Hebrew within Aramaic within Mishnaic Hebrew

Adil Steinsaltz published the Babylonian Talmud in English. There is lately some JPostery on this. It mentions Rabbi Rocksalt in the present-tense where the man had actually left for the world-to-come in 2020. Also the much-touted Talmud study in Asia-Pacific is perhaps overstated, although one can get an education there if one is motivated.

It is, however, the thought that counts: Jews nowadays want goys to learn Talmud. The Donin extracts and the Shulhan have been making them look bad unnecessarily (and, by extension, me). So far, Talmud-study seems mainly directed to Asians simply because they're not as reflexive as are Westerners.

Anyway I stumbled into some notation that the basis for the Talmud, the Mishnah, has some Aramaic passages. I'm not exactly surprised to hear of it, but I did wonder - how much of it; it turns out, not a lot. So little in fact that I'm unsure we can even stick a "dialect" label on it, although Palaestinian seems most-likely.

I find here that the Aramaic usually comes with some Hebrew. The Aramaic reads like the lowest stratum of wherever the passage occurs, usually the saying of some sage, but sometimes an ancient legal-ruling. The Hebrew tends to be in an introductory formula like הוּא הָיָה אוֹ׳, "he'd say". Or obvious glosses.

But even an Aramaic speaker can utter some Hebrew - especially if he's Jewish, lô? Pirkei Avot 2:6's Aramaic is as you drowned others, you have drowned; בסוֹף those who drowned you, shall drown. The verse bears two Hebrew phrases. The first is how this sage saw a skull bobbing in some water; that's a midrashic commentary. The second is that conjunction בסוֹף; literally it means "in the end". Even here that סוף root means the same in Aramaic, emphatic סוףא. I feel like its Hebraism could be from the same sage, nodding to the Jewish eschaton and Divine Justice. Why wouldn't it be?

In that light let's read Mishnah Sotah 9:15, where some annoying bore of a sage bemoans in Aramaic how every sage (implicitly not him, G-d no) is like a scribe and every scribe like a student [blah blah]. Here again is external Hebrew and internal Hebrew. Its Aramaic reads like the Islamic hadith in apocalyptic. In the externals, it's R. Eliezer the Great and he's starting the countdown after the Temple. Internally we have בְּעִיקְּבֿוֹת הַמָּשִׁיחַ. As the Pirkei: why not the Hebrew flourish, as long as we're in an apocalyptic context.

None of this is to be taken to challenge the external Hebrew glosses. I mean, we cannot know their verity but they seem reasonable. In particular Mishnah Sotah 9:15's frame: during Temple times the sages were competing with the ... Temple; so, by contrast, righteous. The pericope simply makes more sense after the Temple even if Eliezer didn't, himself, mention the Temple.

... well, such is my gemara so far. I can hazard a guess as to where one could find some other commentary on these passages.