Aramaic Annotations: Pt.

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© 2010, T. Michael W. Halcomb | www.MichaelHalcomb.com
1. Getting to the Root of the Matter: In Aramaic, nouns need to be
understood in terms of “roots”. If we can identify the root of a word, then we are
better equipped to understand what part of speech it is, its function, etc. As a
crude sort of example, in English, we have the word “Dance”. Just looking at this
word, it could be a noun or a sort of imperative verb, a command. Let’s think of
“Dance” as our root. Now, let’s add the suffix “rs” to it and we have “Dancers”,
this is a plural noun. Just by looking at this word, we know the root is still
“Dance”. Let’s add the prefix “Break” so that we get “Breakdancers”. Now,
even though “dance” is not capitalized, we still know that the root is “dance”
because breakdancing it is directly related to a dance. Yet, we see three parts to
the word: Prefix, Root & Suffix. Aramaic works in a similar sort of way.
2. Identifying the Root: All Aramaic words are built with a root that contains
3 consonants. Sometimes the consonants morph and we have to be aware of
when that takes place but in general, the roots are pretty easy to identify
(especially once you learn the prefixes, infixes and suffixes). We will offer some
examples of identified roots here and in the next few Annotations, we will look at
more specific rules, details and examples.
3. Some Examples:

hlWbx lbx lybx

htWlbx albx lbxl lbyx

While these are very basic and sort of crude examples, just spend some time looking at them to see how the root
“lbx” shows up in different ways when the word is inflected differently by prefixes, infixes and suffixes. More
explanation about how all this works will be given later.