Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic

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The Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic (also Galilean Aramaic , Hebrew ארמית גלילית) is a Midwestern Aramaic dialect and thus belongs to the northwestern branch of the Semitic languages . The closest linguistic idioms are Samaritan Aramaic and Christian-Palestinian Aramaic .

After the suppression of the Bar Kochba uprising in AD 135, the center of Jewish learning in the land of Israel first shifted to Galilee . The local dialect thus became the standard language of the rabbis . It can be found in the Jerusalem Talmud , in the Targumim and in some Midrashim . Several piyutim have been published in this dialect for several years . There are also a few inscriptions. With the Arab conquest of the country in the 7th century, the Aramaic of the region was increasingly supplanted by Arabic and was ultimately only used in writing. Increasingly, however, the Babylonian diaspora determined Jewish scholarship and thus the Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic gained greater importance. As a result, numerous spellings and forms of the Babylonian dialect penetrated the texts, which made research into the Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic difficult for a long time. The discovery of the Cairo Geniza resulted in a large increase in non-corrupted or only slightly corrupted texts .

orthography

Among the most striking features in orthography spelling counts of auslautendem / a / with He instead Aleph . Original Waw is often written with Beth , e.g. B. הבת 'she was' instead of הות.

morphology

The Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic has the following peculiarities compared to the other Aramaic dialects: The 1st person singular is given the prefix -נ n- in the past tense . The 3rd person plural perfect ends masculine on ון- -un , feminine on ין- -in . The infinitive in pe'al has / o / in the second syllable. The 1st person singular object suffix is ​​י- -i .

Dictionary

Due to the Hellenistic character of the Levant and the affiliation to the Roman Empire , numerous Graecisms and Latinisms penetrated the Jewish-Palestinian Aramaic, especially in the area of ​​administration and law as well as the military, e. B. פולמוס 'war' from Greek πόλεμος or פטרון 'protector' from Latin patronus. The Latin words are mostly conveyed through the Greek.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Michael Sokoloff , Joseph Yahalom: Aramaic Piyyutim from the Byzantine Period. In: JQR. 75: 309-321 (1985)
  2. ↑ Michael Sokoloff, Joseph Yahalom: שירת בני מערבא. שירים ארמיים של יהודי ארץ ישראל בתקופה הביזנטית [Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry From Late Antiquity]. Jerusalem 1999.

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