On the Spellings of the Lexical Items b‘š, b‘šwn’, and mšb‘wn’ in Christian Palestinian Aramaic

Abstract

Christian Palestinian Aramaic has always been a mine for peculiar words and spellings despite being a rather conservative written dialect within the group of Western Aramaic. Three words in this dialect, b‘š, b‘šwn’, and mb‘šwn’, which are variant derivations of b’š, have puzzled scholars for more than a century. In addition to another set of ‘incorrectly spelled’ words, these were considered doubtful in the first dictionary, grammar, and text editions, but they turned out to have sound explanations and etymological origins.