Judeo-Aramaic Languages
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Judeo-Aramaic Languages
The Judaeo-Aramaic languages are those varieties of Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic languages used by Jewish communities. Early use Aramaic, like Hebrew, is a Northwest Semitic language, and the two share many features. From the 7th century BCE, Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Middle East. It became the language of diplomacy and trade, but it was not yet used by ordinary Hebrews. As described in 2 Kings , the messengers of Hezekiah, king of Judah, demand to negotiate with ambassadors in Aramaic rather than Hebrew (''yehudit'', literally "Judean" or "Judahite") so that the common people would not understand. Gradual adoption During the 6th century BCE, the Babylonian captivity brought the working language of Mesopotamia much more into the daily life of ordinary Jews. Around 500 BCE, Darius I of Persia proclaimed that Aramaic would be the official language for the western half of his empire, and the Eastern Aramaic dialect of Babylon became the official standard. In 1955, Ri ...
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Greek Language
Greek (, ; , ) is an Indo-European languages, Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic languages, Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the list of languages by first written accounts, longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts ...
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Jewish Babylonian Aramaic
Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Aramaic: ) was the form of Middle Aramaic employed by writers in Lower Mesopotamia between the fourth and eleventh centuries. It is most commonly identified with the language of the Babylonian Talmud (which was completed in the seventh century), the Targum Onqelos, and of post-Talmudic ( Gaonic) literature, which are the most important cultural products of Babylonian Jews. The most important epigraphic sources for the dialect are the hundreds of inscriptions on incantation bowls. Classification and type The language was closely related to Eastern Aramaic varieties such as Mandaic. Its original pronunciation is uncertain and has to be reconstructed with the help of these kindred dialects and the reading tradition of the Yemenite Jews, and where available those of the Iraqi, Syrian and Egyptian Jews. The value of the Yemenite reading tradition has been challenged by Matthew Morgenstern. Vocalized Aramaic texts with which Jews are familiar, fr ...
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Jewish Palestinian Aramaic
Jewish Palestinian Aramaic also known as Jewish Western Aramaic was a Western Aramaic language spoken by the Jews during the Classic Era in Judea and the Levant, specifically in Hasmonean, Herodian and Roman Judaea and adjacent lands in the late first millennium BCE, and later in Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Secunda in the early first millennium CE. This language is sometimes called Galilean Aramaic, although that term more specifically refers to its Galilean dialect. The most notable text in the Jewish Western Aramaic corpus is the Jerusalem Talmud, which is still studied in Jewish religious schools and academically, although not as widely as the Babylonian Talmud, most of which is written in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. There are some older texts in Jewish Western Aramaic, notably the '' Megillat Taanit'': the Babylonian Talmud contains occasional quotations from these. Dead Sea Scroll 4Q246, found in Qumran, is written in this language as well. There were some diff ...
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Hebraism
Hebraism is a lexical item, usage or trait characteristic of the Hebrew language. By successive extension it is often applied to the Jewish people, their faith, national ideology or culture. Similarly, in paleolinguistics, a Semitism is a grammatical or syntactical behaviour in a language which reveals that the influence of a Semitic language is present. The most common example is the influence of Aramaic on some texts written in Jewish Koine Greek. Idiomatic Hebrew Hebrew has many idiomatic terms that are not easily translatable to other languages, for example בארבע עיניים ''be'arba enayim'', literally 'with four eyes,' means face to face without the presence of a third person, as in, 'The two men met with four eyes.' The expression לא דובים ולא יער ''lo dubim ve lo ya'ar'' is literally "neither bears nor forest" but means that something is completely false. The saying טמן את ידו בצלחת ''taman et yado batsalakhat'' "buried his hand in the d ...
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Causative
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non- volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O. All languages have ways to express causation but differ in the means. Most, if not all, languages have specific or ''lexical'' causative forms (such as English ''rise'' → ''raise'', ''lie'' → ''lay'', ''sit'' → ''set''). Some languages also have morphological devices (such as inflection) that change verbs into their causative forms or change adjectives into verbs of ''becoming''. Other languages employ periphrasis, with control verbs, idiomatic expressions or auxiliary verbs. There tends to b ...
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Prefix (linguistics)
A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can be either inflectional, creating a new form of a word with the same basic meaning and same lexical category, or derivational, creating a new word with a new semantic meaning and sometimes also a different lexical category. Prefixes, like all affixes, are usually bound morphemes. English has no inflectional prefixes, using only suffixes for that purpose. Adding a prefix to the beginning of an English word changes it to a different word. For example, when the prefix ''un-'' is added to the word ''happy'', it creates the word ''unhappy''. The word ''prefix'' is itself made up of the stem ''fix'' (meaning "attach", in this case), and the prefix ''pre-'' (meaning "before"), both of which are derived from Latin roots. English language ...
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Aleph (letter)
Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician ''ʾālep'' 𐤀, Hebrew ''ʾālef'' , Aramaic ''ʾālap'' 𐡀, Syriac ''ʾālap̄'' ܐ, Arabic ''ʾalif'' , and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez ''ʾälef'' አ. These letters are believed to have derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting an ox's head to describe the initial sound of ''*ʾalp'', the West Semitic word for ox (compare Biblical Hebrew ''ʾelef'', "ox"). The Phoenician variant gave rise to the Greek alpha (), being re-interpreted to express not the glottal consonant but the accompanying vowel, and hence the Latin A and Cyrillic А and possibly the Armenian letter Ա. Phonetically, ''aleph'' originally represented the onset of a vowel at the glottis. In Semitic languages, this functions as a prosthetic weak consonant, allowing roots with only two true consonants to be conjugated in the manner of a standa ...
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He (letter)
He is the fifth Letter (alphabet), letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician ''hē'' 𐤄, Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew ''hē'' , Aramaic alphabet, Aramaic ''hē'' 𐡄, Syriac alphabet, Syriac ''hē'' ܗ, and Arabic alphabet, Arabic ''hāʾ'' . It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪀‎‎‎, Ancient South Arabian script, South Arabian , and Geʽez script, Ge'ez . Its sound value is the voiceless glottal fricative (). The Proto-Canaanite alphabet, proto-Canaanite letter gave rise to the Greek alphabet, Greek Epsilon Ε ε, Etruscan alphabet, Etruscan 𐌄, Latin alphabet, Latin E, Ë and Latin epsilon, Ɛ, and Cyrillic script, Cyrillic Ye (Cyrillic), Е, Yo (Cyrillic), Ё, Ukrainian Ye, Є, E (Cyrillic), Э, and O-hook, Ҩ. ''He'', like all Phoenician letters, represented a consonant, but the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic equivalents have all come to represent vowel sounds. Origins In Proto-Northwest Semitic there were still three voice ...
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Book Of Ezra
The Book of Ezra is a book of the Hebrew Bible which formerly included the Book of Nehemiah in a single book, commonly distinguished in scholarship as Ezra–Nehemiah. The two became separated with the first printed Mikraot Gedolot, rabbinic bibles of the early 16th century, following late medieval Latin Christian tradition. Composed in Hebrew and Aramaic, its subject is the Return to Zion following the close of the Babylonian captivity. Together with the Book of Nehemiah, it represents the final chapter in the historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Ezra is divided into two parts: the first telling the story of the first return of exiles in the first year of Cyrus the Great (538 BC) and the completion and dedication of the new Temple in Jerusalem in the sixth year of Darius I of Persia, Darius I (515 BC); the second telling of the subsequent mission of Ezra to Jerusalem and his struggle to purify the Jews from marriage with non-Jews. In the book's recurr ...
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Book Of Daniel
The Book of Daniel is a 2nd-century BC biblical apocalypse with a 6th-century BC setting. It is ostensibly a narrative detailing the experiences and Prophecy, prophetic visions of Daniel, a Jewish Babylonian captivity, exile in Babylon. The text features prophecy rooted in Jewish history as well as a eschatology, portrayal of the end times that is cosmic in scope and political in its focus. The message of the text intended for the original audience was that just as the Yahweh, God of Israel saves Daniel from his enemies, so too he would save the Israelites in their present oppression. The Hebrew Bible includes Daniel as one of the Ketuvim, while Christian biblical canons group the work with the major prophets. It divides into two parts: a set of six court tales in chapters 1–6, written mostly in Biblical Aramaic, and four apocalyptic visions in chapters 7–12, written mainly in Late Biblical Hebrew; the Septuagint, the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew ...
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Biblical Aramaic
Biblical Aramaic is the form of Aramaic that is used in the books of Daniel and Ezra in the Hebrew Bible. It should not be confused with the Targums — Aramaic paraphrases, explanations and expansions of the Hebrew scriptures. History During the Babylonian captivity of the Jews, which began around 600 BC, the language spoken by the Jews started to change from Hebrew to Aramaic, and Aramaic square script replaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the Achaemenid Empire annexed the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, Aramaic became the main language of public life and administration. Darius the Great declared Imperial Aramaic to be the official language of the western half of his empire in 500 BC, and it is that Imperial Aramaic that forms the basis of Biblical Aramaic. Biblical Hebrew was gradually reduced to the status of a liturgical language and a language of theological learning, and the Jews of the Second Temple period that started in 516 BC would have spoken a western form o ...
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