Dhimmi: Aramaic v Arabic v Hebrew

Submitted by Motke (Israel), Nov 16, 2018 at 09:18

Hi DNM!

> > "[he will] revolt":
> > Arabic = /yatamarradu/,
> > Hebrew = /yitmarred/
>
> [...]
> yitgaddal is present tense! No?

No, it's future.

In Arabic:

/yatamarradu/ is present or future.
/mutamarrid/ (or /maarid/) is noun/adjective.

In Hebrew:

/yitmarred/ is future.
/mitmarred/ (or /mored/) is present or noun/adjective.

(That's in post-Biblical Hebrew. It also holds for Biblical Hebrew, but tenses there aren't as straightforward (a verb form might mean any of the tenses, depending on other grammatical cues).)

(Nitpicking: In Hebrew, 'r' happens to be among the 5 letters that aren't doubled (shadda), but for parallelism with Arabic I doubled it.)

>
> It is also interesting to know
> that the prefix "Yit" is very
> commonly used in Hebrew.

Ahh, I didn't say it's _very_ common :-)

There are 7 commonly used أوزان in Hebrew, and the /yit/ prefix is only in one of them (in the 3rd pronoun, future). This wazn has a reflexive meaning, which is why it's a natural fit for the Kadish (which refers to His name: 3rd pronoun).

>
> root G-D-L [...] Nothing about "great"
> or "strong" and this is the reason why
> Syro-Aramaic and Arabic speakers do not
> understand the word Yitgaddal

Ok. I guess it exists only in Jewish dialects of Aramaic (there are 3 (actually, there's one more, spoken by Israeli Kurds)).

==

As for "majdal shams", the Hebrew wikipedia gives a few more details:

- It explains that the [Aramaic] pronunciation has indeed changed because of the influence of Arabic.

- Name conjecture: Because of it's height, the sun rays strike it before the other villages.

- Another conjecture: It was named after the Biblical /beit shemesh/. Interestingly, till at least the 2nd and 3rd centuries it was a Jewish village. It still has Jewish artifacts, among them catacombs (named مقبرة اليهود by the residents). You won't find this mentioned in the English wikipedia (except the usual nonsense about the "occupation", ignoring the fact that the last thing the Druz there want is to return to Syria).

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