I was shocked as well!
Apparently, Yeranen Yaakov over on their blog found definitive attestation from a very well known and well-respected source that the Gemara was not written in Aramaic as is commonly believed. Apparently it was originally written in Indonesian!
Peace,
-Steve 😉
Oops! The Gemara written in Indonesian and not Aramaic?! Surely Google can’t be wrong? It just shows how little Aramaic is understood!
I’m sorry to be ignorant but what is the Gemara? Presumably a book but why is it called Gemara and what’s it about. Thanks
PS. I enjoy your blog. Rosaleen
Hehe no worries Rosaleen. I actually meant to expound upon the Gemara a little bit for readers just like yourself, but I was a bit pressed for time when I wrote this.
All of this has to do with the Talmud.
In a nutshell, the Talmud is the recorded Oral Laws of Judaism and is made up of two parts, the Mishnah (Hebrew for “Repetition” or “Study”; a compilation of the oral traditions) and the Gemara (Aramaic for “Completion” or “Study”; commentary between Rabbis debating and interpreting those oral traditions).
As you can probably guess by their names as explained above, where the Mishnah was mostly written in Hebrew (“Mishnaic Hebrew” as it’s called, a dialect influenced by Aramaic) the Gemara was mostly written in Aramaic.
Google Translator’s language auto-detect feature flubbed on two pages of the Gemara, labeling it as Indonesian by mistake. 🙂
Then again, Google Translator was never meant to take on an Aramaic text (although with Google, one day… who knows?). 🙂
Peace,
-Steve
Actually, I meant the whole thing as a joke. The page that I linked to has an image scan of the page of Gemara, so Google Translate wouldn’t pick it up as Aramaic anyways. I’m still not sure why it picked up the other languages – not English. Weird.