Holger Gzella: Christian Palestinian Aramaic between Greek and Arabic

Holger Gzella, "Christian Palestinian Aramaic between Greek and Arabic," in Aaron D. Hornkohl et al. (eds.), Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World (pp. 747–770). 

 

 Among the three Western Aramaic literary traditions of Late Antiquity, Christian Palestinian Aramaic is arguably the one least studied from a historical-linguistic point of view. And yet, it offers a number of insights into the language situation in Byzantine Palestine that cannot easily be gained from Jewish Palestinian and Samaritan Aramaic. A less well-known but significant point is the substrate evidence that, cumulatively, documents a certain presence of Arabic in the region already in pre-Islamic times. Such data ties in with both very recent work on the diversity and diffusion of Old Arabic varieties and ongoing interest in identifying the still under-researched factors that eventually led to the creation of another Christian Aramaic written language besides Greek and Syriac by the fifth century CE at the latest.

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