P.Yadin 50. The letters of this hand
lean oddly forward; a resh sometimes looks like a nun, and a peh
is extraordinary as a closed loop. Nonstandard orthography includes שבה for שבתא,
a backformation with “slippage” of status, since the context demands the
meaning “the Sabbath.” Similarly, one finds פרענת for expected פרענתא or פרענו.
This is either a defectively spelled Hebraism (i.e., פרענות), or an “erroneous”
Aramaic form (again, an issue of status).
. . .
P.Yadin 54. Written carelessly, this letter displays a large variety of
letter-forms, and in varying sizes. These characteristics suggest a practiced
but nonprofessional writer. Nonstandard spellings are numerous, including סלם
for שלם (!), virtually inconceivable for a trained scribe, not unlike a modern
writer misspelling “cat.” The word התשכו for אשתחכו lacks standard metathesis,
uses a heh for expected aleph, and leaves out the heth. The
word תחדון renders תאחדון, and תיעבדון, תעבדון (ad aurem). (Michael Owen
Wise, Language and Literacy in Roman Judaea: A Study of the Bark Kokhba
Documents [The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015], 252, 253)
A final feature of the phonology of these texts is the nasalization of
final open syllables (at least in certain cases). The name “Judah,” for
example, not infrequently gets spelled “Judan” by nonprofessional writers. For
our purposes, the best representation of this tendency, clearly a feature of
living speech, may be the name John b Ba’yah. The patronym is sometimes spelled
בעיה (P.Yadin 53:2), but often the nasalization that speakers heard is
present in the writing: Βειανου (P.Yadin 26:3 and 52:2) and בעין (P.Yadin
49:2, 50:2, 51:2 and 56;1). This nasalization also explains, by the way, the English
name Siloam as in the Siloam Tunnel. The Hebrew of the toponym in the MT of isa
8:6 is שִׁלחַ. The nasalized form familiar to us derives from the LXX
transliteration of the name Σιλωαμ. The translation of the Book of Isaiah into Greek is
commonly placed in the first half of the second century B.C.E. If this dating
is correct, then the nasalization of (at least certain) final open syllables
antedates the Hebrew of our texts by nearly three hundred years. Jerome did not
know the phenomenon, however, evidently not encountering it in the language of
his Jewish informants in the fourth century C.E. He represented Siloam as Siloa
(Vulgate). This nasalization is also absent, of course, from the languages
of the Masoretes. (Ibid., 266)
