From Oral Transmission to Written Transmission: Concerning the Meaning of Some Orthographic Forms in the Manuscripts of the Mishnah and of Rabbinic Literature

The manuscripts of rabbinic literature often transmit unusual orthographic and morphological forms. While many of these forms are errors, some of them reflect ancient linguistic phenomena and give us insight into the transmission of the Hebrew language in the Middle Ages. Indeed, a number of these unusual forms can be shown to have come into being in the transition from oral to written transmission.

For example, the scribe of the Kaufmann manuscript of the Mishnah wrote ורוב עצמות instead of ורובע עצמות. Evidently the scribe heard the phrase עצמות ורובעrecited orally and the two ʿayins coalesced into one geminated consonant. The scribe transcribed the geminated ʿayin as a single one, since in Hebrew a geminated consonant is always written with one letter.

Another example of this phenomenon is the tendency of short proclitic words to be connected to the following word. When the texts were transcribed to writing, these words were written as one orthographic word. This phenomenon explains forms such as אִם >) האם ) and [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="01i" /] which have been mentioned in the research literature.

This paper presents these forms as well as similar ones and analyses how they came into being. All of the forms presented are explained to have come into being during the transition from oral to written transmission.