Talmud the Gemara are in either Mishnaic or Biblical Hebrew. The rest of the Gemara, including the discussions of the Amoraim and the overall framework, is in a characteristic dialect of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. There are occasional quotations from older works in other dialects of Aramaic, such as Megillat Taanit. Overall, Hebrew constitutes somewhat less than half of the text of the Talmud. This difference in language is due to the long time period elapsing between the two compilations. During the period of the Tannaim (rabbis cited in the Mishnah), a late form of Hebrew known as Rabbinic or Mishnaic Hebrew
Yemenite Hebrew well as the "ḥaṭaf sǝġūl", are all actually one and the same vowel (in the Babylonian tradition), and it is as though he had written two "shǝwa"s one after the other. Likewise, in the possessive case, “belonging to her companion” ⇒ שֶׁלַּחֲבִרְתָּהּ, the "lamed" in the preposition של is written with the vowel "pataḥ". The Leiden MS. of the Jerusalem Talmud is important in that it preserves some earlier variants to textual readings of that Talmud, such as in Tractate "Pesaḥim" 10:3 (70a), which brings down the old Palestinian-Hebrew word for "charoseth" (the sweet relish eaten at Passover), viz. "dūkeh"