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Languages of the Bible and their speakers

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Arekkusu
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 Message 9 of 53
13 March 2010 at 12:55am | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
If you really want to hear some really old human speech then Africa
would be a better place to search than the Middle East, - the Khoisan languages (those
with the clicks) are sometimes assumed to be extremely old.

All languages have been in constant evolution ever since the very beginning of humans'
linguistic abilities; human languages were not created. Therefore all languages are
equally old.
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 10 of 53
13 March 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged 
Languages don't necessarily change at the same rate, however, and some preserve more features of their ancestral
proto-language than others. That said, you're probably just as well-off learning Lithuanian or Classical Greek if you
want a taste of an "old" language.
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Arekkusu
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 Message 11 of 53
13 March 2010 at 4:06pm | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
Languages don't necessarily change at the same rate, however,
and some preserve more features of their ancestral
proto-language than others. That said, you're probably just as well-off learning
Lithuanian or Classical Greek if you
want a taste of an "old" language.

Even if you could demonstrate that language A was closer to what it was 1,000 years ago
than language B, it would only be marginally so. Since both these languages would have
been evolving for over 200,000 years, that would still only indicate a difference in
its rate of evolution for 0.5% of the time it's been evolving. Not to mention that
you'd have no idea if language A did not evolve more slowly during the 100,000 years
that preceded, whereas language B might have only slowed down on changes (and mixing,
assimilating, splitting, etc.) in that last 1,000 years.

In other words, to say that a language is older in an irrelevant concept.
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cordelia0507
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 Message 12 of 53
13 March 2010 at 5:17pm | IP Logged 
Well Hebrew has got to be in a good position for a language that developed SLOWLY. The Hebrew Bible is at least 3000 years old, but can still be read by modern Hebrew speakers as I understand it. NOTHING has changed. When they compare current "Torah" scrolls with +2000 years-old ones, there is NO DIFFERENCE. Not a letter, not a word.

But modern Hebrew had to be modernised so it can be used in conversations when it was introduced in Israel during the early days of Zionism.

Compare with me (Swedish) trying to read the rune stones of the Vikings, my ancestors. Some of these stones are actually not even 1000 years ago but very hard to understand even after they are transcribed to latin letters. I understand a bit here and a bit there but on the whole it is very hard. Not only was the alphabet changed, but most words have changed and TONS of German, French and English words have since been incorporated in the language. The grammar has changed significantly too.

(Perhaps for a Scandinavian language genius (no names mentioned) it's a breeze, but I just get the gist of it if I am lucky.) The ones in the area where I grew up were mostly about people who went on journeys to Russia and Turkey or late ones which talk about the change to Christianity.
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Iversen
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 Message 13 of 53
13 March 2010 at 7:45pm | IP Logged 
It is a simple fact that some language have evolved much more slowly than others, - and the relevant timespan here is not 200.000 years, but just 4-5000 years (back to to the time where the Zigurrats were built).
But when I mentioned the Khoisan languages I had something else in mind, namely the fact that they are spoken by people who now just represent the scattered remnants of a population that populated much of Africa before the Bantus and other groups took over. Most Khoisans live in Southern Africa, but I have recently seen a program about a tribe that survived in Tanzania, and they had also the typical click sounds. So these sounds must have been there at least 3000-3500 years ago, before the socalled Bantu Expansion cut the connection lines between the Khoisan people (see Wikipedia). I don't imply that the indicidual Khoisan languages have remained unaltered for that period.



Edited by Iversen on 13 March 2010 at 7:49pm

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lackinglatin
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 Message 14 of 53
22 March 2010 at 1:53am | IP Logged 
"Well Hebrew has got to be in a good position for a language that developed SLOWLY. The Hebrew Bible is at least 3000 years old, but can still be read by modern Hebrew speakers as I understand it. NOTHING has changed. When they compare current "Torah" scrolls with +2000 years-old ones, there is NO DIFFERENCE. Not a letter, not a word. "

As someone who attends church services in Israel, in Hebrew, let me be the first to tell you that you are incorrect.

It is actually pretty hard for Israelis today to read the Tanach (Old Testament). It's more or less akin to modern English speakers reading the King James. I mean, they definitely get the gist, but they definitely get a lot of curve balls and sentences that just don't make sense to them.
Edit: I just want to clarify something before anyone responds. Certain books are easier than others. Israelis will pretty much get 90%+ of most of the Torah (the first five books) and the Ketuvim (the "Writings", a section of books like Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Chronicles, etc.)... but other sections, specifically the prophetic and poetic books, are really hard, and may be lost on them. It uses grammatical features that are lost in modern Israeli Hebrew, and antiquated sentence structures, obscure ancient words, etc.

As far as what that says about language evolution... keep in mind it dropped off of the radar, more or less, for 2000 years give or take. Then about 100 years ago a guy polished it up, updated the vocab, established a definitive grammar, etc. (His name was Ben Yehuda.) And then, in the past 60 or 70 years, the Hebrew has changed a ton, and evolved in a lot of ways.

Lastly, your comment about "2000 year old Torah scrolls" having (quote) "NOTHING CHANGED", you are definitely straying outside the bounds of reality. There most certainly were differences (though few, granted) between the 2000 and 1000 year old copies of the various books. There is a reason the field of Textual Criticism exists. The Dead Sea Scrolls (our "2000 year old Torah Scrolls") feature a distinct variety from the preferred codexes (plural of codex?) of the Ben-Asher scriptorium of 1000 years ago, which previously were the oldest we had known of until the near-miraculous discovery at Qumran in the 1940's.

That being said, they are *very* close. But all caps stating there was not a single difference is simply not true. But it's also not true on other levels: not different by 'a single letter' (whose propaganda have you been swallowing wholesale?) from which modern manuscript? We have a little more than half of the Aleppo Codex, and the oldest complete manuscript is a descendant in the same family known as the Leningrad Codex, and between these two there are disagreements.

On another note, I intend to be reading the bible in Greek in Hebrew by the time I'm 30 without a dictionary (that gives me 10 years, if you are wondering ;). I think it's pretty valuable, because, when it comes down to it, you just miss a lot in translation. Just a fact of life. Beyond that, lots of poor bible teachers make arguments in their teachings based on personal interpretations of things in the Greek or Hebrew... and I'd rather just know for myself. (Wow, some of the absurd statements I heard being made about Hebrew when I stopped by a church in America last summer! I was half dramatically entertained by how wrong she was, and half horrified. She was unusually bad, mind you; usually it's quite a bit more minor.)

I have a dream someday of translating a NT from scratch and updating Zamenhof's translation with modern scholarship, though I'm really impressed the more I use his translation at how high quality it really is.

As has been said, there are three languages in the Christian bible: Greek (Koine), Aramaic (small sections, really, it's barely in there), and Hebrew. As far as what language Jesus spoke... The argument is hot, and I constantly read that either position is definite. I have read that the quote attributed to Jesus on the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, Llama Sabachtani?" is Aramaic (though with my knowledge of Hebrew, even I can understand 3 out of 4 words and recognize the verb structure of the last one), but then I've also heard this referred to as "the Aramaic myth". Everywhere I read about this, people seem to have an agenda. I don't really find it that important.

The question of what the early Hebrews spoke, especially Abraham, Moses, etc., is especially interesting. But the division between proto-semitic languages, I find, seems to be somewhat superfluous. Deciding what is what, and what was when, by who, and how it differed, evolved, etc., is very tricky business indeed, and can involve sudden changes in opinion based on small archeological finds, so I don't put too much stock into it. In any case, it seems clear that some proto-semitic language was spoken.

All that can be said on the Tower of Babel has pretty much been said. (Notice the picture on the top right of this site is a graphic representation of the tower of Babel--we all know this, right?) The idea is certainly interesting!

Yes, the book of Revelation was written in Greek--though, as a side note, the early KJV was based off of a poor compilation of Greek manuscripts that lacked Greek sources for the last couple chapters of Revelation, and so Greek was translated from the Latin, which was then translated back into English. (Publishers were competing to get out the first copy, so quality and scholarship took a back seat at that point in time...)

Hope that was helpful.

Edited by lackinglatin on 22 March 2010 at 2:05am

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Raincrowlee
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 Message 15 of 53
22 March 2010 at 2:51am | IP Logged 
Pl of codex is actually codices.

Can't comment on the rest of the post, though! Informative!
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pohaku
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 Message 16 of 53
22 March 2010 at 5:31am | IP Logged 
There is a very good, somewhat old book called Testaments of Time, by Leo Deuel, 1965, Knopf, which gives fascinating accounts of the discoverers of ancient documents. The book keys on the people, starting with Petrarch and Boccaccio, who paid great attention to ancient Latin and Greek documents, and continuing on into recent times. Much of the book is about Biblical documents and those who found them. One doesn't have to be religious at all to find this of great interest, just fond of languages.



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