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Full Version: Is dot a dot in Khabouris ?
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I have a very simple question ...

In Khabouris, there are dots at the end of some words (I do not mean vocalization dots above or below letters but dots at the base letter level, after some words). Do they consistently mean sentence ends? I have just (re)started reading Youkhanan from an excellent Khabouris transcription by Stephen Silver, and the first thing I have noticed were those dots.

Second related question - are there examples of the "dots" serving the same purpose in any confirmed older Aramaic documents ?

Third - do we treat them as later "extras" and not part of the original text ?

By the way, having done some translation recently (between English and my mother tongue) and struggling with some bits I can tell from experience that the best and most convincing way of detecting and confirming a "translation direction arrow" are the word puns and jokes. You can have a translator who is so good, with a great vocabulary and intelect, that it may even sometimes be easier and smoother to read the translation than the original, but the word puns and jokes will always remain "the killer" and will show which of the two is the primary text. Good I had no poetry to deal with.

Jerzy
Jerzy, until you get a fuller answer, I thought I should say what I have learned.

It seems that all dots were later added to the text, punctuation and otherwise. The ones at the end seem to be end of sentence and comma type stops in the text. I have noticed this as I have been going through the Khabouris line by line.

Also, these larger dots at the end of some of the words, and at the end of the sentences, are in the same place in other Manuscripts, both older and younger than the Khabouris, such as the Houghton 1199 syc 4 "Ashael Grant" MSS and the Schoyen MSS 2080, so, they seem to all come from an original source, and became standard in the copies.

Shlama,
Chuck
Thank you Chuck. Just the type of confirmation I was looking for. Any extra info always of value to me.