DailyHebrew.com

Two recent articles from well-respected news agencies have included fallacious details about the relationship between Hebrew and Aramaic. The first described the Aramaic dialect spoken in the first century of the Common Era as “a language which developed from the classical Hebrew of the scriptures, a few hundred years earlier,” and the second claimed that Aramaic is “the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic.”

So which one is it? Is Aramaic the root of Hebrew or did Aramaic develop from Hebrew? The answer, of course, is neither. Although they may be related by a shared lineage, there is not a direct genetic relationship between the two. That is to say, one did not derive from the other. (Pete Bekins irascibly assimilates these two absurd statements with the tongue-in-check proposal that “Classical Hebrew developed into Aramaic which then morphed back into Modern Hebrew and Arabic.”)

These languages are indeed quite similar—a reasonable modern analogy may be the modern Romance languages—but they are not genetically related. Like Italian and French which share a common progenitor in Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew are related to one another by shared heritage and not direct linage. Almost without exception in modern scholarship, this common progenitor of Aramaic and Hebrew (called [Proto ]Northwest Semitic) is agreed upon. (For an example of some of the difficulties of establishing direct relationships between languages, in particular modern Aramaic dialects, see here.)

For more discussion see any introduction to comparative Semitic grammar or one of many introductory articles/books to this topic. For example:

Faber, Alice. 1997. “Genetic Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages.” Pp. 3-15. In The Semitic Languages, edited by R. Hetzron, London: Routledge, 1997. (overview here)

Huehnergard, John. 2005. Features of Central Semitic. In Biblical and Oriental Essays in Memory of William L. Moran, edited by A. Gianto. Rome: Biblical Pontific Institute. (available online here)

Rubin, Aaron. 2010. A Brief Introduction to the Semitic Languages. Edited by G. A. Kiraz, Gorgias Handbooks 19. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. (available from Amazon)

If you are struggling to learn Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek vocabulary, there is an exciting new flashcard program from Miklal Software which should be helpful to any language student. 

Babel Flashcards works on all computer platforms with Java and includes card decks which are keyed to major grammars (like Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar and more to come) as well as excellent tools to produce card lists based on lexeme frequency, English glosses, part of speech, Biblical passage or any combination thereof!

Several of the other features of this program will be highlighted in future posts, but you can take advantage of a special RELEASE SALE of 20% off with the promo code release1010 for a limited time right now.

For those interested in such things, the most recent edition (Autumn 2010) of the Journal of Semitic Studies contains an article which I co-authored: "A Revised Reading of a Nabataean Inscription from Umm Al-Jiml"

Happy reading!