Aramaic Annotations: Pt.

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© 2010, T. Michael W. Halcomb | www.MichaelHalcomb.com
1. 62 Aramaic Tips & Rules Thus Far…: In this installation of my
“Annotations”, I am listing all 62 of the rules that we have covered thus far
(“Annotations” 1-11) so that you can re-familiarize yourself with them.
60 Aramaic Tips | © 2010, T. Michael W. Halcomb
1) Remember the alphabet table dimensions 3x9 (the last 4 cells of the 3rd column are blocked in) as this
will help you commit it to memory. There are 23 consonants and 5 of them have “final” letters.
The 2) Notice that all 5 “final” letters are in the middle or 2nd column.
Alphabet 3) Note that “ ’aleph” & “ ‘ayin” are pretty much just breathing marks w/no sound
4) “Medial consonants” are all letters not labeled “final” and “final consonants” (all letters that were
circled) are special consonants which come only at the end of a word.
5) In Aramaic, vowels, unlike English, are not written between consonants and thus, there are not “letters”
per se. Instead, vowels are indicated by dashes and dots, referred to more properly as “vowel points”.
These “vowel points” can appear above, below and even inside the consonants!!!
6) The way I remember the 13 “vowel points” is to have 2 columns where one contains the “dagesh” (the
dot) and the other contains the “qamets” (T).
7) I imagine the “dagesh” starting at the top and then falling to the middle and the bottom and then
beginning to multiply. It goes from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 5 and then, at the end, the 5 splits into a new “3”
and a new “2”. (In both tables note that the vowel sounds begin “long” and fall to “short”. There can
basically be 5 long & 89 short sounds.)
8) I imagine the qamets acting like it’s going to take on more substance as it goes but actually just
whittling down quickly. Eventually the “trunk” of the qamets vanishes and so do does the shewa ( : ).
Vowels 9) Holam (long “o” as in Eng. “so”)
Or 10) Shureq (long “u” sound in Eng. as in “soon”)
Vowel 11) Hiriq (short “i” sound as in Eng. “sit”)
Points 12) Hiriq Yodh (long “i” sound as in Eng. “ring”
13) Tsere (short or long “e” sounds; usually “ey” as in Eng. “hey”)
14) Segol (short “e” sound as in Eng. “Ed”)
15) Hataf Segol (VERY short “e” sound as in “eh”)
16) Qibbuts (short “u” in Eng. Sounds like “book”
17) Shewa (murmured “a” sounds like Eng. “uh” e.g. “above”)
18) Qamets & Qamets Qatan (long “a” sound as in Eng. “father” OR short “o” as in Eng. “stop”)
19) Hataf Qamets (VERY short “o” sound as in “ah”)
20) Hataf Patah (VERY short “a” sound as in “ah”)
21) Patah (short “a” sound as in Eng. “cat”)
22) In Aramaic, the general rule of thumb is that the emphasis or “stress” that takes place in a word usually
comes on the last syllable of the word, though, sometimes it falls on the next to last word. When it falls
on the next to last, we note this with the superscripted arrow (accent mark) above the syllable ( < ).
23) If a short vowel comes just before the shewa, the shewa is silent.
24) If a long vowel comes just before the shewa, it is spoken. Long vowels are usually represented by a
macron (e.g. “ā”) above them! Of course, others such as “waw” and “patah” have no macron but are
still long.
25) If there are 2 shewas standing next to each other, the first is silent and the second is spoken.
Syllabification 26) In Aramaic, there are 6 consonants that, when marked with a dagesh (the little dot inside the letter), the
sounds change. As you might have guessed from the heading (BeGaDKePhat), those letters are: Beth,
Gimmel, Daleth, Kaph, Peh and taw.
27) The consonants with the dagesh inside them are pronounced “hard” while those without the dagesh are
pronounced softly. Grammarians refer to the “hard” pronunciation by the terms “unspirantized” or
“stops”. When the consonant is pronounced with a soft degree, it is referred to as “spirantized” or
“fricative”.
28) The general rule of thumb is that if a “vowel” comes just before one of these BeGaDKePhaT
(BGDKPT) letters, the pronunciation is soft. This is easy to remember because in general, vowels tend
to have a more of a breathy sound to them. So, vowel just before BGDKPT consonant = soft. The
corollary, as you might have guessed, is that if a consonant comes before one of the BGDKPT letters,
then the pronunciation is “hard” or “unspirantized”. As usual, there are always exceptions. For
example, prefixes and even the last letter of the preceding word can change the pronunciation of a
BGDKPT letter if it is at the beginning of a word.
 30) We refer to two types of syllables in Aramaic: Open & Closed. Unlike English, we don not start with
the first syllable and then move forward through the word, counting the rest of the syllables, in order to
determine how many total syllables there are. Instead, we start at the end of the word and work
backwards.
31) Each syllable begins with a conversation
32) A syllable never begins with a vowel
Syllabification 33) An open syllable = consonant + vowel
34) A closed syllable = consonant + vowel + consonant
35) Along with the “hard” pronunciation aspect, another function of the dagesh is that it can indicate when
a letter is to be doubled. The general rule for discerning when the letter is to be doubled or not is
twofold:
36) If there’s a dot inside, double it, but…
37) If the dagesh is inside one of the BeGaDKePhaT letters, make sure that it is preceded by a vowel,
otherwise, do not double it.
38) It is common practice to refer to the doubling dagesh as a dagesh forte and the non-doubling as a
dagesh lene.
39) Aramaic has gender-oriented pronouns.
40) 1st – 3rd Person Common, Masculine and Feminine as well as Singular & Plural are used to identify
pronouns
41) That the first 3 sets all begin with “ant” and then the endings morph when they get into the plural. The
Pronouns remaining letters, with the exception of the 3 person pl. begins with an ’i. Still, you can note the
similarities between it and the singular version as they both have to do with “i” and “y”.
42) The endings of the 1CS & 1CP and the 2FS & 2FP are similar.
43) All of the endings of the singular column are odd looking endings, except for 1CS whereas the endings
of the plurals are all pretty basic (w/the exception of the 3MP).
44) In Aramaic, the noun and the adjective work closely with one another. In fact, they are “declined” the
same way and therefore, share the same “paradigm”. It has been said that there is no distinction
between the Aramaic noun and adjective.
45) Basically, nouns / adjectives have 6 ways of changing
46) The use of varying vowel points
47) The doubling or “gemination” of the 2nd or 3rd consonants
48) The doubling or “gemination” of a “two consonant root”
49) The doubling or “gemination” of the last 2 consonants of a “three consonant root”
50) Attached prefixes
51) Attached suffixes
52) In grammatical terms, a “declined” noun or adjective is one that is “inflected” or bent, that is, changed
from its original form. Whereas in Greek a “declined” word has to do with “gender”, “number” and
“case”, Aramaic focuses on “gender”, “number” and “state”.
53) In Aramaic, “state” basically refers to what the noun is doing and how it might be in relationship to the
Nouns & other words around it. There are 3 states in Aramaic which we may memorize using the mnemonic
Vowel Patterns
“ACE”. They are: Absolute, Construct and Emphatic (a.k.a. “determined state”).
54) Absolute: The simple or indefinite noun form: E.g.: a child, a dog, a king
55) Construct: Connected intimately to following word, often by hyphen: E.g.: child of…, dog of…, king
of…
56) Emphatic: Definite article added to noun: E.g.: the child, the dog, the king
57) Nearly all of the patterns begin with patah
58) Nearly all of the patterns have shewa as their second vowel point
59) Nearly all of the patterns have a qamets preceding the final consonant
60) Yodh & final nun only appear in plurals
61) All of the emphatic patterns end with aleph
62) Only the masculine forms of the absolute and construct have segol in them and the singulars are
identical.