Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Query in favour of Greek
#16
Thank you Paul. I have it opened and I will have to think on it. I am also looking for other instances of the same.
Reply
#17
I'd like to drop this here for reference as this thread was brought to my attention and there has been some Facebook discussion about it. (The following has some edits due to the lack of Unicode support here):

Quote:The N-preformative shows up sporadically in other dialects here and there for various tenses, but few does it ever become the norm, so these examples Paul cites aren't particularly compelling.

With the transition from Old Syriac into Classical Syriac, however, there was a *total and complete* shift for the y- prefix to n- for the 3rd person singular that occured over the course of the 3rd century AD, with y- being completely abandoned for n- altogether (along with some other grammatical and vocabulary changes). To say the Peshitta can't be dated in part by this shift would be like ignoring the Great Vowel Shift in Modern English simply because someone misspeaks or uses archaic pronunciation once or twice in their speech.

Another unusual use of n- can be found In Galilean, there was a half-shift between the )- prefix of the 1st person singular Imperfect to n- (a combination of /)nh )ktwb/ perturbing to /nyktwb/ or /nktwb/).

Quote:Q: Why did the -n- prefix to the 3rd-person Imperfect verb evolve from the original Aramaic -y- (specifically, within the "Syriac" milieu) ???

Quote:The perturbation of y- to n- occurred (in Syriac, JBA, and Mandaic) in a few steps.

1) Initial y- in Syriac developed from yi- to i-, losing its consonantal nature (hence why we see "idha" rather than "yadha" for "hand" or "Isho" for how later Syriac pronounced "Yeshua").

2) The indication of the Imperfect then shifted to the historical l- preformative in Official Aramaic, which was originally used in the verb "to be" exclusively. The historical l- resolved as n- in Syriac (there was a lot of n/l swapping in this clade in other places). It stayed l- in Hatran, and Mandaic and JBA swap back and forth between n- and l- freely.

Outside of these four dialects (Syriac, JBA, Mandaic, and Hatran) it remained y-, and the shifts happened at about the same time (3rd century).

[...]

There was an antiquated (and now long disproven) conjecture that it was adopted to prevent spelling out the Divine Name (/y-/ + /hwh/ "to be" in *old* non-Syriac orthography). If that were the case it wouldn't have happened in Mandaic, which had no such taboo, nor Hatran, which was pagan.

Quote:[Paul actually makes two honest mistakes with his n- examples in Targum Proverbs.]

In 9:8 it reads /nysnwk/, not /nsnyk/ as he claims. This is a different, problematic form. The presence of /nsnyk/ there is a typographical error on the part of whomever prepared the text. It appears as a marginal note in the manuscript from a later scribe trying to make sense of /nysnwk/, which is a very odd reading. However, whoever scraped the text from the CAL didn't take into account the footnoting system.

The same goes for /nrxmk/ as he claims. The reading in the *body* of the text is /rxmk/. The marginal note trying to make sense of it and failing reads /nrxmk/, and once again, whoever scraped the Targum text from the CAL made another error.

Because of this, I must conclude that the Interlinear Targum on Peshitta.org is wholly unreliable as it jumbles all of the marginal notes in with the actual text with no discernment between them.

Targum Proverbs is also a very late text.

And back off into the ether I go. If there are any questions throw them to me on Facebook as I don't check the Peshitta.org forums very often anymore.

Peace,
-Steve
Reply
#18
Hi Steve,

As I mentioned on Facebook, please keep this discussion on here so we only have one place to track it and not both (and we don't need to bother you to cut and paste between the two platforms)

My reply to your marginal note on Facebook was:

Does the marginal note rule also apply, twice, in 22:6 ? ("N-sba" and "N-s+y")

The point isn't about whether or not it's in the marginal note or the text, plenty of examples abound of both.

I'm not sure who made the Targum PDFs or whether or not they scraped them from CAL, but that is also besides the point.

So is the age of the Targum of Proverbs, which is far from certain. It lacks very rabbinical (later) traditions, such as:

(a) the use of "yy" for the Tetragrammaton (instead, using the native Aramaic "Alaha")
(b) the removal of the Heh in the Imperfect of "HWH" ("to be", as in Targums Onkelos and Yonathan ...eg, "yehe", "tehe", "yehon", "tehon")
© and other features like rabbinical expounding. It mantains a *very* literal rendering of the Hebrew original

All of which point to a much earlier translation than the other Targums.


+Shamasha
Reply
#19
Also, AKhi Steve...

When we are speaking of Hatran, the preformative is always -l- (in line with Official Aramaic) and not -n-. Neither is Mandaic applicable, which also is always -l-.

We aren't speaking of every dialect that varied the original Semitic -y-, or even how - but why it happened *specifically* within the "Syriac" milieu.

+Shamasha
Reply
#20
Akhi Steve,

In case you missed it ... Targum Proverbs 22:6 ?

("N-sba" and "N-s+y")

Thank you in advance.

+Shamasha
Reply
#21
Paul Younan Wrote:Does the marginal note rule also apply, twice, in 22:6 ? ("N-sba" and "N-s+y")

In 22:6 those are not marginal readings.


Paul Younan Wrote:The point isn't about whether or not it's in the marginal note or the text, plenty of examples abound of both.

It does matter as the marginal notes were added considerably later by scribes trying to make sense of the body of the text but your "plenty of examples" appear to be "rare exceptions in the face of the well established rule" for the specific quirks I'm referring to. But more on that in a bit.


Paul Younan Wrote:I'm not sure who made the Targum PDFs or whether or not they scraped them from CAL, but that is also besides the point.

That would be important, actually, as it would make it a copyright violation traceable back to its original source. I'm surprised that, when reading it, you didn't catch the odd duplications to begin with. Why would a text say /l) tksn tkys lmmyqn) dl) nysnwk nsnyk )kys lxkym) dyky rxmk dnrxmk/?

Because the original read /l) tksN/tkys#1#/ lmmyqn) dl) nysnwK/nsnyK#1#/ )kys lxkym) \dyky rxmK /dnrxmK#1#/%/, all of the markup indicating marginal notes was removed, and the person who did the scraping couldn't read Aramaic and realize the gobbledygook they ended up copying.

You might want to take those PDFs down before you get hit with a DMCA notice. Every single verse has the marginal notes inline without markup precisely how they appear in the CAL (which is an original transcription).


Paul Younan Wrote:So is the age of the Targum of Proverbs, which is far from certain. It lacks very rabbinical (later) traditions, such as:

(a) the use of "yy" for the Tetragrammaton (instead, using the native Aramaic "Alaha")
(b) the removal of the Heh in the Imperfect of "HWH" ("to be", as in Targums Onkelos and Yonathan ...eg, "yehe", "tehe", "yehon", "tehon")
© and other features like rabbinical expounding. It mantains a *very* literal rendering of the Hebrew original

All of which point to a much earlier translation than the other Targums.

Those three ideas may superficially point towards such a conclusion, however:

Your point (a) is simply not the case. There were various ways to represent the Tetragram among the Targum traditions ranging from word replacement to dedicated symbols. You'd only get the "yy" from the editions used in the CAL as that's what's in the critical texts by convention. My favorite, however, is in Targum Neofiti: A cluster of four yods (or sometimes 3 yods and one circle above) arranged in a diamond shape. You can't readily reproduce that outside of something like LaTeX.

(B) is merely another quirk of dialect and choice of editing. With Onqelos and Jonathan, the early critical editions tended to lean towards the defective /hwy/ where the older texts more often had the full verbal form (the same happened in the Galilean corpus; the older, more reliable, and yet less familiar texts used the classical verb forms -- these of course had to be "corrected").

Finally in this case, Haggadic additions © don't really point towards an early or late date, as the point of the Targumic tradition was never a direct translation. That said, interpolations *do* occur in Targum Proverbs regardless, and many of those interpolations actually refer to "another Targum" as their origins.


The more curious thing that we should probably focus upon is the Targum Proverbs' dependence upon the Old Testament Peshitta Proverbs translation. Targum Proverbs seems to have borrowed about one third of its text from the Peshitta and did so in a manner traceable to the Medieval period (you would call this the "Peshitto Old Testament" tradition). An entire battery of specialists took on understanding this problem in Targum Studies Vol 2: Targum and Peshitta (Scholars Press, 1998), especially the chapter written by R. J. Owens Jr. entitled "Targum and Peshitta Texts of the Book of Proverbs."



Paul Younan Wrote:When we are speaking of Hatran, the preformative is always -l- (in line with Official Aramaic) and not -n-. Neither is Mandaic applicable, which also is always -l-.

Mandaic actually uses both. Such is the case all over the /drashia Diahia/.

Quote:We aren't speaking of every dialect that varied the original Semitic -y-, or even how - but why it happened *specifically* within the "Syriac" milieu.

I explained the process behind it already. The "Syriac mileiu" followed the same steps as the other NE Aramaic dialect clusters that went through the same shift at the same time. In Syriac is resolved as n-, in Hatran l-, and in Mandaic and JBA they used both.


Anyways I hope I addressed everything. I'm not sure when I'll be back on here next, but I'll try to check in here and there for responses.

Peace,
-Steve
Reply
#22
Thanks Steve for your insight,

Note that both the example of 22:6 (two verbs demonstrating the shift to the n-preformative in the base text itself, as well as those earlier examples corrected by marginal notes to the n-preformative) are both in line with the reasoning I'm about to give. So they both fit in to my thesis.

Point well taken on the PDF files, they aren't mine and I don't mind taking them down if you think there would be a DMCA violation ... I really put them up on this site for reference from a copy that someone sent me way back, who I can't remember now (I've lost touch, and don't remember the name of the person.) I'm not in love with them, they aren't really central to the mission of this website.

The quirks of the Targum Proverbs also fit into my thesis, so I will be using those going forward.

In any case, please do check back - I will be slowly progressing on the documentation of this, because it's a complicated topic - and I want to be sure the basics are covered first.

The first established point is that Targum Proverbs contains the n-preformative both in the base text, and in marginal notes.

The second point is that Targum Proverbs contains the y-preformative in the base text, but never in the marginal notes.

The third point is that a later redactor attempted to correct each original y-preformative, either in the base text itself, or in the marginal notes. Otherwise, he would be leaving a garbled text with a strange mixture of the two. But he didn't catch everything. So we are left with a "hybrid" text, a mess.


The next post will address .... why would a Jewish scribe have done this to Targum Proverbs?

+Shamasha
Reply
#23
I look forward to reading it akhi.

I also fear I must share sad news I was reading earlier this morning on our mention of Hatran Aramaic. It was just confirmed that ISIS has now destroyed significant portions of Hatra. <!-- sSad --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/sad.gif" alt="Sad" title="Sad" /><!-- sSad -->

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-31779484

Peace,
-Steve
Reply
#24
Thanks Akhi - your participation here is always appreciated.

It's devastating what those animals are doing. Nimrud, Nineveh, Hatra, Idlib ... The tomb of Jonah (formerly a Church of the East site).

Have family who are scrambling and in refugee camps in both Iraq and Syria. No Visa applications to the U.S. Until at least 2019.

They are hoping to make it to Lebanon which just announced asylum for the Assyrian Christians.

Relics and linguistics can be destroyed, and people can be killed and uprooted but they are not going to erase the history like they think they are doing.

+Shamasha
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)