Page:A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, Volume 1 (1903).djvu/12

 (,, Giṭṭin 20$a$), not recognized by the commentators, and probably no longer understood by the Babylonian Rabbis, who received the word from Palestine together with the legal subject with which it is connected, fortunately finds a parallel in a worse copyist's corruption in the Jerusalem Talmud, namely  (Yer. Giṭṭin IV, 45$d$), and both in  (Treatise Abadim, ed. Kirchheim, ch. IV). A combination of these corruptions together with an examination of the subject under discussion leads to vindicta or vindicatio(-nis) (see Révue des Études Juives, 1883, p. 150). It should be said, however, that this is one of the worst corruptions the author has met with.

Another class of corruptions owes its existence to the natural tendency to adapt foreign words to the organic peculiarities of the people. The people pronounced Andrianos or Andrinos more easily than Hadrianos; unkeanos was more congenial than okeanos, agard'mos and agromos are popular mutilations of agoranomos; and  are organic transformations of lectica; although the correct forms Hadrianos, okeanos, &c. are by no means infrequent (see Collitz, The Aryan Name of the Tongue, in 'Oriental Studies', Boston, 1894, p. 201, note).

Otherwise the foreign consonants are transliterated as faithfully as can be expected with national organic peculiarities as different as the Aryan and the Semitic. Transpositions of rd and dr, frequent even in Hebrew or Aramaic home-words, or sch for x (chs), need hardly surprise any one. Thus and  go side by side with, for hydraulis;  stands for xenium;  for dyschistos, and so forth.

As to vowels, the Greek and the Latin ē are, as a rule, represented by, the Greek  by  or , whereas the Greek  frequently appears as. The Greek and the Latin u keep their place as midway between vowels and consonants, so that they may be transcribed by, , or. The last is especially the case in diphthongs, so that is met with alongside of, and  for.

Short vowels, except in cases of heavy accumulations of consonants, are most frequently ignored. This omission of vowels, congenial as it is to the Semitic spirit, means a loss of soul to the Aryan words, and offers difficulties not easily overcome.

The laws of transliteration of Greek and Latin loanwords are exhaustively treated in Samuel Krauss, „Griechische und Lateinische Lehnwörter in Talmud, &c." (Berlin, S. Calvary & Co., 1898). It is to be regretted that the proclivity to find Latin and Greek in words indisputably Semitic has led the author into a labyrinth of fatal errors.

Persian words are now and then encountered in the Talmud as remnants of the first period after the Babylonian exile, when the new Jewish commonwealth was organized under the Persian empire, and more still as modern arrivals of the time when Babylonia grew to be the centre of Jewish lore.

Arabic elements of direct importation, barring explicit linguistic references, came along with Arabic objects of trade, but there should be a considable reduction