Jews

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by timojin, Apr 19, 2017.

  1. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    What language in antiquity the Jews Spoke ?
     
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  3. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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  5. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    I believe it must have been Egyptian, since they come out of Egypt , where they spent 300 years which would be at least 8 generation , I grant Semitic was spoken in the north like Babylon , Assyrian,
     
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    If only there was some way to verify such beliefs!

    Some sort of - I don't know - web of information that you could browse for facts.

    Pity. Stuff of dreams...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  8. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    That apparently is just a fable, there is no evidence of that except for the Torah. The Torah has several such fables such as 'the flood' and the garden of eden.
     
  9. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I did some research on this, and apparently, although there is no evidence of the exodus, there is evidence of Jewish communities in Egypt at various times around 500-400 BC. But the Hebrews were known to exist around Jordan since 1200 BC.
     
  10. timojin Valued Senior Member

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  11. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    There was a migration of Jews into Egypt after Babylonian destroyed the kingdom of Judah it was around
    620 or so BC.
    The population of Jews around Jordan was probable was the early migration from Egypt
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Afro-Asiatic language family is one of the oldest that we have good information about--with more than 300 member languages still in use in the modern era.

    There are six branches of the family: Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Semitic and Omotic.

    Semitic is the only branch that is spoken in Asia--and in fact its member languages are spoken ONLY in Asia. Hebrew and Arabic are the best-known members of this branch, but there are many others (such as Aramaic), that are spoken daily by a total of about one million people.

    Ancient Egyptian is the only member of Egyptian branch of this family that we know about--largely because the Egyptians were one of the first people to develop a written language, which they carved in stone. While the world has a huge inventory of writings in Egyptian (on stone, of course), Egyptian is now classified as a dead language because no one except scholars have spoken it for many centuries. The Egyptian people were conquered by the Muslims, and now speak Arabic.

    The other four living branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic. All are spoken ONLY in Africa.

    Since Jewish religious services include passages from the Old Testament, which the congregation is expected to understand and recite, it would be reasonable to say that Hebrew is still a living language, spoken everywhere where there are Jews with religious congregations. And of course, it is the national language of Israel and all citizens are expected to have learned it. However, Jews have immigrated to Israel from many different countries, and obviously many of them still prefer to speak their original national languages at home--rather than Hebrew, which they may not have studied diligently in their country of origin.

    Oh... there's one more annoying missing bit of information about the Afro-Asiatic language family: No one knows where it originally arose. Did it come into existence in Africa, and some of the speakers eventually migrated into Asia? Or vice versa?​
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2017
  13. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Indeed. Quite a bit of what we think we know about ancient Egypt (or perhaps nearly everything!) is fable and storytelling. The Jews, for example, were never slaves in Egypt. They came voluntarily because there was a lot of work to be done, work that was paid more-or-less fairly. Couple this with the fact that the Jews were the only people on the project (besides the Egyptians themselves) who could read and write, and they quickly rose into the ranks of the supervisors.

    When the project was finished, everyone simply went home, usually with a purse full of money that made their wives extremely happy.

    The fairytales about Moses, and all the other biblical crap, is indeed nothing but biblical crap.
     
  14. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Great you just solved the history problem , but I believe you have a time sequence problem . The only thing
    I might agree with you they entered Egypt as free people, About storytelling in the bible , if you would not have the bible we would not have any history, beside your created story.
     
  15. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    That is incorrect. The bible is one source, certainly, but there are other historical sources as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Egypt
     
  16. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks I am familiar with other sources to.
    My point is if there would not be the bible . Jews would not exist , Judaism would banish just like Moabites. Edomites . Hittites and many others
     
  17. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Jewish people invented a phonetic abjad (an alphabet with no vowels, since vowels have no meaning in Hebrew) roughly 3,000 years ago. That gave them 3,000 years to write their history, their philosophy and their religious stories.

    Since they regarded the Torah as history, much of what is now treated as Jewish history is a mixture of a fair amount of history, augmented by fairytales.
     
  18. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    So at what point in time will assign the existence of Jews ? You can not just throw a rough figure.
    Back to beginning of Jews . Would you start with Abraham ?
    I suppose he did not Jewish ( modern Hebrew ) because he come from the land of Chaldeans and their language was Semitic. Would you believe he communicate with Egyptians .
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sorry, I'm a linguist, not a historian. I can probably find a reasonably accurate date that marks the beginning of the era in which the Jewish people began to use an early form of the Hebrew language.

    But that's not the same as determining when Abraham lived--assuming that he was a actually a real person, not a legendary figure like King Arthur or Paul Bunyan.
    Probably not. Although Egyptian is one of the six groups of the Afro-Asiatic language family, this does NOT imply that the members of two of these groups can understand each other's languages.

    This would be the equivalent of saying that since English and Russian are both members of the Indo-European language family, we should expect British people and Russian people to be able to talk to each other.

    Please understand that "Semitic" refers to a rather large group of languages. There is no such thing as "the Semitic language." Hebrew and Arabic are the two Semitic languages that we Westerners are most familiar with, but, again, this does not mean that people who speak Hebrew can understand Arabic... or vice versa.
     
  20. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    I thought that circa the time of Christ, Jews spoke Aramaic for ordinary conversation & Hebrew for religious purposes.

    I am fairly certain that there was a time when they used Aramaic.
     
  21. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes certainly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    At that time, they decided to preserve Hebrew as a liturgical language. So they used Aramaic, which was already widely used throughout the Middle East as a lingua franca, as their everyday language.

    Today, virtually all Jewish people use Hebrew in the synagogue and other religious situations. In Israel, the entire population has been taught Hebrew as children, so they can speak Hebrew as an everyday language.

    Jewish people in other countries are not necessarily as well-versed in Hebrew, so it's not unusual to hear them speaking the language of the host country, for example, English in the U.K. and the USA, French in France, Farsi in Iran, etc. Here in the USA, with the world's largest Jewish population, the Hassidic people regard Hebrew as a sacred language which should not be used for everyday conversations. Many of the Hassidic people speak Yiddish, a dialect of medieval German which is almost completely extinct everywhere else.

    But Jewish Americans who are not Hassidic simply speak English like the rest of us, and reserve Hebrew for religious services. A lot of the Jewish people in the USA are not very well-versed in Hebrew, so the services can become rather chaotic.
     
    Last edited: May 5, 2017
  23. timojin Valued Senior Member

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    In the Galilean and Samaria region they spoke Aramaic during Christ time, in Judea they spoke Hebrew
     

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