Aramaic of the Jewish texts — overview and Biblical Aramaic

This folder is two things at once:

1. the overview of the family: the five Aramaic varieties of the Jewish texts that Mova distinguishes, the code scheme, the conventions every folder follows, and a table of the features that tell the varieties apart;
2. the reference manual of Biblical Aramaic (arc): the Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra, a late literary form of Imperial (Official) Aramaic.

Mova has no Aramaic data parsed yet (2026-10-17). What it would need is in Aramaic in Mova: what it would need; each variety's folder has its own Aramaic in Mova: what it would need too.

The five varieties

The code scheme

The codes are fixed in the project (the scripture corpus registry texts.tsv, column lang, and its guide in the Research repository, docs/papers/scripture.md, 2026-10-17):

• arc, tmr and jpa are ISO 639-3 codes. In ISO 639-3, arc is "Official Aramaic (700–300 BCE); Imperial Aramaic (700–300 BCE)", tmr is "Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (ca. 200–1200 CE)" and jpa is "Jewish Palestinian Aramaic" (SIL ISO 639-3 code tables, iso639-3.sil.org/code tables/639/data). Biblical Aramaic has no code of its own; it is filed under arc.
• arc-x-targum and arc-x-zohar are BCP 47 private-use extensions (-x-) of arc, because ISO has no codes for the targumic literary language or the Zohar's language. They are Mova's own and mean nothing outside the project.
• Neighbours that Mova does not cover now, named so the boundaries are clear: oar Old Aramaic (to c. 700 BCE), sam Samaritan Aramaic, syc Classical Syriac, myz Classical Mandaic, cpa-type Christian Palestinian Aramaic (ISO cpa is not assigned to it; check before use), and the Neo-Aramaic languages (aii, cld, trg, bjf, huy, amw …).
• Mixed texts carry their main language in lang and the rest in mixed: the Bavli is tmr with hbo-x-mishnaic (the Mishnah and the Hebrew baraitot), Daniel and Ezra are hbo with arc in mixed, the Yerushalmi is jpa with hbo-x-mishnaic. The assignment in texts.tsv is by Sefaria category, not by sentence: a first approximation, see Aramaic in Mova: what it would need.

The files of this folder

Conventions for all five folders

Files

Every variety folder has Aramaic of the Jewish texts — overview and Biblical Aramaic (what it is, what marks it, an index), grammar files, The lexicon of Biblical Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic texts, annotated (annotated examples), Aramaic in Mova: what it would need and Sources. Shared facts (script, the Proto-Semitic background, the basic morphology of Aramaic) are written once here and referred to from the others; each other folder describes how its variety differs.

Transliteration

One scheme for all folders, close to the one in the SBL Handbook of Style and in MACULA's transliteration field:

• Spirantised begadkefat consonants are written ḇ ḡ ḏ ḵ p̄ ṯ only where the text is vocalised in the Tiberian tradition (Biblical Aramaic, vocalised targum editions). For the Babylonian Talmud, the Palestinian texts and the Zohar, which come down to us mostly unvocalised or with late, unreliable vocalisation, the transcription is broad: plain b g d k p t, and vowels as the grammars reconstruct them (Margolis 1910 for tmr, Dalman 1905 for jpa), marked as reconstructions where it matters.
• Vowels: a ā e ē i ī o ō u ū; ə for vocal shewa; ă ĕ ŏ for the hatef vowels. A long vowel written with a mater lectionis is still written with a macron (ī for ־ִי).
• Gemination by doubling: qaṭṭel for קַטֵּל.
• Proclitics are joined with a hyphen: də-malkā "of the king", wə-ʾămar "and he said", lə-ḇaytā "to the house".

Glossing

Examples follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules (Comrie, Haspelmath and Bickel 2008, eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php) in a five-line block:

Aramaic:   מַלְכָּא לְעָלְמִין חֱיִי
Translit.: malkā lə-ʿālmīn ḥĕyī
Gloss:     king.M.SG.DET to-age.M.PL.ABS live.PEAL.IMP.2MS
English:   O king, live for ever!
Source:    Dan 2:4 (WLC, public domain)

Abbreviations used in glosses:

The stem names (peal, pael …) stand for the verb's binyan; a gloss like say.PEAL.PF.3MS reads "says, peal stem, perfect, third masculine singular".

Citing

• Every non-obvious claim names its source: author, year, and section or headword (Rosenthal 1961 §45, BDB-Aram s.v. דָּת, Jastrow 1903 s.v. אַשְׁכַּח). Full references, local paths and open URLs are in each folder's Sources.
• Quotes from grammars are short and marked; the explanations are our own words. Nothing copyrighted is copied.
• The ancient texts themselves (the Bible, the targums, the Talmuds, the Zohar) are in the public domain. Each quoted line names the digital edition it was taken from and that edition's licence (from texts.tsv). Editions under non-commercial terms (for instance the William Davidson / Steinsaltz Talmud on Sefaria, CC BY-NC) are not quoted; they may only be used for tests and measurements, as Data and model licences says. CC BY-SA editions are quoted sparingly, a line at a time, with attribution.
• Numbers carry their date: counts from MACULA and from the corpora were made on 2026-10-17.

Where to start

• For the family as a whole: The Aramaic family and the Jewish varieties, the comparison table at its end.
• For Aramaic grammar from zero: Script and phonology, then The noun in Biblical Aramaic, Pronouns in Biblical Aramaic and The verb in Biblical Aramaic, with the annotated passages in Biblical Aramaic texts, annotated open beside them.
• For one variety: its folder's README, which lists only what differs from Biblical Aramaic.
• For the engineering: Aramaic in Mova: what it would need.

The Elamur team

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/