Actually, the question could have been phrased, "which of these 2 languages is the oldest" which would have been more clear.
What is the oldest language, Hebrew or Aramaic?
by TJ Curioso 16 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Leolaia
Aramaic and Hebrew can be thought of as roughly contemporaneous, both deriving from older LBA Canaanite dialects (attested in the Canaanite of the Tell el-Amarna letters and in Ugaritic) in the period of Levantine nation building in Iron Age I (1200-1000 BC). They were part of a dialect continuum in West Semitic; the languages of Aram, Israel, Judah, the Transjordan, Moab, and Ammon were mutually intelligible but contained their own idiosyncracies. The shibboleth story in Judges 12, for instance, depicts dialect differences between the Ephraimites of Israel and the Transjordanians of Gilead. The dialect of the Northern Kingdom, as attested in the OT, also shows greater features in common with Aramaic than the Hebrew of the southern kingdom of Judah. The oldest Hebrew inscription, found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, dates to the 11th century BC; the Gezer calendar dates to the 10th century BC. Early Aramaic texts include the pedestal inscription from Tell Halaf from the 10th century BC and the Tell Fahariyah and "House of David" Tell Dan stele from the 9th century BC. Moabite texts from the 9th century BC include the Mesha Stele and the El-Karak inscription. As for Transjordanian Semitic, the excerpt of the Book of Balaam son of Beor from Deir 'Alla dates to the 9th century BC.
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TJ Curioso
Leolaia, for your words, you believe that both hebrew and aramaic have the same roots and evolve at same time, right?
Why then, in time of Jesus, aramaic was spoken more frenquently than hebrew?
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Leolaia
I was talking about the situation in early Iron Age, since the question concerned the origins of (biblical) Hebrew and (Old) Aramaic. Your current question is altogether different, as it concerns the linguistic situation in Judea a thousand years later in the time of Jesus. A lot had happened in the time in between. The Aramaeans had begun to settle extensively in Northern Mesopotamia, requiring the Assyrian empire to be bilingual in Akkadian and Aramaic (see the Old Aramaic story of Ahiqar, preserved in a late sixth century BC papyrus, on Aramaeans involved in Assyrian government); the Neo-Babylonian empire that succeeded it was similarly bilingual. Aramaic became an international diplomatic language in the Assyrian empire. There is a story in 2 Kings 18 of representatives of King Hezekiah negotiating with the Assyrians in Aramaic which would not be understood by the common people. Then the Assyrians destroyed the nothern kingdom of Samaria and repopulated much of the land with refugees from the Aramaean kingdoms, including Hamath, Damascus, Arpad, and Sepharvayim; these colonists mixed with the Israelites still in the land, and some also migrated to Judah. And after the Babylonians destroyed Judah, the Jews left in the land mixed with the Samaritans and when the exiled Jews returned from Babylon in 538 BC, they found the land populated with various groups, including Aramaeans. Aramaic became the official language of the Persian empire in relations with the territories (cf. the Aramaic correspondence in the book of Ezra), and it was during the Babylonian exile and in the Yehud province during the Persian period when the Jews shifted from Hebrew to Aramaic as the language of everyday life. So we find Aramaic intruding into the exilic book of Jeremiah in post-exilic redactions (10:11), used in the Elephantine papyri, and eventually in the Hellenistic period, used as the language of composition in books like Tobit (which recasted the Aramaean hero Ahiqar as a Jew), 1 Enoch, the Aramaic apocalypse of Daniel, Jubilees, and many of the Qumran documents. Hebrew however continued to be used as a language of composition, utilized in Sirach, the Hebrew apocalypse of Daniel, the Temple Scroll, etc.
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NOLAW
Ancient Semetic is a 'machine' language. It is not human.
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ziddina
Ah, you mean, "older", right...
Because neither one is the OLDEST language - and do you mean the FIRST language, which may be extinct, today, or the oldest LIVING language?
Neither one qualifies as the OLDEST living language, either....
http://able2know.org/topic/114282-1
This website seems to be much more informative:
http://www.krysstal.com/langfams_indoeuro.html
And it has this to say about the probable "oldest" language [not considering the Australian aborigines or African languages...]
"The Indo-European Family is thought to have originated in the forests north of the Black Sea (in what is now Ukraine) during the Neoloithic period (about 7000BC). These people bagan to migrate between 3500BC and 2500BC, spreading west to Europe, south to the Mediterranian, north to Scandinavia, and east to India. ..."
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ziddina
This looks like a very good site....