How Similar Are Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic?
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- čas přidán 10. 05. 2024
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In this episode I examine Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic - the languages of the Hebrew Bible (or "Old Testament") - and see how similar they are!
In this video I did my best to pronounce Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic with their original full range of phonemes, including sound distinctions that you won't hear in Modern Hebrew. If you know some Modern Hebrew (or a modern form of Aramaic) the pronunciation in this video will sound different. I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly, but I tried to make it as authentic as possible.
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:19 Brief history
01:14 General similarities between Biblical Hebrew & Aramaic
03:05 Similar cognate vocabulary
03:51 MyHeritage (the sponsor of this episode)
06:42 Sound correspondences between Hebrew and Aramaic cognates
09:13 Differences in grammar
15:31 Comparing an Aramaic Bible verse with Hebrew translation
20:34 Comparing an Aramaic Targum verse with the Hebrew original
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Done already! Greek but with a strong Italian heritage😊
That’s cool! I guess there has been lots of migration in both directions since Greece and Italy are so close to each other.
@ErickFishuk Thanks! In most videos, though, I get native speakers to pronounce the samples because I can't pronounce them well enough myself (at least not well enough to serve as a good example). I did the samples myself in this video, but I'm sure people with more expertise in BH and BA will be critical of my pronunciation. I did my best though.
68% Sephardic, 14.4% Sardinian, 5.1% Ashkenazi, 3.7% Italian. 2.5% Greek, 3.7% Middle Eastern, 2.6% West Asian.
I'm North African Jewish from both sides
@@Langfocusmake a video about the disappeared languages of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, etc.
Shlama, as a native Aramaic speaker and someone who can speak Hebrew to an extent I’m really excited for this😍😍
Glad to hear that! Just keep in mind that this is about Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic, so probably pretty different from what you speak. And of course I'm not a native speaker of either.
Wait Aramaic still exists and isn't extinct? How many speakers are still around? It pleases me that the descendant of the language of Jesus himself survives in some form.
@@canchero724there are several hundred thousand speakers spread throughout the Levant and Mesopotamia, along with a global diaspora of refugees
@@canchero724Jewish Aramaic and normal Aramaic are not mutually intelligible. The language of Jesus is long dead.
@@Langfocus I can tell you're not a native speaker. You don't have the accent and throat for some pronunciations such the Ayn and Kha and Ha. Btw, do you know about the trick of adding special "charcters" to Roman letters to better transliterate words? For example, 3=Ayn (Yasuo3), 5=kh (Meshia5), 7=Hha (Elo7im), 9=q (9adosh). It's very practical when you get used to it and it helps making the distinctions.
Im an Assyrian and I approve this message !!! Shlama to all my Assyrians and Jews 🙏🏼 we still speak Aramaic, and it is our first language 💙🤍❤️ khaya Ashur 💪🏻💪🏻
Shlamalihun min Georgia
@goshaivanov7870 i only speak arabik and understood this. We say it differently in arabic but I got it because I watched the video
You said , "Peace to you from Georgia" right?
shalom habibi !
Shlama Khoonie min Chicago.
Much love to all Assyrians from Italy.
Can we all appreciate the fact that Paul did the whole reading by himself without anyone reading in Hebrew or Aramaic like he usually does?
Impressive!
He seems extraordinary gifted in languages.
He is a fluent hebrew speaker. Though his pronunciations are about a decade old. Nobody today speaks with throated T, K, TS, SH. Maybe he is pronouncing them how they were in biblical times though.
@@Luccicap that's exactly what he did
@@LuccicapYeah, he’s pronouncing it more like biblical hebrew. Modern hebrew has some significant phonetic differences
@@Luccicap "Nobody today speaks with throated T, K, TS, SH" so older people don't maintain their original accents? Why? If you can't even rely on old people to speak properly and not have their language bastardised by linguistic laziness then I don't know what to say. This is how regional dialects and languages go extinct.
As an Arabic speaker, I find most of the words you mentioned are very similar to Arabic and have the same meaning.😊
Arabic is the closest to proto Semitic. So proto Semitic is Arabic.
No. Arabic is close to Proto-Semitic, but Proto-Semitic is NOT Arabic. @@HardCore_Islamist
I'm a Hebrew speaker, and I've just started learning Arabic. It's very interesting to discover words with the same root as in Hebrew.
Personally from my understanding after learning little Arabic for couple of years for school the similarities are clear from close inspection and it’s clear it originated from the same family but while I can still understand to some extent Phoenician and Aramaic to some extent it’s just sounds weird Arabic isn’t intelligibile , my take has native Hebrew speaker
@@marina12345678911000That’s because Modern-Day Hebrew consists of 75% Arabic roots. This took place during the revival of the Hebrew Language in the 20th century.
As a native Hebrew speaker I've always found it fun to read over the Aramaic portions of the prayer book/bible and pick out all the cool parallels to Modern Hebrew. For me, at least it's very easy to understand. Once you have an eye for the roots, everything else falls into place.
Yes, it is.@@obaletalbazi2110
הגיוני
@@obaletalbazi2110
The traditional Jewish prayer book absolutely has sections in Aramaic. The Kaddish being the most well known, but not the only one.
Do you know of a book you can recommend for an English's speaker to learn Hebrew and Aramaic?
What is modern Hebrew? The bible should never change.
I'm a Jew born and lived my whole life in Israel, and for most of my childhood, i thought the Aramaic words were just "high language" Hebrew, like thees and thous. Not that they were foreign.
How interesting! In which contexts would you bump into them?
@@katathoombz judicial terminology and financial terminology in modern Hebrew often use Aramaic words as some sort of "high language".
@@NatanFlayer how _very_ interesting! And, also, understandable.
הרבה מילים ארמיות מהתלמוד זלגו לעברית המודרנית
@@katathoombz i don't know exactly, high brow language is not a precise term.
But Natan's comment made me realize that's the Hebrew equivalent of Latin.
Another thing I would mention is that for millenia, learned Jewish men were and continue to be bilingual in both Hebrew and Aramaic. As a result, Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic have influenced each other greatly. In Modern Hebrew there are features of Aramaic ranging from extremely casual speech to legal texts and poetry, and many of the features which make Modern Hebrew different from Biblical Hebrew are from Aramaic influence (albeit later dialects than Imperial Aramaic)
Absolutely. The Talmud is primarily in Aramaic.
Well those empires spoke Akkidian. The Cannanite/Edomites spoke Aramaic which the inflicted on the small remnant of Judah that returned to the land. This is why the bible was translated into Greek. They translated the Bible into Greek to keep it out of the hamds of the Syro Phonecian Cannanites.
@@jrutt2675 Apparently you havent heard of the Aramaic targum transplantations
@@palsyr4307 How would those scripts contradict my statement?
@@jrutt2675 the bible was translated to Greek on orders of the Greek empire, nothing to do with anything against Aramaic people otherwise the Talmud would be mostly Greek not mostly Aramaic as well as the multiple Aramaic targums.
We Assyrians (Chaldeans and Syriac people as well) have our form of Aramaic ( Assyrian Neo-Aramaic or basically Syriac) that we still speak within our daily live and in our churches. We call it Assyrian as a slang but it’s a modern Aramaic version that we native Christian Mesopotamians speak as our first language. We have two dialects eastern and western.
I wonder how diferent is it from bibilical/jewish aramic.
Original.Assyrian is Akkadian dialect. Right?
@@Johannes... Yes but later Aramaic gradually took control as the main language in the Assyrian Empire which led the Assyrians today to speak a form of Aramaic.
Would that be called Chaldean? My barber is from somewhere in the Middle East (I don't know which country) and said that he speaks Chaldean, which he called 'the Jesus language'. Would this be modern Aramaic?
@@Marsel-ov6yg3im5cAlphabet not language
As a non Arab who can read and partially speak some Arabic, I can say that Biblical Aramaic is strikingly similar to Classical Arabic to the point of being relatively intelligible even to me. When you romanized the script and read it out, I was able to understand it quite easily based on my Arabic.
It's a lie, though they're similar, they're no intelligible
I agree! Despite my very limited Arabic, lots of the words seemed familiar to me, like how Arabic uses لا (laa) for negation or how the Arabic word for hand is يد (yad).
@@bogdanstamenic2836indeed. Here are some more Classical Arabic cognates to Biblical Aramaic words featured in the video:
god = ilah
translate = tarjum
write = ktb
house = bayt
eye = 3ayn
wisdom = hikma
good = Tayyib
peace = salam
snow = thalj
three = thalatha
hear = sama3
gold = dhahab
king = malek
head = ra's
sky/heavens = samaa'
land/earth = arD
create/begin = bada'
below/beneath = taHt
and = wa
for = li
with = bi
like = ka
@@YousufAhmad0All of those have cognates in both Biblical and Modern Hebrew as well, it's not really a criterium for mutual intelligibility: eloh, targum, katav, bayit, ayin, hokhma, tov, shalom, sheleg, shlosha, shama', zahav, melekh, rosh, erets, bara', tahat, wa/ve, le, be, ke/ka. Aramaic is more closely related to Hebrew as a Northwest Semitic language, rather than to Arabic which is a Central Semitic language - a separate branch.
@@justsomeofmyfavs sure, I am not a linguist, just shared a personal observation
As a native Arabic speaker, I find this amazing
Most of the rules you mentioned apply to Arabic: the prepositions, the negation, the pronouns, the 3-consonant template ... they're almost the same
And about 90% of the words you mentioned in this video are used in Arabic as well, so this is really cool
However, I've noticed that Formal Arabic is closer to Biblical Hebrew in pronunciation rules, while our Arabic dialect in Syria is closer to Biblical Aramaic
For example the word for gold in the Syrian dialect is also "dahab", while in Formal Arabic it's "zahab"
in formal arabic it's not zahab! it's "ðahab" the same sound as in "the" in english
Arabs and Hebrews are brothers, whether they like it or not 😊.
@@JonaedJonny-vi3pc yes sure bro
@@JonaedJonny-vi3pc From Jewish origin but not Jewish according to Halakha, and you ?
@@amineafaryate2598 In some languages "z" is pronounced as English "th", one example is the Peninsular Castilian "z", they pronounce it as "th" while in the Americas we treated sometimes as z but most of the time just as "s". We don't like to complicate our lives with those nuances. So, he's not wrong writing gold as "zahab". It just depends on our own notions of the sounding value of Roman consonants.
Your pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew was outstanding. Keep up the good work! Many people will say “This pronunciation is strange and not Hebrew”, but they are thinking of Modern Hebrew, rather than acknowledging Ancient Hebrew and its ‘original’ sounds. Thank you for the video!
I'm Maronite Catholic and we use Syriac Aramaic in liturgy. Its interesting how similar Aramaic and Arabic are.
Nice one Paul! This was the first time I've seen you pronounce Hebrew with all the sounds that didn't make it to modern Hebrew, and I think you did a great job!
כמו תמיד, סרטון מעולה - מעריץ שלך מישראל
Thanks! I don't usually pronounce Hebrew the way I did in this video, so I worked on it. If it was pronounced like Modern Hebrew I could have done it more naturally.
I took several years of Biblical Hebrew in university (which turned into a Religious Studies minor kind of by accident, just because I had enough BH credits) but that was a long time ago.
@@Langfocus thank you! I was wandering why you pronounce it like that
@@Luccicapbecause that how Hebrew is meant to sound. Unfortunately it was bastardized by Ashkenazi Jews like Herzl who made it sound a lot like German or Yiddish. This is a real shame.
Learning Biblical Hebrew currently, it's fascinating how Aramaic had so much stuff that's vastly different from Hebrew! Can't wait to get into it as well someday!
Man, as a religious jew who likes Arameic prayers we use I am sooo thankful for this! We were never taught Aramaic. We just read it and memorise by heart. Thank you!
This is absolutely fascinating. Could you do a video on Canaanite languages or go into more details on Biblical Hebrew and Phoenician? I didn't realize they were on the same language branch and I'd be interested in seeing how closely related they are.
I second this
They are basically identical. The linguists say that probably phoenician was faster than hebrew. While hebrew has a lot of diphtongs, the phoenicians usually used one vowel.
Wine: in hebrew is Yayin, in phoenician is Yen
Sea: in hebrew is Mayim, in phoenician is Mem
House: in hebrew is Bayit, in phoenician is Bet
But overall, the languages are so absurdely similar that they are considered actually the same language. They are 99.999% identical.
Late punic, however, is different.
Interesting fact: lebanese arabic retains a lot of these influences. The presence of the vowel "e" instead of "a" or "i" in spoken lebanese arabic is very considerable. In other arabic dialects, the "e" vowel is unexistant. Arabic has only three vowel sounds: a, i, u. Lebanese arabic probably have a big influence of aramaic and hebrew/phoenician
🙏🏻
I'm in my final few classes of Biblical Hebrew, having studied it intensely for four years almost, and we had entire units dedicated to recognizing the differences. In the Bible itself, it's easy enough, but I independently learned the Syriac script and tried to read some of the targum texts and other translations out there and the difficulty shoots up significantly. I think the Aramaic texts in the Bible were written in a way that mimics Hebrew text a lot, but I haven't taken actual Aramaic courses yet. Also, THANKS for doing the ancient pronunciation. That's what I've learned, and it's really refreshing to hear it on a video.
It sounds like you kind of did what we did in my BH classes in university. I took I think 30 credits of it, but after 24 credits we had finished all the material for BH and my professor had nothing more to teach. So we spent the final year doing Biblical Aramaic, sort of by analogy with BH.
I used to go the attic of the library annex where I was the only person there, dig out Targums and attempt to read them for fun. lol
@@Langfocus You must be the life of the party!
This is one of the more exciting episodes I've seen from you in a while. Looking forward to it!
Can't wait for a Tagalog overview!
As a Hebrew speaker I couldn't understand modern Aramaic at all. Ancient Aramaic I would only understand when written and analyzed thoroughly. I've met a few modern Aramaic speakers, they were able to understand me better than I did them, mostly because of the pronunciation. Modern Hebrew has a very clear pronunciation, most of the non-common sounds dropped.
Hispanophone here, the same relationship exists with Spanish and Portuguese. The languages are both related (as derivatives of vulgar latin), and Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish speakers better than the other way around!
Difference being, that Latin is much harder to understand since the languages evolved too much. We do have some cognates, and if you analyze Latin enough then you'll be able to have epiphanies.
For example, the word for "book":
Spanish: Libro
Portuguese: Livro
Latin: Liber
Some words are just...weird:
Word for "fire":
Spanish: Fuego
Portuguese: Fogo
Latin: Ignis
Since people won't read my second comment, I was comparing the word for "fire" in the different languages, not saying that fogo and fuego came from ignis. Stop trying to correct me 🗿
The weird words are either Arabic or Visigothic, like Fuego for Fire. One that gets you in trouble is COSA. This has two origins and if Spanish or Arabic are languages you learned be wary: you call an Arabic speaking Somali gang banger a COSA and he will pull a gun on you. The Latin word is thing. The Arabic word is vagina. They just evolved to sound the same. I got into this on a factory floor when some Chicano shouted "Miss Thing!" and I shouted back "¡Srta cosa!" It turns out Miss Thing is a mistranslation of a word Puerto Rican drag queens in New York City used to mean a real woman. Oops.
you got killer English, that's for darn sure
@@sdweston8 thank you
@@hannibalbarca1147 fuego and fogo comes from latin word focus not ignis.
As an Arabic speaker, this is so interesting
So many similarities with Arabic from both languages?
@@save_sudan_and_palestineAramaic is older than the two others I think, as if Latin survived near by Spanish, Italian... so the three are really related
@@save_sudan_and_palestine There is tons of overlap but they are not mutually intelligible. If an Arabic speaker speaks to me very slowly I can pick out many words though
@@ak47dragunov Is Hebrew your language?
@@save_sudan_and_palestine Yes
As a Yiddish speaker it is really weird to see words like מתנה or ארץ in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic, because I understand them but the pronunciation is so different!
Many Yiddish words which aren't from German are actually from Hebrew...
Interestingly, Hebrew loanwords in Yiddish (and Ashkenazi Hebrew in general) retain some of the early Hebrew pronunciations that have been lost in Modern Hebrew - the kamatz in מתנה is reflected in the komets-alef matóneh מתנה. However, ארץ/erets in Yiddish is erd ערד, which is Germanic and not Hebraic in origin. Erets is only used in the context of erets-yisroel ארץ ישראל.
It is conjectured that the population that initially developed Yiddish spoke Aramaic before they moved into German-speaking lands and adapted to the local language. But they may have also spoken French or Italian.
@@davidkantor7978 I've heard that. I also heard that they may have spoken Judaeo-Slavic before adopting German. Very interesting stuff.
I study both East Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) and German as a hobby. Although I needed the English subtitles, I was pleasantly surprised to find that i could actually understand retrospectively the words and sometimes even entire sentences spoken in a Yiddish comedy series on CZcams
Always glad to see other content creators discuss Biblical Hebrew 😁
As a native speaker of Arabic, hearing both languages was like hearing minecraft villagers communicating in wierd, somewhat harsh arabic with a liiiittle bit of wierd vocabulary.
I don't know why I found them somewhat close to how Turks speak.
As a native Hebrew speaker, Arabic does sound like the mid level of distance relative to Hebrew that it is
Yep, that pretty much sums it up
I love that you compare it to Minecraft villagerese
Hawwwm.
Knowing how modern Hebrew is pronounced makes this very interesting. Seeing as most of the fricatives moved to stops and the pharyngealized consonants became affricates or lost the pharyngealization. Some letters still preserve the fricative --> stop with the dagesh ( feh to peh, vet to bet). You can still see some variation in modern Hebrew by more conservative religious practices using /s/ for tav in certain environments.
hey, a question, if i may: in modern Greek, a lot of the sounds that were different in ancient Greek have been homogenised over the centuries. the result is that you end up with multiple different spellings that sound the same: for example, "H", "I", "Y", "OI", "EI" and "YI" all represent the same "[i]" sound. (it makes trying to spell words a fkn nightmare.) is the situation similar in Hebrew?
@evilotis01 Not as far as I'm aware, at least not uniformly. For most speakers to my knowledge, tav and tet have merged into /t/. But they're not used the same way in spelling (due to historical reasons) and tet is also commonly used for loanwords. The pharyngeal chet and chaf have also moved around a bit and end up the same most of the time, but have different spelling conventions. Most of the time, Hebrew isn't written with vowels or the dagesh. From what I was taught, the dagesh is basically able to be ignored in a lot of cases where it doesn't retain the fricative --> stop. Like if I see a dagesh in a gimel /g/ I can't do anything with it. Though I'm not a native speaker, I'm just Jewish so I learned through education.
I feel bad for modern Greek iotazation, the oops all [i] really got them
Thank you for this video! That was so interesting and very impressive to hear you read Hebrew and Aramaic
Very interesting video, Paul! I knew that there were small sections of the OT written in Aramaic but I didn't know that it and Hebrew were that similar.
Thanks so much for such a comprehensive breakdown of how these two languages relate to each other. I sort of knew most of this already but hadn't really compared the similarities and differences.
Been following your channel for years. I am really fascinated by the details entailed in each video you have posted. Thank you so much!!!💓💓💓💓
Another brilliant assessment. Thanks so much! Extremely informative. Amazing pronunciation, by the way. I want to use you as my model for Biblical Hebrew and Aramic phonology when I finally study it seriously.
Thanks, Luke! I’ve seen some videos of you speaking Latin and those were great! 👍🏻🔥
Thank you - I used to teach BH (and learned and forgot BA) so this was a good introduction to some of the differences. One of my students was an Assyrian Iraqi Australian who spoke Aramaic as his home language and who went on to become Bishop of the Assyrian Church in Europe. Once he pointed out to me that in the Aramaic Bible Gen 1.1 - "biqmin b'ra" - can be 'heard' as 'in the beginning was the Son' because 'bar' in Aramaic means 'son', so the Assyrians understood this as a sign pointing to the pre-existence of the Son. They were deeply interested in questions of the Trinity and the Nestorian controversy.
Except that the original language of the verse is Hebrew. Making such an inference from a translation doesn't hold veracity. The root ברא can only mean one thing in Hebrew: the concept of creation.
@@aryeh-xw7mi I know, I'm a Hebraist. I was simply observing how Assyrian Aramaic-speaking Christians can "read" or "hear" this verse as saying "In the beginning was the Son of God" and some think it interesting or even providential.
But his NT and ALL copies of the OT are derived from Greek. Without LXX, there would be no "Torah" and/or "Hebrew" at all. What is called "Modern Hebrew" today is a purely reconstructed contrivance. Even Paul wrote his "Letter to the Hebrews" in Greek, which proves that "Hebrew" as a living, spoken language was long dead 2 thousand years ago.
@@aryeh-xw7mi Hebrew translated from Greek. Show me the "Original Ancient Torah in Original Ancient Hebrew" prior to LXX..........Exactly ;) Indeed, the oldest complete "Hebrew Torah" we have is only about 1000 years old and is Russia, of all places.
@@KarlKarsnark You're saying that the Torah was originally written in Greek? The Hebrew text has been carefully preserved from generation to generation, meticulously copied. The idea that the Hebrew text is a translation from Greek, based on the oldest existing full manuscript being the Leningrad codex, is mere conjecture, and, at least to me, is preposterous. The text is the same in Jewish communities around the world, even when those communities have not had contact with others for centuries. This itself attests to the effectiveness of the methods and standards for copying the text as required by Jewish law and practice. The "original Torah" is therefore found in every synagogue, faithfully copied going back far before any parchment scroll could be expected to have survived.
I wish this video had been available back when I was in seminary! But even now, it is very helpful - thank you!
Your pronunciation for each letter is incredible!!
Very funny how while learning Hebrew as a kid, we always pronounced yud hay vuv hay as Adonoy, never questioning the inconsistency of the actual letters with the completelyy different pronunciation. And no teacher ever broached that subject either.
It’s because יקוק pronounced phonetically is not a name we’re supposed to say. There are some names of G-d we are forbidden to use, and that’s one of them. So we pronounce it אדושם instead.
Fascinating. I have taught myself a fair amount of Biblical Hebrew over the years, but use the pronunciation I was taught when I visited Israel as a young man, 40 years ago - so I say vav rather than waw, and pronounce the object marker as et rather than eth- and so on.
When reading the book of Daniel, I noted that it shifted into Aramaic in chapter 2, and so I worked through parts of the Aramaic text, with an English translation for guidance, and picked up some of the similarities and differences between BH and BA mentioned in this video. I downloaded a pdf of an Aramaic grammar from somewhere online, but I must admit I never gave it the devotion I have given to Hebrew grammars- I suppose because of the comparatively small amount of the Tanakh composed in Aramaic.
A very interesting and accurate video. Also, a beautiful and precise pronunciation of both BH and BA. Congrats!
There is so much awesome stuff to discuss once you get into historical linguistics. This is an extremely welcome experiment. I would lose my mind if you did a deep dive into Sumerian grammar (something that hasn't been done on youtube in like, ever)
I find it rally cool that there some Sumerian words in Hebrew.
Absolutely fascinating as always!! Thank you Paul 🙂
A while ago, you absolutely blew my mind with your video about odd similarities between Celtic and Semitic languages, I was wondering if you could make a video with your favourite theories about languages as I imagine there must be quite a few fascinating ones you must know of! 😇
Thanks Paul, another question I've never made to myself but now I need to know the answer~
This is great. I've been waiting for you to do this subject
That was an excellent video. You give so much knowledge and with such an interesting perspective
Excellent Video! I took Biblical Hebrew in College, but I was only able to learn some Biblical Aramaic from using a book to self-study the language. I would compare the similarities of Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic as analogous to Spanish to Portuguese. (Very similar vocabulary but significantly different grammar, although even the grammar is still comparable.)
I'm studying neither language (learning German, French, Spanish, and Swahili)...but I just love to pull up a Langfocus site. Always enlightening!!!
why Swahili? Definitely a unique language to learn.
Wanted to study languages from all corners of the world. Couldn't overlook the tongues from a continent as large and important as Africa. @@Abilliph
Having been to Africa several times, the thought dawned on me that I should get familiar with one of the more widely spoken languages there...and I'm glad I did. It is a most delightful language, although (gotta admit) German is my favorite. @@Abilliph
I really appreciate the pronunciation in this video!
Thank you Paul for your useful videos!
I'm quite familiar with both languages. Many Jewish texts from, two different Targum's (you mentioned one here but there's another one) to the Talmud are two of the most widely studies texts written in Aramaic. One thing to note about those translations is that, as you said, they're not exact translations. Often times, they include explanations which the bible doesn't say, making them more of a commentary than a translation. When they're taught in school, usually to boys around 5th grade, a lot of the similarities are indicated as to make the learning of Aramaic easier. Even though they're quite similar, I still come across "new" words (for me, to be clear, not actually new words) all the time in Aramaic and need to get them translated. However, as you said, often times by using the few rules you mentioned, you're able to figure out what the word means in Hebrew. It gets really tricky when Aramaic words are used that just appear once or twice written down anywhere, and therefore figuring out what those words mean in purely contextual. After 25+ years of learning Aramaic and being fluent in (modern) Hebrew, I don't think it's that hard to understand Aramaic's written form at all. However, because it's not spoken (basically at all) anymore, it's not a language I'm familiar with listening to.
I will just add that the pronunciations used in this video of Hebrew and Aramaic were not the more widely used pronunciations. There are many different pronunciations of both languages, but I'd say that in modern Hebrew, some of the letters are pronounced slightly different. To be clear, I was able to understand everything said in the video, it just sounded a little rough around the edges compared to spoken modern Hebrew.
Great video!
It's supposed to be BIBLICAL Hebrew. It's not supposed to sound like Modern Hebrew.
@@NuisanceMan ok, but as we don't have a recording on Biblical Hebrew to compare it to, we don't know what it sounded like. However, if I had to guess, it probably had a lot more flow to it then the way it was spoken in the video. I understand that Hebrew was not necessarily the first language of the speaker in the video, I was just pointing it out.
THANK YOU FOR FINALLY MAKING THIS VIDEO. I'm a Modern Hebrew speaker and I'm alsp studying deaply the Classical Hebrew language of the Tanakh because I write poetry and Hebrew poetry uses old language. Around Pesakh this year, I because interested with Classical Jewish Aramaic and decided also to study a bit, I was so surprized to see all the similarities and also "lost cognates". For example, the root "to see" in Aramaic is ח.ז.ה whereas it's ר.א.ה in Hebrew, but in Hebrew, we still have the word חזון "vision, ambition" which is related to the old root before it was lost in Hebrew. I love seeing all of these similarities and it makes me so happy, especially as today there aren't any living languages that are mutually intelligible with Hebrew.
This is my favorite episode in a long time.
Super fascinating! Thank you for sharing :)
I studied both languages years ago. Thanks for this helpful review.
Thank you, Paul, for this great video! I speak Hebrew and find written (biblical) Aramaic understandable. I've never heard modern spoken Aramaic. Let me again admire your work.
I can read both Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Hebrew came first for me when I was younger. I lived in Israel for several years as a young guy and spoke the modern form everyday, but was educated in the classical form. I’ve been doing the ‘Daf Yomi’ program, where you read one or two folios of the entire Talmud over the course of seven years. In its written form, Aramaic is very understandable with little (but occasional) confusion.
I really only understand Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic in their written forms. They say that Yemenite Hebrew is very close to classical in pronunciation and preserving the nuances and distinctions between consonants and vowel markers. But listening to a traditional Yemenite speaker is very difficult to understand for me, even though I love the sound of it. Same with modern Aramaic and Turoyo; when it is spoken, I can’t understand most of it.
Not really, the Yemenite pronunciation of Qof is Gof as in Yemenite Arabic. The Iraqi pronunciation even lacks Begadkefat lenition as in Biblical Hebrew. Just because they sound Arabic doesn’t mean they are authentic Hebrew. Arabic doesn’t have this voiced bilabial fricative (β) and only pronounced (b) for Beit whether it is preceded by a vowel or not.
@@RodrigoPerez-zu7qb why would you need to insist on one “authentic” Hebrew? The various standards of Hebrew pronunciation were developed at different times in different communities, nothing inherently makes one more “authentic” than another.
Paul, your videos on languages are truly great and I really admire your dedication and commitment towards learning languages and explaining them linguistically. I took Biblical Hebrew a couple of years ago and you inspire me to get back to learning Hebrew. I find it very fascinating and interesting. Your videos on languages is one of the best I’ve seen and listened to over time. Thank you for being so informative and explaining the languages.
Very intersting, as Syrian Arab myself, I noticed that some of the Hewbrew/Arameiac related words matches our offcial and spoken arabic, for example the word "gold" in offical arabic is similar to the hebrow word, but the same word in Arameian is similar to the spoken arabic in Syria.... intersting indeed
Syrians used to be Aramaic speakers... the language came from your country and in Halab/Aleppo, it is still spoken.
Because our dialect is derived from the Aramaic, that's why it seems very similar
Paul,
My name is Ramon and I live in Canada. I like these videos simply because I like languages, though not to that extent to become a scholar, a linguistic or a CZcamsr. My native language is Neo-Aramaic (aka Assyrian or Syriac). I can speak it much better than reading/writing it. On the other hand, I am ‘almost fluent’ in Arabic. A few years ago, I took a few classes of Modern Hebrew (just for fun) and found it to be a pleasant language. Yes, modern Hebrew and my native language are similar but, as you mentioned, they are not mutually intelligible. Regarding, the alphabet, just like Hebrew, my language has 22 letters starting with ‘Alap’ and ending with ‘Taw’ (in Hebrew, Aleph and Tav). While learning Hebrew, my knowledge of Neo-Aramaic and Arabic, was very helpful to learn quickly. My classmates thought I was super-smart and since I liked that, I did not reveal why I was learning so quickly.
Shlama ahona
Raba Pshena@@barnosho1611.
Shlomo ahunone
@@IronmanX bshayno ahuno
@@WesternArmenian99 where do you live
Thank you ! Without the background music it is MUCH BETTER to understand and pay attention to your presentation and lessons to us ! Very much appreciated.
I’ve been fading the music out before the language breakdown sections for several years. It only plays during the intro and background information parts.
@@Langfocus Thank you very much! Cheers.
Always interesting brother, thank you
Nice vid, Paul. I hope someday you can discuss Galilean Aramaic and Samaritan Aramaic of the first century. 👍 Learning Galilean Aramaic must be challenging.
As someone learning Quranic Arabic, it was very cool to see how similar all the languages were. With the Jeremiah verse I could get almost the whole thing (a couple words I didn’t know in Arabic/couldn’t place) just thinking from arabic ^-^
Have you try reading Quran in Aramaic?
No, that would be interesting ^-^
@@maryelizabeth6286 I saw in a video, somebody is definitely trying because he's fluent in Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew. He uses aramic dots to read quran. It became clear including alif lam mim etc. He said he's gonna make a book about it.
Very interesting.
@@majeromajero7330 Oh very interesting! I'll have to look that up ^-^
@@majeromajero7330That's 100% wrong. The Quran was written in Old Higazi Arabic.
Thanks for the video, Paul!
I'm struggling to learn a second language and I'm blown away by your videos. I don't know how you do it, but I love to see it. Cheers!
I don’t know how I do it either. But it entails an 8 year-long migraine. 😄 I’m laughing but it’s true.
The truth is that I don’t have skills in most of the languages I talk about. I just sort of investigate them and describe what I learn about them (as an amateur linguist, you could say). In the case of this video, I do have some speaking skills in Modern Hebrew, and reading skills in BH and BA. But my videos mostly draw on my ability to analyze and condense information than my actual language skills.
@@Langfocus That's very insightful, but even if you're doing this kind of research in a short time like a couple months it's still very very impressive.
Cool!
I've actually studied both. Given the limited corpus of Biblical Aramaic, I'm not sure you can understand it unless you learn Biblical Hebrew (or perhaps another dialect of Aramaic) first.
Yes, I learned to read it after learning to read Biblical Hebrew. A lot of the words are related to Hebrew words, and there simply aren't that many words in the small Aramaic parts of the Bible, so I only had to learn a small number of new words, and some differences in grammar, etc.
@@Langfocus That's such a melodious pronunciation of the two languages :)
Did you happen to have an Israeli teacher? I learned it in the Netherlands and my pronunciation is kinda flat and ugly and with much less distinction between the qamets and the patach for example.
My Biblical Hebrew teacher in university wasn't Israeli, but I studied Modern Hebrew at the same time and have spent a lot more time speaking Modern Hebrew than reading Biblical Hebrew out loud. So for this video I had to change my Modern Hebrew pronunciation and try to use all the Biblical phonemes.
I remember taking a look at a table of the different forms of "house" (i.e. his house, my house, our house etc) in neo-aramaic and the words sounded remarkably like their arabic equivalents
I must thank you for this. I really wanted a video on ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. Hopefully you'll make a video on Yiddish too.
The way they modify the pronunciation of the characters using those dots is really cool.
That fact that I understood around 30% of the words in this video as an Arabic speaker is kinda impressive in my opinion...
I think BA is phonetically more similar to Arabic than BH and that could be because of the Canaanite shift mentioned in the video
The (supposed) shift mentioned was a vowel shift, so I don't see the connection. Tradition holds that there were seven Hebrew letters that had 2 pronunciations each: בגדכפרת, indicated with a דגש קל. As opposed to Israeli pronunciation, six of those can be found with different pronunciations among the various traditional pronunciations of Jewish communities the world over (though very few communities make a distinction with all six, and it's not always the same distinction between communities). The ר was last reported with 2 different pronunciations many, many centuries ago in Tiberius (טבריה) and the second pronunciation has not been know since.
I just realized what you meant by bh and ba. I misunderstood, and my reply was not relevant.
Awesome video!
Could you talk about New Testment's greek?
Great video, as someone who learned both langauges, and struggled alot more with biblical aramaic, this really helps to break things down.
Regarding the DNA test - don't sweat the 1%. My understanding/experience is that those disappear as more reference tests get added into the database. Mine had a random 1% Iberian peninsula amongst the massively otherwise British genepool. It later disappeared. Either through better scans, corrected data, or just a larger reference pool to compare from.
I see. It's interesting that the results become more precise as the database grows.
@@Langfocus Well, I'm absolutely not an expert on the topic, so don't put too much weight on what I say. It's possible that you do actually have an Arabic ancestor, but I'd probably just attribute it to the +/- error range, or a random coincidental match with someone in the reference group for that ethnicity, depending on how the company does their breakdowns.
I knew someone whose test came out 8% Jewish which increased to 9% and then 11% over time so seems like it's more art than science.
@@JohnSmith-eu2dt I'd say you're not far wrong. After all, there isn't a list somewhere that says "this gene is English, this gene is French, this gene is Welsh, this gene is Russian, etc." I'm sure they use statistical analysis of genetic profiles of people who seem to be descended from people who were born in that region for generations. And that assumes those ancestries are correct and that no secret bedroom shenanigans happened. ;)
These DNA tests are basically scams. Don't waste your money.
As an Assyrian and Neo-Aramaic native speaker I find the Biblical Aramaic is very similar to Neo-Aramaic as well as Biblical Hebrew
You're the best! Please do more videos about Semitic languages and their relationships to each other.
Thanks for the great and informative video!
Thank you Paul, excellent as always!
Thank you as always, Inez! :)
@@Langfocus I wrote this while visiting Lithuania. I’m on my way to Latvia.
Hi, love your videos.
Native Hebrew speaker, so regarding your end of the video question I can't understand any Aramaic at all unless I take a good while staring at it written and trying to decipher it.
My grandma knew Aramaic, though I never asked her how she came to know it. She wasn't religious or anything.
Was your grandmother from Iraq or Syria?
Well, I asked my mom (her daughter), turns out she didn't speak it fluently, she studied it and Latin during her history degree. She had Polish ancestry but was born in a refugee camp in Marseille, and moved to Israel aged 9.
I forgot to answer your question at the end.
I would say both languages, along with Ugaritic (which you did not include here), are extremely similar. Your explanation of consonantal variation and the Canaanite vowel shift was spot on, as well as the particles of existence and non-existence!
I’ve never actually tried to learn any Ugaritic, but I remember my BH professor in university laughing about how in some Ugaritic writings Baal is the good god and YHWH is the bad one.
@Langfocus if you know BH and BA, Ugaritic isn't difficult. Dr. Michael Williams and Huehnegard's books on Ugaritic are fantastic. Yeah, it's funny how Baal is the good god in the Ugaritic/Canaanite pantheon haha. The Baal Cycle is a great example
@@Langfocus YHWH doesn't exist in Ugaritic texts, but El does.
OK Paul this was _very_ fast and made me realise I will have to review earlier videos on Hebrew and other Semitic languages before I'm really ready for this one
This was a very good summary! Thanks!
Wow most of those words you used are also similar to Arabic. Rosh=Ras, Yod=Yad, Ayn=Ayn, Aktob=Katab, Eloah=Ilaah, etc.
Also,
Šilṭoon / Šaalṭaan = Sulṭaan
yes! some are similar in Hindi, too, presumably bc they made their way into that language via Arabic. i actually paused the video on ektab bc i got distracted, and when i came back i was like, oh, i wonder if that means something about books or writing, bc "kitab" means "book" in Hindi.
arD=ereS, qiiZ=qayiS
aktub is actually cognate with ekhtov
and enosh/anash couldve turned into ins (إنس)
As someone currently learning hebrew, it's very fascinating to see the influence that aramaic had on modern hebrew, and to find parallels between the two. My first hebrew teacher studied the history of the hebrew language in university, so she knew aramaic and arabic, in addition to hebrew, and whenever she brought up the similarities between them, or features in hebrew that came from aramaic, those were the most interesting moments in class
Fascinating. Great job!
There is considerable evidence of scholarship in this video. Thanks for working so hard.
Such videos about Semitic languages are the best. It would be great if you could make more similar videos in the future. Especially about Aramaic.
he'll need both a) the appropriate resources to conduct the research, alongside b) native speakers of these languages, because they know more about their languages. Because of this, other ideas like modern Aramaic, or comparing North and South semitic (like Hebrew or Arabic to Amharic), or Tigre or Tigrinya
@@seid3366The problem is that modern Aramaic speakers are about as violent with their neighbors as the Tigrinya speakers and the Amharas are with each other. It was a trip to see Syrians marching in protest before they started getting killed for it who had protest signs written in Estrangela, the Syriac script Paul doesn't mention but is the source of Hebrew vowel points.
I'm bilingual,i grew up speaking Hebrew and Spanish, as i see it, the mutual understanding of Hebrew and Aramaic is like Spanish and Portuguese., you can understand it if you talk slowly and repeat some words,and read it slowly.
אתה יהודי ספרדי? גם אתה מדבר לאדינו או רק ספרדית?
@@AvrahamYairStern הורים מארגנטינה,ואני מבין לאדינו,זה ספרדית כמעט 100 אחוז
אני לא ספרדית וגם לא הבן זוג שלי (הוא לא יהודי) אבל ההורם שלו מאל סלודור אז הוא מדבר ספרדית, וגם הוא יכול להבין לאדינו. כשאנחנו ראינו את הסידרה המלכת היופי של ירושליים, הוא הבון כמעט כל הדיאלוג לאדינו@@AvrahamYairStern
@@danielslubski1028 אה טוב לדעת. למדתי ספרדית כשהייתי צעיר יותר ויכולתי להבין גם לאדינו, אבל עכשיו אני נאבק עם ספרדית ולאדינו
Yes, spanish and portuguese are 80-90% mutually inteligible, and this is the same number for hebrew and aramaic.
Thank you very much, man, for these videos. I love learning about languages and their origins/developments because it is important/necessary to understand cultures and philosophical ideas. I speak Arabic (my native language) which took a lot from both of these languages (Aramaic and Hebrew) and I understand much of neo/modern-Aramiac. So, I can relate to this video significantly. You are super-genius and God granted you extraordinary talents, plus you definitely worked hard to develop/refine them to comprehend and work through/with all these different languages!!!! Unbelievable. God bless you, sir, and keep up the fabulous work you're doing
how good is our friend's paul pronouciation! and thank you very much because i am reading since few years the old testament in the tiberian
pronouciation every day and i notice thanks to you some errors in how i pronouce some vowells ( the qamass for exemple) so thank you again
and long happy life to you and to langfocus!
Hi. You can find some Aramaic in the book of Genesis. Especially during the interaction between Jacob and his uncle Lavan.
According to Jewish tradition, Abraham's family came from Aram Naharaim - from beyond the river Perath, which is why he was called Hebrew - Ivri. He who came from the other side.
Hi, I'm a Hebrew speaker from Israel and I have read the Bible and Onkelos translation to Aramaic, so I can state that after a few pages of Aramaic, you can read it easily like Hebrew.
What's a Isreal? What's a Hebrew? What Hebrew or Isreal existed before the Ashkenazis took their German showers
@@user-fp2fl9ul2e
You probably aren't interested in learning and only want to insult. But if you want to research more on the topic of the Hebrew language - there are many sources you can read. For starters, you should know that Modern Hebrew was revived in the 19th century, long before the Holocaust.
Canaan: 8000BCE
12 tribes of Israel: 1211BCE-1047BCE
United kingdom of Israel: 1020BCE-930BCE
Northern kingdom of Israel (samaria) 930BCE-720BCE
Southern kingdom of Judah: 930BCE-586BCE
Yehud medinata (province of judah under achameid occupation): 539BCE-332BCE
Judah during the Hellenistic period: 323BCE-167BCE
Maccabean revolts: 167BCE-160BCE
Maccabean judah: 160BCE-140BCE
Hasmonean dynasty: 140BCE-37BCE
Herodian kingdom: 37BCE-100CE
Judean provisional government: 66CE-70CE
Bar Kokhba revolt leading to the bar kokhba jewish state: 132CE-135CE
State of Israel: 1948-Present@@user-fp2fl9ul2e
It was a great explication, specially by the fact that i was interested about the cultures of the Levante so many years, and I see the similarities between those ones, both being different by history, religion, time, etc.
It was a good video.
This video reminds me your first videos I saw ages ago. It still gives me laugh your short and long answers on how similar are Arabic and Hebrew. 🤣
Glad to see the channel grew so well.
As for Hebrew speaker Aramaic looks for me like some archaic/poetic version of Hebrew (if i was not familiar with history).
I speak a tiny bit of Arabic after 3 semesters in college and it’s interesting how the Aramaic in this video seems like a language somewhere on the Semitic continuum between Hebrew and Arabic. Many of the shared Semitic roots I recognize in Hebrew are easier to see in Aramaic.
Thank you, Paul, for making this wonderful Semitic comparison video! I've been watching Langfocus since June 2016. I learned a lot from your videos and they continue to inspire me!
Thanks! I'm happy to have you as a long time viewer! :)
This was such an awesome video. I speak a bit of modern hebrew and notice that I can understand the written Aramaic if I try hard. I notice that you pronounce the biblical hebrew much different from modern Hebrew. Can you maybe one day make a video about the difference between biblical and modern hebrew. It would be very interesting to learn about the grammatical differences and sound shifts over the years. Thank you for all your videos!
thank you very much for your video! So informative! I know biblical and modern hebrew and the times I tried reading the Book of daniel, it was jarringly difficult. Your video is an excellent summary of the main grammatical differences =D
Something I will bring up for those curious is that later Aramaic dialects have greatly diverged from Imperial Aramaic since Aramaic continued to be a living language to diverse populations. The Talmud for example, mentioned in this video, is written in a dialect of Aramaic far more divergent from Hebrew than Imperial Aramaic. Thus the Talmud and later neo-Aramaic dialects (which are what are still spoken today) are significantly unintelligible to speakers of Modern or Biblical Hebrew, unlike Imperial Aramaic which as we've seen in this video is quite similar.
Being Jewish myself but having a mediocre knowledge of biblical and mishnaic Hebrew, and Jewish Aramaic, I've always enjoyed when I read certain prayers (the kaddish, of course) and seeing similarities between Hebrew and Aramaic - shamayim vs. shamaya, for example. Non-Jewish Aramaic like that spoken by Assyrians and Arameans is much harder for me to parse, of course, but it's still fun to compare and contrast. Thanks for this interesting video!
this was such an interesting video!!
Great content!
Im not Arabic speaker but know many Arabic words because of religious study and i can understand many of the words you mentioned in the video, so interesting
i love your videos!
Interesting how this got recommended to me. Great video 👍🏾