least Old Testament times Hebrew and Aramaic were incompatible foreign languages to each other, and in my opinion it is well-proven that the phonemic repertory of both languages was well distinct and different throughout Old Testament times. However, the tricky point is the specification "Biblical", and the question whether we deal with "languages" at all. Is there "a" Biblical Hebrew language, or are there some and more Biblical Hebrew languages, and, what is more, is Biblical Hebrew a language at all (? See for the last question the important papers of the late Edward Ullendorf, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, in: Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? Studies in Semitic Languages and Civilizations. Wiesbaden 1977.3-17, and Ernst Axel Knauf, War "Biblisch-hebräisch" eine Sprache? Empirische Gesichtspunkte zur linguistischen Annäherung an die Sprache der althebräischen Literatur: ZAH 3 (1990) 11-23. The same can be debated with Biblical Aramaic.
BIBLICAL Hebrew and BIBLICAL Aramaic look so similar and contiguous only because they both were, as being "Biblical", encoded by the same system (the masoretic) and in a time (9th-10th century CE) when both languages in Jewish tradition had melted to a certain extent. ¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨¨ Dr. Reinhard G. Lehmann Academic Director Research Unit on Ancient Hebrew & Epigraphy FB 01/ Faculty of Protestant Theology Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz D-55099 Mainz Germany [email protected] http://www.hebraistik.uni-mainz.de http://www.ev.theologie.uni-mainz.de/297.php Subsidia et Instrumenta Linguarum Orientis (SILO): http://www.hebraistik.uni-mainz.de/182.php 10th Mainz International Colloquium on Ancient Hebrew (MICAH): http://www.micah.hebraistik.uni-mainz.de/204.php > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:42:34 -0400 (EDT) > From: Will Parsons <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Similar to...... > To: [email protected] > Cc: [email protected] > Message-ID: <[email protected]> > Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii > > On Fri, 3 Jun 2011 10:30:35 +0000, George Athas <[email protected]> > wrote: >> French and Italian. Clearly related, and yet still morphologically and >> phonetically different enough to sound very distinct. > > That's probably a reasonable comparison with respect to morphology and > vocabulary, but is it true on a phonetic level? I rather think that once > Hebrew became replaced by Aramaic as a native tongue, it is unlikely there > could have survived a native Hebrew phonemic system distinct from that of > Aramaic. So, in this respect Hebrew and Aramaic would be closer to each other > than to even such closely related languages as Spanish and Portuguese (or > since the original question came from [I believe] a Catalan speaker, Spanish > and Catalan). > >> From: Pere Porta <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> >> Date: Fri, 3 Jun 2011 11:39:50 +0200 >> To: B-Hebrew <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> >> Subject: [b-hebrew] Similar to...... >> >> Dear b-hebrew listers, >> >> I need to know some answer to this question: >> >> The relation between the biblical Hebrew and the biblical Aramaic.... what >> is it like, compared with today languages? >> >> Is it similar to the relation, say, between English and German? >> Is it similar to the relation between Spanish and Portuguese? >> Is it similar to the relation between French and Italian? >> Is there a better comparison than these? >> >> What do you think? > > > _______________________________________________ b-hebrew mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/b-hebrew
