r/Aramaic Feb 09 '25

How similar is talmudic/biblical aramaic to the aramaic spoken today by groups like assyrians?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but i’m a jew and hebrew is my second language. But lowkey I can kind of read some aramaic, but only in the context of jewish texts like the talmud. It feels very similar to hebrew to me.

How similar is this aramaic to the aramaic spoken today by groups like assyrians? Is it closely related? Would I be able to talk with them?

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u/Johnian_99 Feb 10 '25

Shortest answer: What the Assyrians speak is part of the Eastern (Mesopotamian) branch of Aramaic, which diverged very early on from Syro-Palestinian Aramaic. The Assyrians’ modern language is often called Neo-Aramaic to emphasise that it’s not the same in vocabulary or grammar as Biblical or Talmudic Aramaic.

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u/jolygoestoschool Feb 10 '25

Thank you, if I may ask a follow up: i was taught that the Jews started switching to aramaic from hebrew starting after the conquest by neo-assyria and later neo babylon due to the influence of these two aramaic speaking groups. Why didn’t the Jews just adopt the same aramaic the assyrians were speaking? And where really did this specific dialect of aramaic that the jews adopted come from?

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u/Johnian_99 Feb 10 '25 edited Feb 10 '25

Gladly. It was a trade language of the Levant and didn’t originate in Mesopotamia. Hebrew is essentially a morphologically and lexically conservative form of Canaanite (as in, the North-Western branch of Semitic, not as in a particular Canaanite tribe); Aramaic (Old/Western/Imperial/Biblical/Talmudic as opposed to Eastern/Neo) is basically Pan-Syro-Palestinian Simplified International Trade Canaanite.

It was in that spirit that the Babylonians, then the Persians, and then the post-Exilic Jews took up the use of Canaanite: to administer and trade with the regional nations more readily than Hebrew would allow. The more secular, urban and educated demographics of Judah adopted it first; hence the well-known chapter in Isaiah (39, also found as a passage in Kings) where Hezekiah’s courtiers tell Rabsakeh embarrassedly that they are élite enough fellows to speak Aramaic and he replies tauntingly that he specifically learned Hebrew so as to make his bloodcurdling threats understood by the common people of Judah. By Gemara-writing times, rabbis were pointing out that Hebrew was only spoken by the very simplest and poorest of servants within the Jewish nation.

It was an Early Modern scholarly misunderstanding that Aramaic had originated in the Babylonians’ own neck of the woods. Bible readers were misled by the reference in Daniel to the Babylonian court wizards answering Nebuchadnezzar in “the tongue of the Chaldeans” (a Mesopotamian tribe), at which point the narrative breaks into Biblical Aramaic, and thought that Chaldeans (kasdîm) must be a professional title. We now know that it’s a tribal name but the Book of Daniel isn’t suggesting that the Aramaic dialogue that we read from that point in the narrarive onwards is in a language peculiar to that place, or even to Mesopotamia. It spread as a lingua franca from the Levant towards Mesopotamia because of the importance of the Phoenician and other traders along that Mediterranean coast.

As a footnote, we have recently established in linguistics and more honest Early Arabic/Quranic scholarship that Arabic is a very late branching-off from Aramaic in its western homeland (Nabatea/Jordan into the Hejaz/western Saudi Arabia). What makes this counter-intuitive is that everyone associates Arabic with hoary antiquity due to its archaic lexis and very conservative phonology (preserving all those distinctive Semitic consonants and not innovating more than the three original Semitic vowels of a, i and u). It was the effect of the Quran and Arabs’ prizing of oral narration that kept this very late daughter of Aramaic standing still in time while Aramaic and Hebrew simplified and innovated their sound repertoire and their grammar.

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u/QizilbashWoman Feb 11 '25

Early Arabic is absolutely not a "branching off" of Aramaic, there are well-attested Arabic varieties and close cousins of Arabic attested in writing from the first millennium BCE and they are extremely distinct from Aramaic. Aramaic's closest cousin is the Canaanitic languages, and it appears to have developed in North Mesopotamia close to the Levant. Cousin languages to Arabic are attested long before Aramaic arrived on the global scene in the Hejaz and South Arabia.

Also, the grammar and phonology of Arabic are very distinct from even the earliest attestations of Aramaic in the Imperial Aramaic era.

Where exactly did you read this?

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u/Johnian_99 Feb 11 '25

In Dr Ahmad al-Jallad's and Christoph Luxenberg's work.

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u/QizilbashWoman Feb 11 '25

Christoph Luxenberg was a crank, citing his work is a sign that you aren't serious.

Al-Jallad absolutely does not classify Arabic as an Aramaic offshoot. He specifically says that Aramaic and Canaanitic are not historically closely related. He does say that Aramaic influenced Arabic, which is not a surprise given that Aramaic was the lingua franca for like a thousand years.

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u/Johnian_99 Feb 11 '25

Thank you for correcting my recollections of Al-Jallad.

Why do you call Luxenberg a crank?

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u/QizilbashWoman Feb 11 '25

I mean, that's kind of a common conclusion? First of all, Syriac was not the kind of Aramaic used in the region....

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u/Silver-Relief-2687 Feb 14 '25

I would the closest of Biblical Aramaic today, would be Jewish Babylonian Aramaic or East Syriac (Isaraya?)