L’araméen dans l’histoire de l’hébreu moderne

Abstract

Aramaic began to have a great influence on Hebrew as soon as the pre-exilic period, due to the many contacts the Hebrews had with Aramaic-speaking people in the Assyrian empire. But this influence became even more important after the fall of the Jewish realms of Samaria and, above all, in -597, of Jerusalem. When they returned from their Babylonian exile to Jerusalem, the leaders and a large part of the masses had substituted Aramaic for Hebrew. As a result, and despite the restauration made by Esdras and Nehemiah, certain chapters of the Bible itself are written in Aramaic. Later, as Hebrew was becoming progressively restricted to liturgical use, Aramaic replaced it in everyday life, and was adopted as the language of the great Commentaries of the Bible, i.e. the Mishna and the Babylon and Jerusalem Talmuds, before the spread of Arabic resulting from the Islamic conquest, and the adoption of languages of the Gentiles after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 and the ensuing Diaspora.Hebrew morphology has kept some Aramaic features, but Aramaic influence is much wider in the lexicon. A number of Aramaic words were borrowed to name objects and concepts for which a Hebrew word was lacking. Besides Ben Yehuda’s and Bialyk’s new words, many others were introduced by the great writers of the end of the xixth century, translating into Hebrew Yiddish words which were themselves adapted from Aramaic. Another domain in which Aramaic was used are patronyms, translated, for some time, from German into Aramaic rather than Hebrew, which was felt less prestigious.However, nowadays Aramaic has become much less frequent as a source of neology and patronyms. No new words are now coined using it as it was used in the former stages of the history of Hebrew.