Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

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neilgodfrey
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by neilgodfrey »

mlinssen wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:50 am Whatever can be found in Judaism and the Tanakh can hardly be related to the scribblings of the NT that, apart from anything else, establish far beyond any reasonable doubt that its authors were unfamiliar with Hebrew, Judaic customs, Judean geography, and the meaning and application of Tanakh material in the broadest sense of the word.
Well, yes, I suppose by repeating an argument you strengthen it against any possibility of being questioned from some angle you are unfamiliar with and wish to avoid learning about.

mlinssen wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:50 amBesides that, they were writing for a non-Hebrew audience (I'll give Paul a break there), in Greek infested with Latin loanwords, explicitly explaining and translating Hebrew words and habits
You will be very pleased to hear that I have no argument that the Greek language NT works were written for non-Hebrew audiences; yes, even in Greek, and yes, that they include Latin loanwords (hardly "infested" though, but that's a subjective judgment) and even include explanations of Judean customs and Aramaic terms. If they include explanations of Hebrew words, too, then I would not be at all surprised. None of that is a point of contention between us.

(Suggestion: ask questions, read more, to find out what the argument is that you think you are disagreeing with before trying to debunk it.)
mlinssen wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:50 am But you just use the term OT, as if that exists. And then you jump to the term biblical, as if you want to drag it even closer to Christianity, while you mention Proverbs as an example, which is a perfectly Judaic text in a perfectly Judaic book: the Tanakh, sometimes erroneously called OT by people who want to make their point by covert induction. The Bible doesn't exist in biblical academic, only in lay circles.
Oh, I see where we disagree. Yes, there are times when it is quite proper to make clear distinctions among those terms but, hey, there is also a common lay language that we can even use among scholars. They will usually explain the terms they use in their introductions. But if you think I use common lay terms sometimes in order to insidiously introduce deceiving ideologies then I fear you will perhaps also fall into the perfect description of a conspiracy theorist, seeing the world in black and white, seeing other people as occupying either the good or evil camps.

mlinssen wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:50 am Then you link rabbinic writings to an era when Christianity began to form and emerge as a distinct movement in order to avoid naming late 2nd / early 3rd CE, and you even further contaminate that by then referring to that as this same period of Judaism, happily abusing yet another occasion to link Judaism to Christianity
I was actually thinking of the scholarship (including Jewish scholars) who make that link, or see that period as a point of origin from which Christianity emerged on the one hand and the rabbinic literature we have today on the other -- even though the latter dates from much later. Jewish scholars are among those who argue that some of what is found in that literature does very likely go back to "the time when Christianity began to emerge as a distinct movement".
mlinssen wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 10:50 am You, sir, are a demagogue. And a particularly bad one at that
Well, I've never been called a demagogue before. And I don't really understand how what you have said above fits the meaning of "demagogue" -- maybe that's why you say I'm a "bad" demagogue. But then you got rather upset with me when I tried to point out the difference between transcription and translation, and how holding a flame to one's eye actually blocks one's vision. But I did so, yes, matter of factly, but without insult, I hope, or any personal attack.

Why not drop the personal attacks and engage with my comments as if I'm a normal person who disagrees with you and has strange ideas you've never heard of before and go from there -- with an openness to learning more about how others think and a willingness to accept a point that shows we are wrong (I've had to apologize or recant a few times) and a humility in the way we present our own ideas so that we don't give the impression that we are some sort of closed-minded dogmatists. (I came here approaching you that way but unfortunately found my approach was not reciprocated.)

Shalom. Peace. But if you really are into conspiracy theory type thinking then I suspect that appeal will fall on deaf -- even suspicious -- ears.
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mlinssen
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by mlinssen »

neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 2:46 pm Why not drop the personal attacks and engage with my comments as if I'm a normal person who disagrees with you and has strange ideas you've never heard of before and go from there -- with an openness to learning more about how others think and a willingness to accept a point that shows we are wrong (I've had to apologize or recant a few times) and a humility in the way we present our own ideas so that we don't give the impression that we are some sort of closed-minded dogmatists. (I came here approaching you that way but unfortunately found my approach was not reciprocated.)

Shalom. Peace. But if you really are into conspiracy theory type thinking then I suspect that appeal will fall on deaf -- even suspicious -- ears.
Dear Neil, I laid out in great detail why and where your comments are wrong, and at the very end I used one single word to describe what I thought your intentions were when you wrote those comments

And what do you do? You deflect, polarise, and drag another OP in while alleging a particular state of mine regarding that OP. You focus on the one word and pull all of it into an emotional bitch fight in stead of just addressing, in an adult and rational fashion, the arguments that I brought in

It would seem that you are taking a break from your blog. Let me suggest that you also take a break from this forum, which you'll undoubtedly loudly protest.
Your general attitude leaves everything to be considered, and you are a pot calling the kettle black. I'll quote you, and then refer to our very first encounter
a humility in the way we present our own ideas so that we don't give the impression that we are some sort of closed-minded dogmatists. (I came here approaching you that way
viewtopic.php?p=115871#p115871

I'll quote it for you as well, as it is such a splendid demonstration of your humility, open-mindedness, and oh absence of dogmatic thinking and acting - notice the emphasised part in particular:
neilgodfrey wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 6:42 pm
mlinssen wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 4:06 pm
neilgodfrey wrote: Sun Dec 20, 2020 2:54 pm What the gospels did establish was that -- when all were read literally -- a Jesus figure of some form or nature did wander around Palestine and got crucified. The Jesus of the gospels entered history but left it open for his literal minded readers to understand him, his composition, his provenance, any way one wanted.
Emphasis mine

Perhaps then, this little that was sure, was the entire message, or dare I say, goal?

Impale is the verb of my choice by the way, the whole cross thing didn't either develop until centuries after
I don't know where you are coming from with these questions so you'll have to explain a bit more. Are you suggesting that there were centuries between the first message of Christianity and the concept of a Christ crucified? Does anything change whether Christ was crucified on a crucifix or impaled on a stake?
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by neilgodfrey »

mlinssen wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:30 am It would seem that you are taking a break from your blog. Let me suggest that you also take a break from this forum, which you'll undoubtedly loudly protest.
Your general attitude leaves everything to be considered, and you are a pot calling the kettle black. I'll quote you, and then refer to our very first encounter
That's the second time you've in effect asked me to leave this forum. Do you really want to expel and silence views that even only very occasionally (no more than twice, iirc) attempt to point out what another sees as a flaw in your argument?

My attitude? You seem to read a lot of mind-reading into the words of mine that you quoted.

I'm sorry you have responded the way you have. After our first disagreement I ignored all your efforts to draw me into another exchange and your response here -- in a thread in which I simply asked about Greek loanwords you finally brought me to respond to you -- reminds me of why I thought it a good idea to ignore you entirely. I do not seek your removal from the forum, however. You can ignore me as I intend to do a better job of ignoring you in future.

(Is all this because I did not laugh at the joke about holding a lamp to one's ear instead of one's eye and then pointed out the difference between a transcription and a translation?)

P.S. - added later...

You remind me of cult leaders who impute bad attitudes into those who question their teachings.
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mlinssen
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by mlinssen »

neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 3:59 am
mlinssen wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 1:30 am It would seem that you are taking a break from your blog. Let me suggest that you also take a break from this forum, which you'll undoubtedly loudly protest.
Your general attitude leaves everything to be considered, and you are a pot calling the kettle black. I'll quote you, and then refer to our very first encounter
That's the second time you've in effect asked me to leave this forum. Do you really want to expel and silence views that even only very occasionally (no more than twice, iirc) attempt to point out what another sees as a flaw in your argument?

My attitude? You seem to read a lot of mind-reading into the words of mine that you quoted.

I'm sorry you have responded the way you have. After our first disagreement I ignored all your efforts to draw me into another exchange and your response here -- in a thread in which I simply asked about Greek loanwords you finally brought me to respond to you -- reminds me of why I thought it a good idea to ignore you entirely. I do not seek your removal from the forum, however. You can ignore me as I intend to do a better job of ignoring you in future.

(Is all this because I did not laugh at the joke about holding a lamp to one's ear instead of one's eye and then pointed out the difference between a transcription and a translation?)

P.S. - added later...

You remind me of cult leaders who impute bad attitudes into those who question their teachings.
And once more, Neil, as usual, you deflect.
You avoid the arguments, you even avoid the entire topic

You take the conversation onto your own terrain and into your own direction, just so you can agree with yourself. Let me juxtapose the following two quotes of you, just to you can (hopefully) see how ambivalent you are, failing to enact your own words
neilgodfrey wrote: Wed Jul 28, 2021 2:46 pm a humility in the way we present our own ideas so that we don't give the impression that we are some sort of closed-minded dogmatists. (I came here approaching you that way but unfortunately found my approach was not reciprocated.)

Shalom. Peace
Versus
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 3:59 am After our first disagreement I ignored all your efforts to draw me into another exchange
while you say in the same post
neilgodfrey wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 3:59 am (Is all this because I did not laugh at the joke about holding a lamp to one's ear instead of one's eye and then pointed out the difference between a transcription and a translation?)
I can handle immature behaviour Neil, most of the time that is even fun. I did find some funny pictures among the many that you posted to my peculiar case of logion 33, and it's fine to be childish every now and then.
I can also handle evasive manoeuvres in a conversation, that's part of the game, consciously or unconsciously everyone does that, and rarely does a reply address all the points in the post preceding it.
I can handle a firm conversation too; if everyone would just go belly up and agree, there wouldn't be any forums at all.
I can even handle people saying one thing and then acting out something quite different from it. I will endure people who lecture others on how to behave, only to portray quite different behaviour themselves. And I will condone, one time only, outright misportraying of events like you did with our first encounter, which I quoted above in order to refresh your apparently awfully flawed memory

Yet I expect a certain degree of maturity, of playing by the rules. When you get caught ducking the ball, you say "Ah you got me, good for you" and then you play along for a while - that's what grown ups do

But if you repeatedly behave like a stubborn childish troll, don't be surprised to get treated like one
mbuckley3
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by mbuckley3 »

For the purpose of orientation : some supplements to, and comments on, Neil's bibliography.


{1} As Krauss and Jastrow are still the starting points, it's still useful to look at pre-DSS scholarship. The first two chapters of Morton Smith's 'Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels' (1951) contain an incisive survey.
Ch. 1, on loanwords, discusses the problem of identifying them. Jastrow in his preface is explicitly programmatic in his attempt (vs Krauss) to minimise the number, by finding a semitic etymology (however strained or unattested) wherever possible. As a test case, Smith uses an article by Paul Fiebig on Tractate Shabbat, a text c.55% the length of GMk. Fiebig's list contains 65 words from Greek and Latin occurring in all 89 times. Jastrow's method yields 38 words occurring in all 46 times.
Per contra, GMk contains 30 semitic words occurring 101 times. "[According to Fiebig] it will be clear that the vocabulary of Shabbat shows a Greco-Latin influence far stronger than the semitic influence shown by the vocabulary of Mk. And even if one accept the reckoning of Jastrow...the frequency of occurrence would be almost the same as in Mk, and the number of words occurring would be twice as great as in Mk - in proportion, of course, to the size of the works."


{2} Smith's ch.2, on idioms, examines the topic of reverse translation (into Aramaic, as was then the vogue, but the same principles would apply to Hebrew). On Burney's 'The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel' (1922) he wrote :
"Thus he succeeded in showing that Jn was written in a style more similar to Aramaic than that of the other gospels, but in order to prove that Jn was translated from the Aramaic it is necessary to show something more : ..not only that typically Aramaic expressions are found in Jn, and not only that they are found in Jn more often than in the other gospels, but also that they are found in Jn with about the same frequency as that with which they are found in Aramaic works. The proof of translation must be built not on the difference between Jn and the other gospels, but on the parallelism between Jn and Aramaic works, and specifically on the parallelism to be found in the frequency of parallels...Here research is brought up short by the fact that there are no Aramaic works from the period of the gospels (except, perhaps, for Megillat Taanit)." (Whether even now our evidence of C1/C2 Aramaic is 'sufficient' is a moot point).
Smith reckons that it was due to this inability to prove translation through frequency that attention turned to alleged 'errors of translation', where what is difficult in Greek is rendered comprehensible in a semitic conjecture. Torrey, who admitted that 9/10 'errors' were nothing of the sort, provides Smith with several 'capital examples' of mistranslation where Smith demonstrates that they are, possibly, likewise nothing of the sort.


{3} Segal's 'A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew' is a compact and useful book. If you need to check that an alleged 'Mishnaic idiom' is such, it is so simple to use. But it is important to understand its programmatic mission, to prove, through its structure and vocabulary, that Mishnaic Hebrew was not an artificial language (like, say, Vatican Latin), but a common written and spoken vernacular in the C1/C2.. This is now generally accepted by semitists, if not by NT scholars, who tend to minimise its extent. The DSS and non-DSS finds confirm that Hebrew was being written. Of the 'Essene' texts, though only the Copper Scroll and 4QMMT have MH elements, apparently,this in turn is seen to corroborate Segal's vernacular stress : formal works would still be written in (a pastiche of) 'biblical' Hebrew....Of other documents, J.T. Milik ('Discoveries in the Judaean Desert ii', 1961) could enthuse : "The thesis of scholars like Segal, ben-Jehuda and Klausner, according to whom Mishnaic Hebrew was a language spoken by the population of Judaea during the Persian and Greco-Roman periods, is no longer a hypothesis; it is an established fact. Several legal documents from Murabbaat are in Mishnaic Hebrew; but they are less numerous than those in Aramaic. But Mishnaic Hebrew is the sole [sic] language of correspondence. "
Smith saw the implications of Segal's work : "It is also possible that passages in the gospels describing these discussions [with the Pharisees] go back to documents originally written in Hebrew. Considerable material for the support of these opinions will be found in M. Segal, 'A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew'..."
Independently, Harris Birkeland in 'The Language of Jesus' (1954) drew on Segal to argue (in a pamphlet of just 40 pages) for the gospels being translations from Hebrew. His 'notorious' assertion that Jesus' Aramaic words 'prove' the rest of text was in Hebrew derives in part from Segal's belief that the Mishnah is faithful to the language of the speaker, (Aramaic narrative : Hebrew speech, Hebrew narrative : Aramaic speech). James Barr, a formidable semitist whose lectures I attended, rated Birkeland as a scholar and regretted that his better arguments were not engaged with. (Whatever they were : the pamphlet seems virtually unobtainable ).
However, Segal/Birkeland is continued in the accessible (jstor) 'Hebrew as the Spoken and Written Language in the Last Days of the Second Temple' (1960), by J.M. Grintz. Aside from adducing evidence for Birkeland's notion that Josephus' 'Aramaic' BJ was in fact written in Hebrew, Grintz argues that GMatt is a translation from Mishnaic Hebrew, discussing a series of words and phrases that are particular to MH, but unknown to Aramaic. (Caveat : Targumic Aramaic is seemingly meant.)


{4} Highly recommended is Saul Lieberrman's 'Greek in Jewish Palestine' (1942), a series of case-studies of loanwords explicating rabbinic texts; (for a taste of his methods, see the essay 'Ten Words' in his 'Texts and Studies' (1974); both volumes available at Internet Archive, GJP under 'Liberman').
Lieberman is the anti-Jastrow, happily rummaging through manuscript variants to find as much transliterated Greek as possible. Finding a single other attestation for a word does not faze him, nor ((like Jastrow, but for Greek !) does having to invent a formally correct but unattested word
('ενθήκωσις).
He is a superior philologist. Κράτησις, descrbed as a gentile festival in the Mishnah,, confuses Krauss, who lists references which Jastrow correctly translates, by context, as 'royal prohibition'. Lieberman supplies the literary confirmation for this; but also, by brilliant cross-referencing, explicates the Mishnah meaning as 'The Capture', an Alexandrian festival celebrating the taking of the city by Octavian.
Above all, Lieberman is alive to the (in)frequency of a 'loanword', and the context of its usage.
Thus :
1 ) there are genuine loanwords for common items (including, in the Palestinian Talmud,
ληστής rather than 'gannav', which is rather grim)
2) a single Greek word is used for its specificity, e.g. regarding a title or a legal term in
gentile courts
3) a single Greek word can be referencing a Greek phrase, whether proverbial or legal
4) Lieberman offers a fair sampling of entire Greek sentences being quoted
(2)(3) & (4) would not qualify as 'loanwords' per se (which complicates any statistical analysis of texts, which Lieberman does not attempt to do).

As he puts it in the introduction to his 'Hellenism in Jewish Palestine' (1951) :
"It is pertinent to inquire why the Rabbis employed the particular Greek word when an adequate Hebrew or Aramaic term was seemingly available. 'Almost every foreign word and phrase have their raison d'etre in rabbinic literature. We shall try to demonstrate that all Greek phrases in rabbinic literature are quotations' [quoting GJP]. If a common Greek word is employed by the Rabbis only very rarely, whereas they generally use its Aramaic [or Hebrew] equivalent, some reason must lie behind the rabbinic choice of a Greek term in a particular case."
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by neilgodfrey »

mbuckley3 wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 3:29 pm For the purpose of orientation : some supplements to, and comments on, Neil's bibliography.
Thank you so very much, mbuckley3!
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Re: Greek Loanwords in Mishnaic Hebrew

Post by StephenGoranson »

mbuckley3 wrote, in part:
"...Harris Birkeland in 'The Language of Jesus' (1954) drew on Segal to argue (in a pamphlet of just 40 pages) for the gospels being translations from Hebrew. His 'notorious' assertion that Jesus' Aramaic words 'prove' the rest of text was in Hebrew derives in part from Segal's belief that the Mishnah is faithful to the language of the speaker, (Aramaic narrative : Hebrew speech, Hebrew narrative : Aramaic speech). James Barr, a formidable semitist whose lectures I attended, rated Birkeland as a scholar and regretted that his better arguments were not engaged with. (Whatever they were : the pamphlet seems virtually unobtainable )."
***

WorldCat lists 90-some participating libraries with copies of the booklet or offprint (WC numbers may sometimes include duplicate listings).

But, besides buying a used copy, it may be useful to check if your library has the original proceedings publication in
Series: Avhandlinger utg. av det Norske videnskapsakademi i Oslo. II. Hist.-filos. klasse, 1954,; no. 1; Variation: Avhandlinger (Norske videnskaps-akademi i Oslo. II--Hist.-filos. klasse) ;; 1954, no. 1.

Libraries do not always catalog titles within series. For example, Duke U. library does not have the offprint version but it does hold the original series volume.
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