Mishnaic Hebrew century after the publication of the Mishnah, Mishnaic Hebrew began to fall into disuse as a spoken language. The Babylonian Gemara (, circa 500), as well as the earlier Jerusalem Talmud published between 350 and 400, generally comment on the Mishnah and Baraitot in Aramaic. Nevertheless, Hebrew survived as a liturgical and literary language in the form of later Amoraic Hebrew, which sometimes occurs in the Gemara text. Many of the characteristic features of Mishnaic Hebrew pronunciation may well have been found already in the period of Late Biblical Hebrew. A notable characteristic distinguishing it from Biblical Hebrew of the
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"