Aramaic is a language affiliating to the north-west Semitic languages to which Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew belong. One of the most general and common feature of the Semitic languages is the sentence initial position of the verb. Biblical Aramaic, ...
Aramaic is a language affiliating to the north-west Semitic languages to which Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew belong. One of the most general and common feature of the Semitic languages is the sentence initial position of the verb. Biblical Aramaic, the formal Aramic language, has very different word order from that of the north-west Semitic languages, however. This study fully has examined all the sentences in Biblical Aramaic, that is, all the 1002 Biblical Aramaic clauses, to explore its word order. In that examination, parameters like sentence types (verbal, nominal, participial, and HAVA [=to be] sentences etc.), forms of verbs, the word order among subjects, predicates, and objects, descriptive and colloquial styles, tense, independent and subordinate clauses etc. were considered.
As a result, the greatest differences have appeared in word orders of verbal sentences. All possible word orders, i.e., all the 6 word orders appeared in sentences where subject, verb, and object are included, while the word orders of VO and OV accounted for almost half of the tokens when the orders of verbs and objects were considered. Thus, verbal sentences in Biblical Aramaic can be said to have free word orders.
To determine what factors have influence on the word order of Biblical Aramaic, we have made multi-angular investigation using various parameters, and compared it with the word orders of Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian and Ugarit languages, Arabic and the most ancient language, Sumerian. However, no factors were found out on the linguistic side, and hence it was noted that we should find factors from geographic and historical perspectives. We can say that the reason why Biblical Aramaic, the formal Aramaic, had free word orders is the Aramaic people who had moved after the national migration policy by the Neo-Assyrian Emprie received influence from their original ancient Aramaic that they had used when they had lived in the eastern area of Mesopotamia, and from the Akkadian language used in the area they had migrated.