12-14-2012, 05:43 AM
judge Wrote:IOW in the west it would have been Yeshu, in the east it would have been Eshu (or something similar)
As it stands, in Jesus' own dialect of Aramaic (early Galilean) it would have been closer to "Yeshua" (Yeh-shoo(ah)).
Although the gutterals would have been slightly reduced (Kutscher makes some good arguments about the extent), they would not be eliminated, nor would the vowels on them completely disappear.
Initial yod elongating into an "ee" sound is only attested in one Galilean word and only in the Emphatic (/ida/ vs /yada/ = "the hand"; Galilean retains the Absolute/Emphatic distinction). It also does not seem to be a universal feature of the dialect as it only occurs on ~2 unique occasions out of 230+ times /yad/ occurs in the corpus overall.
Peace,
-Steve