They probably spoke several languages, in different contexts. It's highly likely, unless they lived in isolated all-Jewish villages, that they spoke Medieval Arabic (many famous Jews actually wrote in Arabic; the 9th/10th century scholar Sa`adiah ben Gaon wrote most of his books in Arabic, such as Emunoth veDe`oth or "Beliefs and Doctrinal Knowledge," probably implying that it was the language he most expected people to be able to read) - or at least, spoke it in mixed situations. In non-Gentile settings, I would imagine they used an Aramaic dialect (keep in mind that this is what most of the Gemara of the Talmud is written in; most of the Mishnah is Hebrew), and was supposedly the mother tongue of many Jews even during Jesus' time), though they may have used Hebrew. I'm nearly positive that they used Hebrew for their religious services, prayers, etc.
Eddy wrote:
brandrinn wrote:
The problem is, the mountainous areas of the levant happen to be a hotspot of linguistic diversity. Hell, there are still people in Lebanon speaking Aramaic.
Whoa really? Considering that thousands of years have passed since the heyday of Aramaic, it must have undergone extraordinary amounts of linguistic change. How can we even consider the modern variety the same language as Aramaic spoken over two thousand years ago?
Obviously, it's not the "same" language - in the same way that Old English and Modern English aren't the same language. But they are also not completely "different" languages i.e. finlay is quite correct. Modern Hebrew is a great example; it sounds nothing like what Mishnaic Hebrew is reconstructed to have sounded like - leaving aside grammatical changes, like the fossilization/lexicalization of the smikhut construction (the same happened in Syriac, though it is still quite productive and rarely lexicalized in Arabic) in favor of a more analytic construction. Note that many forms of written modern Aramaic still use the Syriac abjad, and there's often the sense that speakers consider their languages to be dialects of Syriac (or Mandaic, which uses a greatly altered form of the Syriac abjad).
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