Quotes by John Courtenay

“When Aramaeans became Christians, their name was often confounded with 'heathen', hence they called their land by the Greek name 'Syria', themselves by the name 'Syrians' and their language 'Syriac'.””

“The Rabbinic pronunciation of ת sometimes approaches the ס sound.””

“Aramaic did not come into Palestine until after the Babylonian-Assyrian conquest of the country.””

“There is some evidence that the Canaanites lived together with the Babylonians for a longer period than did the Aramaeans ... It is found that Hebrew is phonetically more closely related to Semitic-Babylonian or 'Assyrian' than Aramaic.””

“It is found that the Egyptian language has an appreciable admixture of Semitic, which was derived ultimately from Arabia.””

“The Semite has the power of transporting himself backward or forward ... thus he could realize the future as either present or past ... For this reason the tenses are really moods; they express not time past or future, but states complete or incomplete.””

“... at no period did Greek become the language of Palestine.””

“The work of the authors of the LXX was not only a translation, it was also a revised version. In all such translation work there is a concurrent process of modernization.””

“The translators of the LXX did not attempt to find a Greek word to correspond in sense with every Hebrew word or phrase. Sometimes they did not translate the original at all, but gave some substitute for it, whose meaning 'is, of course, to be ascertained only from Egyptian Greek.””

“The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek.””

“The Bible of Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, was Semitic, the earliest utterances and traditions of the Gospel were Semitic.””

“It has been shown that some institutions, at one time regarded as distinctly 'Jewish', are really Babylonian.””

“The whole traditional civil and moral cult of the Judaism, was inspired and elaborated during the Exile on the model of Babylonian worship and institutions.””

“Assyrian more than Hebrew preserved the simplicity of the vowels, but in the matter of consonants was more akin to Phoenician and Hebrew; Arabic preserved the greatest purity in both respects.””