12-03-2014, 04:11 AM
Rab is short for rab-ba, which literally means "great one." However in usage, rab-ba many times means "teacher" in the New Testament. Father is pronounced A-wa in Chaldean Aramaic and transliterated into the Greek New Testament as Abba. The second letter of the Aramaic alphabet (Beth) has a "b" and a "w" sound. Greek doesn't have a "w" sound so that sound was often transliterated as "b" in the New Testament. "Father" is pronounced av-va in Assyrian. The letter Beth has a "b" and a "v" sound in Assyrian as well as in Sephardic Hebrew. The one letter (Beth) is doubly pronounced in Assyrian but not so in Chaldean. The spelling is the same but the pronunciation is sometimes different in the different Aramaic dialects.