Word play in aramaic and syriac

[SteveCaruso]

Really? Not "good enough"??? Interesting statement there Steve, I hope I misunderstood you.

Is this why you are trying so hard to figure out what the Galilean dialect might have been, so you can make His words "good enough". Please say no.

Yes I think you have misunderstood me. :-) I mean "good enough" in the sense of *complacency*, like a declaration that there is nothing more to be learned or better understood, so there's no sense trying.

In this case I'm arguing that Classical Syriac, although closer than Greek, isn't the final authority on the quirks and original form of Jesus' language. There are other possibilities that can be explored, and there is always room for improvement in our understanding.

It's not a matter of *making* anyone's words "good enough" for any purpose. My goodness? :-)

Also, I had asked you a question a few days ago, maybe you missed it. I asked what you thought the term "Edessian letters" might mean, as to the script and text of the NT used in Edessa as early as 78 A.D. What would we call such a language that was in such letters?

I think I did miss it as I only have time nowadays to skim forums from time to time. (This response is actually a patchwork of several sittings.)

I suppose that "Edessian letters" in the time period of 78 AD in and around Edessa would refer to Old Syriac script (which eventually developed into classical Estrangela forms). Something similar to the Birecik inscription and Helene of Adiabene's tomb (although we have no examples of *penned* Syriac scripts [i.e. on parchment or papyrus] until the 3rd century, so that style would be slightly different from those carved forms).

That language, too, is designated "Old Syriac" (not to be directly confused with the Old Syriac Gospels, and as opposed to "Middle Syriac" starting around the 3rd Century and the "Classical Syriac" of the Peshitta).

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I don't say this in a mean spirit, but one of instruction.

This is what I have assumed from the beginning. You can likewise assume that I am being 'instructive,' myself, and not at all mean-spirited in my reply.

I in no way meant to discredit your work. I am in fact a big fan, even though the hypothetical is not my forte.

My only objection was to your wording of a "missed pun". That's a statement that assumes a definitive. Perhaps qualifying it with a "potential/hypothetical" would sound much less authoritative and much less misleading.

If I must prefix each and every one of my statements with an ontological disclaimer, then I would use more words than necessary. As such, I should not cease to speak with confidence and conviction. I am confident of my conclusions, and anyone who engages another party in such discourse should be aware of both their and their colleague's reasonable limits of evidence and certainty from the outset. Insisting upon overqualification is distracting from the issue at hand. :-)

I also think that the Aramaic of the Peshitta is a lot closer to whatever single dialect of "Galilean" Aramaic you feel obliged to confine Christ's understanding to,...

Not a single dialect. A distinct sub-family and dialect continuum distinct from Judean, Samaritan, and Syriac. This sub-family is generally identified as early Galilean or (increasingly more common) early Jewish Palestinian. Exposure to other dialects, following established models for borrowing and absorption, is taken into account.

You're not an Aramaic-speaking person in a multi-dialectic culture, I am. And I see and experience it daily. Much like Christ and His Disciples did.

I'm not *quite* sure that how you paint me is *wholly* accurate. I do speak Aramaic at home with my kids (JPA -- in similar manner to modern Kthobonoyo -- which is very different in speech and writing from anything that you're most familiar with), and I teach several classical dialects. I'm not wholly in the dark.

However, if you wish to brand me as "not a true Aramaic speaker" do me at least the honor of donning a proper kilt and saying it in a good Scotch brogue. ;-)

Please understand that phrases like "missed pun" carry a lot of weight, and require a much more thorough analysis than to simply count the number of occurrences in a still-incompletely analyzed corpus of work. Anyone with any bit of basic search technique can look up entries in CAL. Try living it, and have posters come on your forum and tell you (while flipping pages in a book or a browser) that you must be wrong.

Paul, I've *worked* on the CAL. It was the first grant I worked on from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's a tool that I am familiar with in function in ways that I'm not sure you're even aware of are available.

I've had plenty of problems with visitors to my blog who do not understand, follow, or wish to understand the conventions of my field.

But all of this is getting us even further away from the point. :-)

Is there a missing wordplay in the Peshitta? Certainly not. Especially not to the hearers of the teaching?even if it wasn't spelled out in the text, it was understood by both the listener and the educated reader. If, and only if, it was meant as a pun. That's an assumption, of course.

This is a case of special pleading. That it "was understood" by an "educated reader" is nebulous. The very would/could/should that you'd rather avoid. :-)

Matthew Black was your predecessor in this line of reasoning, and he not only failed miserably in promoting Aramaic primacy among the firmly entrenched Greek camp, but he also made native Aramaic speakers shake their heads in disbelief at the monstrosities he proposed in the spoken dialect. His book is ridiculous.

Matthew Black is nearly 70 years out of date, Paul. His "An Aramaic Approach..." is older than you are. :-)

Furthermore, he was not quite an Aramaic primacist, he was better characterized as an enthusiastic source critic.

I'm talking more about recent works like Casey and Chilton and in Galilean studies such as Sokoloff and Kutscher and applying them to NT source criticism; things that have been published in the past few decades, or even few years. A lot has happened in that time that is never talked about here. :-)

It's the same reason Mel Gibson's film was a linguistic flop. Not only is the language of the movie gibberish to anyone alive today, but it's highly improbable that anyone in the past would have understood 10% of it. Perhaps only if they listened to it in slow motion, and with subtitles.

I am not a fan of reconstructionalism, not the sort made by Matthew Black nor by Professor Fulco of Mel Gibson fame. It doesn't strengthen our case or help the Aramaic cause, if anything it weakens it by making it as convoluted as the Greek camp finds itself in.

I actually got to meet and talk with Fulco when he gave a presentation at Rutgers University under the auspices of the (now) AMESALL department. I wasn't initially convinced that he was working with the right material from the get-go? but it's a *movie*; a really strange artsy-religious one, where he was constrained in many ways by Mel Gibson's requirements, and made artistic choices in many places rather than more conventional ones. It was not a documentary, it was entertainment.

(However, most "documentaries" nowadays can't be told apart from "entertainment" anyway. :-) )

Additionally, there were plenty of Aramaic speakers who got a kick out of it, and were able to understand quite a bit (I remember George Kiraz's interview in the paper).

For some reason you feel compelled to know exactly how Christ said every word, and I feel you are chasing a fruitless goal.

Again, you're strongly mis-categorizing me, and again I need to remind you that's not how reconstructive work -- by its very nature -- *works*.

Like most Aramaic speakers today, He would and could have said things in multiple ways depending on the audience and the situation.

This is an axiom. Additionally, if you espouse to this axiom, you must also allow for wording that isn't found in the Peshitta. Otherwise you don't espouse to this axiom.

Certainly no one alive today is constrained by a single dialect of Aramaic,

No Neo-Aramaic speaker has that luxury in this day and age. Aramaic is fragmented, shattered like Romance Languages after the fall of Rome and the splintering of Vulgar Latin into local dialects that evolved into completely different languages.

Out of the 20+ families (consisting of some 100+ dialects in total) of Neo-Aramaic that exist today, very few are mutually intelligible, spoken. Unless you can readily understand Turoyo, Ma'loula, Hulaula, and Shushtar? :-)

Your constant use of "Syriac" instead of "Aramaic" ?

This entire section of your response seems to hinge upon a very grave misunderstanding: The designation of the language of the Peshitta. It's unanimously called "Classical Syriac," distinct from "Middle Syriac" and "Old Syriac." It's no matter of "cloaking" anything, nor is it a political statement on my part. It's an established, academic name that virtually all linguists refer to it by, and a goodly number of them who study it specifically are, by your account, ethnically Assyrian.

"Aramaic" like "English" is a very broad brush that many people take for granted. Very few people who are not trained in Old Englisc can crack Beowulf, or the Winchester Chronicle open to random page and make sense of it without a translation, let alone pronounce it properly (and Beowulf is only 1,000 years old). The same with Chaucer in its original form.

In any case, I lack the basis to formulate an agenda on this matter, and I unilaterally refuse to couch anything in terms of your proposed "us vs them" as I am party to neither "side" (it's not my fight; I'm my own "side," tout seul). To say anything else is chasing windmills.

Overall, however, this even further distracts (if that's possible) from the topic at hand, and that is the potentiality for the Peshitta missing puns and wordplay due to dialectical differences.

These differences exist. I've demonstrated a shibboleth in the extant corpus that's beyond unlikely to happen by mere chance (and is one of many I could expound upon; but let's focus on this one) and due to that shibboleth, a plain wordplay would exist in nearly any other relevant dialect *but* the dialect of the Peshitta (because that's simply how the language works). So naturally we don't find it there. This is a wordplay that a number of scholars have remarked upon from a variety of angles.

This is not something to dismiss offhand as a fribble for the various reasons and diversions you've stated above, but something to take a bit more seriously in the context of Peshitta studies. :-)

Peace,
-Steve