The Influence of Hebrew Language on Nominal Group Elements in Judeo-Persian Translations of the Torah

Abstract

In the past, the translators have typically chosen morpheme to morpheme or source-oriented method for the scriptures translations. In this method, the source text would have a great influence on syntactic structures of target language. One of the scriptures translated to Persian by this method is the Torah. Usually the translations of the Torah can be seen in Persian-Hebrew texts. Most of this translations belong to 4th to 8th century A.H. In this article the author seeks to review some influences of Hebrew language on Persian nominal group elements in Persian-Hebrew translations of the Torah. For this purpose, the modifiers, numerative adjective, agreement in number and etc. were reviewed. Eventually, we will see the translations of the Torah are more difficult and strict compared with other translations of scriptures, so that translators tried to literally enter syntactic structures of Hebrew in Persian language. In addition, the influence of Hebrew language in Persian-Hebrew texts is a lot in the field of word components order, average in phrase structure and low in morphology.