Babylonian and Palestinian Mishnah.

Many of Rabbi's own emendations have been preserved in the different readings of Yerushalmi and Babli, although the differences between these two versions are not all due to his changes, as Rapoport assumes ("Kerem Ḥemed," vii. 157-167); for most of the differences not due to philological causes must be ascribed to the different mishnaic schools. In addition to the Debe Rabbi, later amoraim also emended the Mishnah if the received reading seemed untenable. These emendations were then incorporated into the Mishnah; those made by the Babylonian amoraim into the Mishnah which was taught in the Babylonian schools; and those made by the Palestinian amoraim into the Mishnah as taught in the Palestinian schools. Thus, in 'Ab. Zarah i., the Mishnah in the Palestinian Talmud was corrected according to the Gemara (Yer. 'Ab. Zarah i. 39d), while the Mishnah in the Babylonian Talmud retained its original reading. Sometimes—curiously enough—the Mishnah of the Palestinian Talmud was corrected to harmonize with the results of the discussion in the Babylonian Talmud, and vice versa (comp. O. H. Schorr in "HeḤaluẓ," vi. 32-47; Frankel, "Mebo," pp. 19a-22a), although only a few of these emendations, of which there are many in the Talmud—introduced by the phrases "sami mi-kan" = "omit from here," or "ḥasuri miḥasra" = "something missing," or "teni kak" = "teach thus"—found their way into the Mishnah itself. Many of the amoraim objected to corrections in the Mishnah, holding that the phraseology chosen by the ancients in their mishnaic collections should be retained unchanged (Yer. Nazir i. 51a).

The Mishnah is written in a peculiar kind of Hebrew, which is far more different from the Hebrew of the earlier books of the Old Testament than from that of some of the later ones and which is, therefore, correctly designated as "Neo-Hebraic." This language was spoken by the people of Palestine as late as the second century of the common era, but was cultivated especially by the scholars; so that it was called "leshon ḥakamim" = "the speech of the wise." It contains many old Hebraic terms which were preserved in popular speech, although they are not found in the Bible, as well as numerous foreign elements, especially from Aramaic, Greek, and Latin; the scholars being forced to adopt these loanwords as terms for objects and concepts which were formerly unknown and for which there were no designations in the Hebrew vocabulary. Foreign words were especially used to designate implements borrowed from foreign peoples (comp. Weiss, "Mishpaṭ Leshon ha-Mishnah," pp. 1-7; A. Geiger, "Lehrbuch zur Sprache der Mischna," pp. 1-3); and these borrowed terms were so Hebraized as to be taken by many for native words.