Searching for Aramaic in the Bible

[Timothy Jenney]

Prompted by a fb post on Nerdy Language Majors this morning, I wondered if I could use Accordance to search for the Aramaic words in the Bible. Yep.

 

Here's my search in NA28-T: the morphological search ( [ANY Aram] finds 15 verses with 22 words. It appears that only four of those words are tagged accented: ῥακά, ὡσαννὰ, and the phrase μαράνα θά.
 

Edited September 21, 2018 by Timothy Jenney

[Peter Bekins]

No ελωι ελωι λεμα σαβαχθανι? No ταλιθα κουμ?

 

Those must be considered a transliteration by the taggers of NA28 while [Aram] looks for Aramaic loan words? GNT-T hits on the transliterations BTW.

 

*EDIT: I see that GNT-T also hits 22 in 15, so it must be the same. What then do you mean by "only 4 words are tagged"?

 

Is there a similar search that will work in Hebrew Bible? The underlying MORPH db is tagged for language, but I don't see a quick way to use that in a search. 

 

Pete

Edited September 21, 2018 by Peter Bekins

[Joel Brown]

Peter, I believe all Hebrew Aramaic forms are tagged with a "_0" suffix on their lemma, so a simple search for *_0 should find all Aramaic forms.

[Timothy Jenney]

Thanks, Joel! I was hoping someone would suggest a way to search for Aramaic in the HB. Wonder if we should add the word "Aram." to make it more intuitive?

Peter, my apologies for using the word "tagged." It should have been "accented." I've corrected my post.

Edited September 21, 2018 by Timothy Jenney

[Peter Bekins]

Ah yes, that always screws me up when I accidentally click the _0 form. 

 

Thanks,

Pete

Edited September 21, 2018 by Peter Bekins

[Peter Bekins]

Thanks, Joel! I was hoping someone would suggest a way to search for Aramaic in the HB. Wonder if we should add the word "Aram."?

 

Peter, my apologies for using the word "tagged." It should have been "accented." I've corrected my post.

 

I see. To my original point then, does that imply that the accented words were considered loans into Greek while the unaccented are just transliterations?

 

Peter

[Timothy Jenney]

I really don't know!

 

That would be a great question for one of the editors.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Hi Dr J,  I'm interested about the significance or otherwise of the accents on the four cases you note. Is that related to the Nerdy Lang. Maj. original question or is there something else about it you were pointing out ? Also, interesting is the case in Mt 27:46 where half is tagged Hebrew and half Aram. whereas the quote, using all Aram. forms appears in Mk 15:34.

 

thx

D

Edited September 22, 2018 by דָנִיאֶל

[Timothy Jenney]

It is a NLM question, Daniel. Again, I'm not sure why the editors chose to accent some Aramaic words and not others, though I would like to know.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Got it. The EPT by the way accents all of these words.

 

Thx

D