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Acts 2:5-12
#1
Doesn't Acts 2:5-12 story seemingly contradict the assertion made on this forum that Peshitta Aramaic was 'lingua franca' for most of the areas mentioned in this text?

All were amazed at Pentecost that they heard a bunch of Galileans, speaking all their native languages. What were those? Are we talking about different dialects of Aramaic here?

My native language is Romanian which is one of the many Romance languages out there. Italian seems to be closest to may native language, and Romanians learn Italian very fast and with not as much effort as say, English. I have very close relatives who did that, and they all can bear witness to it. If I hear an Italian speak (I haven't learnt any), I may get a general idea at times, of what he/she might be speaking about, but yet it's a completely different language. If a Romanian with absolutely no knowledge of Italian would all of the sudden start to speak Italian, I would certainly be utterly amazed (the same would be true for Latin, even though it sounds very close to Romanian).

The text would seem to indicate to me that by this time the Aramaic in Galilee was quite different from what was spoken even in Judea. Different enough as to have them in complete amazement, when they heard them speak their native language.

Isn't the assertion that Peshitta is the exact language in which the apostles wrote, a little bit of a stretch then? From what I gather, Peshitta language is the Aramaic that was used in some of the territories mentioned in this text.

It not very clear to me, from the various posts on this forum, what's the assumption made here over all. Is Peshitta a very reliable translation from some earlier Aramaic sources which has been lost, or it's actually the language in which the letters were written in, originally? Also the script in which those letters were written was Estrangela, is that the assumption?
Were there any archeological discoveries made in the land of Israel, that shows that Estrangela was in use there?
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#2
This is an intriguing theme.

Just as Greek was a lingua franca, for which we know the following.
While Egypt spoke 'egyptian' (coptic) and Italy Latin (mainly), and galatia spoke Celtic, we can be sure that Greek was the lingua franca for them.

The Aramaic of Odessa is the most widespread written eastern language of that time. From this we can conclude that the Peshitta was written in a 'koine' /common understood language of that time.

Of _course_ everybody had their own dialect. But as you noted with Italian/romanian/spanish/french (latinic languages), Semitic languages also are 'look-alikes'. For Arabic/hebrew/semitic people it was not so hard to learn a common aramaic (syriac).
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