[Avodah] [Mesorah] Chad Gadya

[Mandel, Seth]

I wish to briefly comment on something that Toby said, because it is
relevant also for a discussion we are having on Mesorah.

Toby says," He may be right, or it may be that people were still mixing
a lot of Aramaic into their daily language, as many of us continue to
use some Yiddish mixed in with our English."

And she is basically correct, but she misses one point that is implicit
in what she says: HQBH not only implanted in people the kind of speech
to express ideas (as opposed to the way animals communicate through
sounds or songs), He also created it in a very complex way (as He did
everything). One of the features of all human languages is that they
change over time. Sometimes they change rapidly, other times slowly,
but they always change. Sometimes the changes involved borrowing lexical
elements from another language, but that also is change.

That is fact. There is no language that ever existed that does not change
over time.

A corollary of that is that what a person speaks or writes dates him.

Another very interesting fact is that HQBH implanted in humans the
ability to learn languages and learn the grammatical rules of a language
at a certain stage in their development. From the point of view of
psycholinguistics, languages are learned in certain stages that are
exactly like Piaget stages or other developmental stages in that one must
always precede the other, and once it is "learned" it is set, not like
one can learn a date and then forget it. Once the bases of the language
are set in a child, they influence everything he speaks or writes later.

The assortment of sounds, for instance. English speakers learn to
pronounce the eth and edh sounds without to much trouble; speakers
who do not have those sounds in their native language struggle to
learn them. Speakers of English and European languages do not have the
'ayin sound, and they struggle to learn it. And that is the cause of a
"foreign accent." Some people are better at learning new sounds, but
all struggle with them.

Which is all a long introduction to introducing the idea of forensic
linguistics. One can find enough items in anything a person says or
writes to be able to date him. Not to the year, usually not to the decade,
but certainly to the century.

Sometimes we do not know enough about how people spoke historically to
be able to date something. We establish the date for linguistic changes
by getting data from other examples in the language.

Leshon Chazal is different from Biblical Hebrew, even late Biblical
Hebrew as in the Book of Esther. It differs in vocabularym morphology,
syntax and in the few elements of pronunciation that were indicated.

After the time of Chazal, no one spoke Hebrew as a native language. Jews
learned it in school, but they spoke Aramaic.

By the time of the Geonim, Jews spoke later Aramaic and Arabic (or Farsi
or Moroccan).

The Rambam spoke Arabic as a native language. And even as great of
a stylist as he was, one can find clear traces in his Hebrew of his
underlying Arabic.

Back to our subject: how do we date something like Chad Gadya or Echad
mi Yodea'?

Both were clearly written after the time when Aramaic or Hebrew were
spoken, and so mix up some things.

The items counted are half in Hebrew, half in Aramaic. That was also
true in the time of the G'moro. But in time of the G'moro, no one mixed
up masculine a feminine forms of numbers. No English speaker would say
"I saw Paul today; she was rushing to school." No Hebew speaker would say
"ishti yavo hayom." No Spanish speaker would say "la problema es..." No
one whose native language distinguished between classes of nouns, such
as mascuiline and feminine, or the 9 classes in Swahili, would ever use
adjectives or verbs that did not match the class. No native speaker of
Hebrew would ever say "Shalosh avot," even though the form avot has what
looks to be a :feminine plural. And no native Hebrew or Aramaic speaker
would say "shlosha asar middayya." So the person who composed it did
not know to carefully distinguish the gender of the numerals.

No native speaker would have used the form "middayya," either. The root
m-d-d does not exist in Aramaic, nor does any word like middah. The
G'moro used the word middah when speaking Aramaic, as in Sanhedring 38b,
קשו קראי אהדדי? אידי ואידי חדא מידה היא

but the word is a borrowing from Hebrew.

And, if an Aramaic speaker borrowed a word like middah, he would form
the plural either by using the Hebrew plural, middot, or would use an
Aramaic feminine Hebrew, middata.

So: the poem was written after the time when people spoke Aramaic.

As Toby says, the poet wanted to use forms that flow mellifluously off
the tongue. So he invents forms that anyone would understand, even though
no native speaker would use such a form.

The form d'zabben abba in Chad Gadya also shows ignorance of Aramaic,where
z'van (in the "Kal" binyan) means to buy, and zabben (in the "Piel" binyan
means sell. Both forms are used many times in the Targum. So whoever
wrote a form like d'zabbin abba here is ignorant of the Aramaic of the
Targum as well. That is one of the marks of the Jews who lived in the
Christian medieval society. They had dropped the Targum from the Torah
reading in shul already in the 10th or 11th Century, and no longer knew
Aramaic other than the words they saw in the G'moro.



[Email #2.]

Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2019 10:38:43 +0000
From: Aryeh Frimer via Avodah <avodah at lists.aishdas.org>

> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba (not Arba'a) Imahot because
> Avot is male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya and
> shlosha Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.
> Has any one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are the
> rules in Aramaic different?

The rules in Aramaic are the same, although the form of the numerals are
different. To be consistent, one should be saying t'loth 'asre middayya
and tarte 'esre kokhvayya.

But the question is incorrect in two points:

1) middayya and kokhvayya and dibbrayya are all MASCULINE in Aramaic. The
singular is, like with all Aramaic masculine nouns, has the definite
form midda, kokhva, dibb'ra; the final -- a is the definite article.

Even in Hebrew, the old singular of dibb'rot is NOT dibb'rah, but
dibber. That word is masculine, but with the -- ot plural, which is
quite common in Hebrew for masculine nouns. Maqom-m'qomot.

Even when the word has an -- ot ending in Hebrew, the Aramiac often has
the -- ayya (maculine) plural. In Hebrew we have a hag called Shavu'ot. In
Aramaic, it is Shavu'ayya, not shavu'ata.

2) The questioner should have first asked why are we counting some things
in Aramaic and some in Hebrew? Why not 'arba immahata and t'lata avahata?

The answer is that all the songs after the Haggodo were medieval
compositions, most originally in German. Old haggodos still have "nun
boy," even if they have the Hebrew "Qel b'neh." To make it sound more
authentic, the songs were rewritten in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic,
but the knowledge of Aramaic in medieval Ashk'naz was near nill. They
had long ago abandoned reading the Targum on Shabbos in shul, and
all of the medieval compositions from Ashk'naz in Aramaic have basic,
sometimes toxic errors. No one even really knew the Aramaic parts of
Daniyyel and Ezra. The song "Qoh Ribbon" is mostly based on Daniyyel,
but punctuated in the siddur with incorrect signs: hayvat boro means
"the animals of the wild," and that is the way it is in Daniyyel. But
people sing "hevat b'ra," which means "the animals of the Son."

Chad gaya is sung "di-zabbenn abba," which would meant "that father sold,"
rather than di-z'van," which means "bought."

Why did they bother using Aramaic at all, if they didn't know
Aramaic? Probably because it sounded more "authentic." Just like nowadays,
Jews studied G'moro. Whether or not they understood Aramaic. Most or
all of the children did not, but they learned G'moro like they had
learned Chumash: most or all did not know Hebrew, but the rebbe would
have them read a couple of words, translate them, and had the kids learn
the translation with the Hebrew. When they started reading G'moro, they
already knew a lot of Hebrew, and so understood the G'moro based on Rashi.

Rabbi Dr. Seth Mandel Rabbinic Coordinator The Orthodox Union