After a lifetime or so working on Micronesian languages, I decided it might be interesting to combine linguistics with sitting in the synagogue on Saturday morning. Someone once asked me why I had never worked on Semitic languages. I answered: "There are enough people working on them without me." I probably should have said: "Because I really don't know anything about them!" Even this late in life is not too late to learn though.
In an attack of whimsy, I began to look at Aramaic a couple of years ago, but didn't quite know where to start. So I started with Onqelos, the standard targum (Aramaic translation) of the Pentateuch. Mostly I've been playing, going through the Sperber (1959) edition of the text to see what little oddities strike me. Experience has taught me that when you study your text material closely, you notice things. Most of what I've noticed so far has been morpho-phonological. Given that Onqelos is for the most part a reasonably close translation of the Hebrew, I couldn't really expect to find any interesting Jewish Literary Aramaic syntax.
In 2001, I was asked to identify some Aramaic documents. They turned out to be six Mandaean religious texts (written, of course, in Classical Mandaic). All I knew about Mandaic at that time was what the script looked like, so I sought help far and wide in identifying the actual texts. Some of them are now identified, more or less definitively, but the identity of others is still up in the air.
In the process, I've learned a fair bit about Mandaic, but that detour pushed the "work" I had been doing on Jewish Literary Aramaic onto a back burner. I did manage a paper entitled Vowel Quantity in Jewish Literary Aramaic, to appear in the Journal of Semitic Studies, and currently available in pre-final draft form in pdf or postscript formats. Comments on the draft are still welcome, but please don't totally rubbish the paper -- my ego is quite fragile.
This year I've had the opportunity to teach Semitic linguistics to a general undergraduate audience, and that's been taking up most of my time. In the course, I've tried to highlight at least some of the areas in which the study of Semitic languages has had impact on theoretical concerns in linguistics. It's given me a chance to start getting caught up on my reading -- to the extent permitted by my university's meager Semitic studies journal holdings. I'm making considerable use of the library's document delivery service, bless it and those who run it. I trust some interesting thoughts will come from all that reading; in any event, I feel that I'm learning things.
And one day I might even get a chance to give a course on modern Hebrew Bible criticism. Not linguistics, I know, but fun.