Word play in aramaic and syriac

[SteveCaruso]

Q: If it wasn?t the Aramaic of the Peshitta New Testament, as seen in the Manuscripts, such as the Yonan and the Khabouris, then why does Mar Elia III, who was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1176-1190 A.D. in one of his Homilies, give witness to an ?old Edessian Gospel? which he saw sitting on the Altar of Mar Sawrisho in the city of Baghdad, where he states that it was better than any of the new copies with no missing letters, and which bore the date of 78 A.D., (?year 389 of the Greeks?) handwritten by Mar Akhai companion of Mar Mari, the disciple of Mar Adai (Thaddeus) the Apostle?

?Better than any new copies????

Copies of what? The Aramaic New Testament in the 12th century, which he was familiar with? This ?Edessian Gospel? was used in a Church in Baghdad 1,100 years after it was given to the Church of Edessa in 78 A.D. by companions of the Apostles.

"New copies" is curious as then my question is "Which one?" there were 4 subsequent editions after the Peshitta by that time. The Philoxenian, the Harklean, and at least two others that were not named. Andreas Juckel from the University of M?nster did some serious work on this. From what I understand from seeing him at the Hugoye Symposium back in 2010 where he was showing the extensive work he's done on dating Peshitta manuscripts, he's also working on a critical edition of the Peshitta New Testament (with full apparatus, showing variants, etc.).

Anyways, each of the subsequent revisions were much more literal translations from Greek into Syriac (the Harklean even had an extensive apparatus with notes), and as a result a lot less fluid, which is why they never "stuck." In 78 it could not be the Peshitta, as the Peshitta is in too young of a dialect (the consensus is that the form it's in today is 5th century, being compiled over the late 3rd and 4th; it's Middle/Classical not Old Syriac).

The only possibility left under established consensus -- if we were to take Mar Elia III's account at face value, as we cannot examine this manuscript ourselves -- is perhaps an unknown Old Syriac edition, older than what we call "the Old Syriac Gospels" by quite some time (which are actually on the cusp of Old Syriac into Middle Syriac).

The only other possibility is that he was simply mistaken, or the colophon was fabricated. (Like they say about pieces of the True Cross, if you were to gather them up together, you could build Noah's Ark.)

I'm going to assume that regardless of what transpired that Mar Elia was not intending to deceive anyone, but today we have no way of knowing what that manuscript was in relation to his preference. There are too many possibilities. :-)


+++++

Akhi Steve,

You state in one breathe that saying "potential/hypothetical pun" ( for the sake of accuracy) would be an over bearing over-qualification, yet in the rest of your post you insist on being extra detailed in minutia such as differentiating between the mlhaso and malula dialects. You can't have it both ways. Either be specific in both cases, or vague in both.

If you have a problem with my argument, please address the argument, not its window-dressing. Focusing upon presentation in this manner blurs the subject and is a red herring. :-)

You can be convinced in your alleged wordplay without being dogmatic in positively stating that it is a missed pun. Someone reading your post, who doesn't know any better, might assume that it must be true. Or that there must be something other than pure conjecture behind the statement.

Category error. My work isn't "pure conjecture." If it were pure conjecture, there would be no linguistic basis for it. I'm not simply "making stuff up," I'm working with an established corpus in comparison to another corpus. :-)

I am additionally not going to assume that my audience is so uncritical that I need to "spoon-feed" them.

So please, let's let this be the last of this distraction. This marginal discussion has been enough of a disclaimer for anyone who reads the thread.

The fact remains that even the small amount of Aramaic preserved in the GNT is identical to what you call "Classical Syriac." Even in cases where glosses occur, it is for clarification of an A/B scenario.

Yes, the small portions retained are also identical to nearly every other dialect from the first millenium as it contains very common words. That doesn't narrow it down. :-)

Additionally, the Peshitta *does* make clarifications *into* more "native" Syriac, so it's not quite as "identical" as you make it out to be. :-)

For your information, yes in addition to my own Tkhuma dialect I also have family (uncles, aunts, brother-in laws, etc) and close personal friends with whom I regularly and easily converse in Jilu, Tyari, Urmi, Baz, Elkosh and even Turoyo. I won't lie and claim I've ever met anyone who speaks mlahaso (it's nearly dead, if not already dead) nor anyone from Malula (which is more influenced by Arabic than Aramaic.)

The fact is Aramaic has always been fragmented, today and even more so in Christ's time. But what you call "mutual intelligibility" is simply a matter of exposure and practice. People in our community are more comfortable in switching dialects than you think. And people were back then as well, as evidenced by the different people with whom Christ conversed). The evidence is in the scripture and in the evangelizing of multiple areas of Aramaic speaking peoples.

Yes, and Jilu, Tyari, Urmi, Baz, and Elkosh are all subdialects of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and I have heard some native speakers refer to some of them as "accents" (so I am assuming very high intelligibility).

I assume that Turoyo gives you some difficulty, as it contains grammatical structures and lots of vocab that doesn't occur in other dialects (such as the re-invention of the definite article). When I hear Turoyo I must write it down to make sense of it, myself.

Ma'loula is not mutually intelligible to any of the dialects you've listed. Even the subdialects of Bakh'a and Jub'addin (which are Musilim Neo-Aramaic) have some difficulty understanding each other as they contain phonemes that Ma'loula proper does not.

Hulaula is a Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect that is intelligible with Lishanid Noshan, and Lishan Didan groups, but little else. Jewish Neo-Aramaic and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects that "grew up" in the very same villages tended not to be mutually intelligible, even if they shared the same mother dialects.

Shushtar is Mandaic Neo-Aramaic and is rather unique, but largely intelligible with other Mandaic Neo-Aramaic dialects.

I never mentioned Mlahso. It is, for all intents and purposes, dead. :-(

None of these are very well intelligible to my own home dialect that I speak with my kids. The closest living relation is Ma'loula, but what I speak is like book Latin to them.

In any case, switching dialects between the same subfamily isn't as difficult as switching between subfamilies. A better example: I can speak Standard American English, Lowland Scots, Estuary English, and South Jersey English pretty well, too (although the latter is more of what *I* consider an "accent" rather than a separate dialect, although there are a number of vocab differences). British English (mostly urban) and American English are also seeing increasing exposure and overlap due to mass media and are beginning to grow together again.

Some dialects of English I can understand, but cannot possibly speak. For example, I grew up in an Episcopal Church where there were a lot of speakers of Jamaican, Haitian and other Caribbean English dialects, and I am able to follow the cadence and idiom very well. But bugger-all when I try to reproduce it. :-)

Some dialects of English, such as Manxenglish, or Igbo-English give me quite a bit of difficulty on both ends (understanding *and* speaking; and back in my college years I had an Igbo-English-speaking professor... it was madness).

Aramaic, indeed, was starting to split apart in Jesus' day. It's nothing like it is in modern times, though. But 2,000 years does that to language.

Can you please give your educated opinion on James 3:18 ?

Are you aware of any "Galilean" Aramaic usage of Shayna that would fit in this very nice wordplay with seed and "peace/cultivated land"? (Supported later with the wordplay on the familiar Shlama)

According to your work on CAL, the word Shayna is not attested to outside the "Syriac" dialect.

No pun is necessary here to make sense of this passage in Galilean, although I can see exactly why a Peshitta scribe would choose /$yn)/.

This is because "sewing peace" is an established idiom, but not one you find in Syriac (or on the CAL :-) ). For example /zr( $lmh bynyhwn/ = "He sewed peace between them" from Dereshot.

Additionally /(bd/ "to make" also means "to produce" or "to yield" as in crops such as /hwwn zr(yn lh xy+yn whwwt (bd) zwnyn/ = "They sewed it (a field) with wheat and it produced weeds." This also happens in Syriac.

Sewing peace and making/yielding peace works perfectly fine in situ in the Greek from an Aramaic perspective. :-)


More later. My time is currently short. :-)


Quick Edit: And once again we're distracted from the focus:

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. :-)