Jesus Primarily Spoke Aramaic

Jesus is believed to have primarily spoken a Galilean accented dialect of Aramaic since Aramaic was the most commonly spoken language of Judea in the first century AD. He also seems to have understood some Greek since he talked with Romans who would have primarily spoken that language.  Also, it was a point of pride and honor for a Jewish man to stand up in the synagogue and read from the Hebrew scriptures,

Biblical Hebrew,and most modern representations of the language, has an abjad writing system rather than an alphabet as in English. Abjabs are writing systems in which there are only consonants with no written vowels. The word is a technical term named for the fist four letters of the Arabic abjad in their original order of sequence: alif, ba, jem, dal. The first four letters in the Hebrew abjad retain the original Semitic sequence: aleph, bet, gimel, dalet.

The first widely used abjad was ancient Phoenician. It was much easier to learn and to write than the Egyptian hieroglyphics (a pictographic writing system). The Phoenician sea merchants quickly adopted the writing system for their business records.

The modern "alphabets" of Greek, English, Spanish, Russian, and other similar languages represent both consonantal and vowel sounds using their glyphs (aka letters). Each glyph represents a different sound.

The English word "alphabet"is derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.

Nikkudot

The nikkudot (plural of nikkud) are vowel marks which the Masoretes placed into the Hebrew text of the Bible.  Before that time, the Hebrew text consisted entirely of consonants.  This occasionally created confusion between similar words and the Masoretes were attempting to alleviate the problem.

Modern Hebrew has returned to using only consonants in the written form of the language.  In the spoken form, vowel sounds occur between consonants, with very rare exceptions.

Below is “bereshith,” the first word of Genesis, written with and without its accompanying nikkudot.

בראשית    בְּרֵאשִׁית

The New and Old Testaments

The New Testament was originally written in all upper case letters with no spaces between consecutive words.  The Old Testament was originally written in all upper case letters with no spaces between consecutive words and with no vowels.  Neither language used any punctuation. The paragraph below will give you an idea of how this would look in modern English.

THENEWTESTAMENTWASORIGINALLYWRITTENINALLUPPERCASELETTERSWITHNOSPACESBETWEENCONSECTIVEWORDSTHELDTSTMNTWSRGNLLWRTTNNLLPPRCSLTTRSWTHNSPCSBTWNCNSCTVWRDSNDNVWELS

Carrying a Numbrella

My three year old granddaughter was playing with an umbrella recently and she asked me, "What is this called?"  She is very smart and inquisitive.

I told her it was an umbrella and she went around saying "Numbrella."

The reason she was saying this is that in English we add an "N" between ending and starting vowels in consecutive words so as to avoid what is called a hiatus.  (What she heard me say was "a numbrella.") To us the hiatus sounds almost like a hiccup.  So, properly, it is "an umbrella" rather than "a umbrella." But, of course, my granddaughter is three and doesn't yet know proper English grammar.

This made me think of the Koine (Common) Greek used in the New Testament.  The same device is used for two vowel sounds occurring consecutively.  I think that this device originated with the ancient Attic-Ionic versions of Greek.  Some of the linguists out there may know if it is found in earlier languages.

(Not all languages use this device.  In Samoan for example, every vowel is fully pronounced even when two vowels occur in succession; the surname Tuiasosopo is pronounced as "too-ee-AH-suh-so-po".  The name of the Hawaiian oo bird is pronounced "oh-oh.")