] the Aramaisms of the book of Judges and of some
J others are derived. It also had always a closer con- junction, both by origin and by intercourse, with
1 Aramaic than with Arabic. But in liter times great political events secured to Aramaic the complete as- cendency; for, on the one hand, after the deportation of the ten tribes, the repeopling their country with
i colonists chiefly of Syrian origin generated a mixed Aramaic and Hebrew dialect (the Samaritan) in cen- tral Palestine ; and on the other the exile of the re- maining two tribes exposed them to a considerable, although generally overrated, Aramaic influence in Babylon, and their restoration, by placing them in contact with the Samaritans, tended still further to dispossess them of their vernacular Hebrew. The subsequent dominion of the Seleucida\ under which the Jews formed a portion of a Syrian kingdom, ap- pears to have completed the series of events by which the Aramaic supplanted the IIebrewr language entirely. The chief characteristics in form and flexion which distinguish the Aramaic from the Hebrew language are the following : As to the consonants, the great di- versity between the forms of the same root as it exists in both languages arises principally from the Aramaic having a tendency to avoid the sibilants. Thus, where T, BJ, anil U are found in Hebrew, Aramaic often uses 1, n, and a ; and even S for '2. Letters of the same
J organ are also frequently interchanged, and generally so that the Aramaic, consistently with its character-
ARAMAEAN LANGUAGE
355
AIIAaLEAN LANGUAGE
istic roughness, prefers the harder sounds. The num- ber of vowel-sounds generally is much smaller ; the verb is reduced to a monosyllable, as are also the seg- olatc forms of nouns. This deprives the language of some distinct forms which are marked in Hebrew, but the number and variety of nominal formations is also in other respects much more limited. The verb pos- sesses no vestige of the conjugation Niphal, but forms all its passives bjr the prefix PX. The third person plural of the perfect has two forms to mark the differ- ence of gender. The use of Vav as " conversive" is unknown. There is an imperative mood in all the passives. All the active conjugations (like Kal in Heb.) possess two participles, one of which has a passive signification. The participle is used with the personal pronoun to form a kind of present tense. The classes of verbs fib and &<?, and other weak forms, are almost indistinguishable. In the noun, again, a word is rendered definite by appending X— to the end (the so- called emphatic state") ; but thereby the distinction between simple feminine and definite masculine is lost in the singular. The plural masculine ends in "|T. The relation of genitive is most frequently ex- pressed by the prefix "I, and that of the object by the preposition t>.
The Aramaean introduced and spoken in Palestine has also been, and is still, often called the Syro-Chal- daic, because it was probably in some degree a mix- ture of both the eastern and western dialects ; or per- haps the distinction between the two had not yet arisen in the age of our Lord and his apostles. So long as the Jewish nation maintained its political indepen- dence in Palestine, Hebrew continued to be the com- mon language of the country, and, so far as we can judge from the remains of it which are still extant, although not entirely pure, it was yet free from any important changes in those elements and forms bj- which it was distinguished from other languages. But at the period when the Assyrian and Chaldsean rulers of Babylon subdued Palestine, every thing assumed another shape. The Jews of Palestine lost with their political independence the independence of their lan- guage also, which the3' had till then asserted. The Babylonish Aramaean dialect supplanted the Hebrew, and became by degrees the prevailing language of the people, until this in its turn was in some measure, though not entirely, supplanted by the Greek. See Hellenist. Josephus (De Mace. 16) and the New Testament (Acts xxvi, 14) call it the Hebrew (>) 'Efipa'ii; SiaXtKrog). Old as this appellation is, however, it has one important defect, namely, that it is too indefinite, and may mislead those who are unacquainted with the subject to confound the ancient Hebrew and the Ara- maean, which took the place of the Hebrew after the Babylonish captivity, and was the current language of Palestine in the time of Christ and the apostles, as is evinced by the occurrence of proper names of places (e. g. Bethesda, Aceldama) and persons (e. g. Boa- nerges, Bar-jona), and even common terms (e. g. Tali- tha cumi, Ephphatha, Sabachthani) in this mixed dia- lect. (See generally the copious treatise of Pfankuche on the history and elements of the Aramaean language, translated, with introductory remarks by the editor, in the Am. Bib. Rejws. April, 1831, p. 317-3G3; comp. Nagel, De lingua Aramaa, Altdorf, 1739; Etheridge, Aramcean Dialects, Lond. 1843).
The following are philological treatises on both
branches of the Aramaean language : Grammars
Sennert, Harm, lingg. Orient. (Viteb. 1553, 4to) ; Amira, Gramm. Syriaca give Chaldaica (Rom. 159G); Buxtorf, Gramm. Chald. Syr. (8vo, Basil. 1015. 1050) ; De Dieu, Gramm. Una. Orient. (4 to, Lugd. B. 1628; Francof. 1683); Alting, Institut. Child, et Syr. (Frkf. 1676, 1701) ; Erpenius, Gramm. Chald. et Syr. (Amst. 1628) ; Hottinger, Gramm. Chald. Syr. et Rabb. (Turic. 1652);