Monday, April 18, 2005

THE WIKIPEDIA "ARAMAIC LANGUAGE" ARTICLE is today's featured article on the Wikipedia main page. That's all to the good, but the current version of the article includes this unfortunate sentence:
Biblical Aramaic was originally written in Achaemenid Aramaic, but heavily influenced by later forms of Aramaic and Hebrew due to the work of the Masoretes in the first century CE.

The Masoretes worked in roughly the second half of the first millennium C.E. (The Aleppo Codex of the Hebrew Bible was produced by them.)

It's also a bit of a stretch to call Biblical Aramaic "Achaemenid Aramaic." Granted, Official Aramaic was settled into its mainstream form then, but the material in Daniel, while in the Official Aramaic dialect (apart from its late orthography) was written in the second century B.C.E. (granted, in some cases perhaps based on earlier stories). I think "Achaemenid Aramaic" should read "Official Aramaic" here.

UPDATE: The broken link to the article has now been fixed.

UPDATE (19 April): Ed Cook comments over at Ralph. He says the whole article needs to be rewritten, not just revised.

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