It's written in the "PaleoHebrew" script.
Perhaps I misread your post but it seemed like "Paleo-Hebrew" described a language, not a writing system. Of course the abjads of the Middle East underwent extensive evolution and there were surely eras in which written language changed faster than spoken language. Particularly at a time when the script of one people's language was borrowed and adapted by another people.
I'm assuming that all these ancient scribes did not call the language "PaleoHebrew" but thats retroactive history for you.
AFAIK Hebrew did not change drastically after it was first written down. This is a common phenomenon: written records are a powerful force for conserving old elements of a language. With a phonetic system, that can even slow phonetic change, although as the evolution of Middle English demonstrates (long A and I used to be AH and EE), it can be overwhelmed by other forces. With a non-phonetic system such as Chinese you get the interesting situation in which the pronunciation of the words changes so drastically that people in different regions can't understand each other's speech, but they still use the same words, grammar and syntax so they can read each other's writing (about 98% in the languages of China, which is good enough).
Every reference that comes up on a Google search refers strictly to the writing system, an early rendition(s) of the Hebrew abjad. I would be skeptical of the scholarship of anyone who suggests that it is a spoken language.
The Wikipedia article on Hebrew says that Archaic Biblical Hebrew has been called Paleo-Hebrew, but again, it's referring to the written language. In any case, that refers to Ancient Hebrew over its entire period of existence, as opposed to Liturgical Hebrew, a language of scholarship like Latin frozen during the Diaspora, and to Modern Israeli Hebrew, a language reconstructed by scholars. This use of the term does not even focus on the evolution of the writing system, much less of the spoken tongue!
What was the language and script of the Persians during the time of Ezra? Did they speak/write in Aramaic?
Farsi, or Persian as it was called by foreigners until a few decades ago, is the keystone language of the Iranic subgroup of the Indo-Iranian group of the Eastern or "Satem" branch of the Indo-European family. Many of the languages spoken by the Persian peoples of the region, such as Dari, one of the official languages of Afghanistan, could easily be called dialects of Farsi if not for political reasons--the same capricious force that defines Afrikaans and Flemish as distinct languages rather than dialects of Dutch. Others, such as Pashto, are not quite intercomprehensible but clearly diverged from the mainline quite recently.
The reason this happened is that Persian/Farsi has been spoken steadily in Persia/Fars for millennia, evolving like any other language from ancient to modern form.
Of course there was a time when Aramaic was the
lingua franca of the entire region--right up into the early years of the last century. Businessmen, scholars, politicians, artists and anyone else whose work brought them in contact with foreigners would have been fluent in it as a matter of necessity. And the tiny fraction of the population who were literate in the era before the printing press would have been literate in Aramaic, perhaps in some cases without being literate in their native language--although the educated Jews would have also been able to read Hebrew, the Muslims Arabic, and the Christians Latin, Greek or Old Slavonic, which were not necessarily their native languages.
But a
lingua franca does not necessarily displace vernacular languages. French did not become the universal spoken language in Europe.
Today barely half a million people in geographically separated communities speak Aramaic at home--although they are a proud group with word processors and a strong presence on the internet guaranteeing that their language will not die. But it was not always thus. The Jews have consistently abandoned Hebrew and adopted the language of their host community, and by the Roman Era they all spoke Aramaic, the language in which the later books of the Old Testament and most of the Talmud were written.
In fact, back in pre-biblical days, although the Aramaeans were merely one of many tribes conquered by the Assyrian-Babylonian empire, for reasons that may never be understood their language came to be the language of the empire and indeed displaced the languages of the conquerors. This is how it was set up to become the region's
lingua franca througout several turnovers of imperial masters--Macedonians, Persians, Mughals, Arabs, Ottomans, and I've forgotten half of them and probably put the ones I remembered in the wrong sequence.
But this never happened in Persia. As far as I can tell, the Persians have always spoken Persian.
From what I've read I gather that it's generally acknowledged that almost all alphabets (phonetic writing systems in which each phoneme has its own symbol), abjads (an alphabet with no vowels) and abugidas (an alphabet in which each symbol is a consonant with a rigorous standard addition of a small symbol for a vowel, as in many languages of India) are ultimately derived from Sumerian, which was arguably derived originally from non-phonetic Egyptian logograms. The only exception I know of is the Korean alphabet, created just a few centuries ago by scholars who thought that writing non-phonetically in Chinese was absurd.
it seems the Pahlavi writing system was derived from Aramaic.
All of the writing systems of the Middle East were derived from Sumerian via one path or another. The Aramaic abjad is a later form of Phoenician script. In addition to Pahlavi, both the Hebrew and Arabic Abjads were derived from the Aramaic. The Greek alphabet was adapted directly from the Phoenician, a more complicated task since vowels are phonemic in the Indo-European family so symbols had to be established for them. And of course both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are offshoots of Greek.
The Persians eventually adopted the Arabic abjad (and with some creativity turned it into something resembling an alphabet) during the spread of Islam, just as Christianity spread the Roman alphabet--and to a lesser extent the Cyrillic--everywhere its monks traveled. Similarly, Buddhist monks from China spread the non-phonetic Chinese system of logograms throughout East Asia.
Note that I have excluded syllabaries. Japanese
kana were developed domestically, basically stylizations of some of the Chinese logograms. The Cherokee syllabary was created by Chief Sequoia in the middle of the 19th century, and within a few years literacy was higher among the Cherokees than the so-called "civilized" Euro-Americans who surrounded and persecuted them. Chief Sequoia had a whimsical streak and his symbols are rather entertaining. Your browser probably doesn't support Cherokee but you can see its 85 syllables in the
Wikipedia article.
Sure, I'll call it Pre-Bible. If thats alright.
If you really want to join in what is surely an international scholarly dialog on this subject, why don't you figure out what the respected scholars call it instead of making up your own terminology? If you are as serious about this field as you present yourself to be, surely your research must be taking you far beyond Wikipedia, much less SciForums!
I guess we could break it down to Old and New Testament so we reference the collation of myths according to different groups
I'm not sure it breaks down that way. The last few pages of the Old Testament were not written that long before the first few pages of the New.
What were the languages of all the various source texts of the Jewish canon? What was the basis on which parts were excluded?
I appreciate your respect for the scholarship on the Linguistics subforum. But even I, the Moderator, don't have a degree in any of these fields. It's in accounting, which makes me a disciplined and skeptical scholar, but of itself does not impart a lot of knowledge from outside the business office.
If you ask a question on one of our hard science boards like physics or biology, you're going to be talking to a Moderator with a PhD who is a working professional in that discipline. Elsewhere on SciForums--which is, after all, primarily a place of
science, you get pot luck.
We look forward to the findings of your own research on this subject. Carry on and report back!
And yes, I realize that I toss around my own terms "pack-social" and "herd-social" in discussions of biology and anthropology. I simply have not been able to find the proper biologists' or psychologists' words for these instincts. Even the zoologists I've asked were stumped.
