Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original "writing on the wall," presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, "Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?")
But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it. (My father, a Jew born in Kurdish Iraq, is a native speaker and scholar of Aramaic; I grew up in Los Angeles and know just a few words.) This generational rupture marks a language's last days. For field linguists like Khan, recording native speakers—"informants," in the lingo—is both an act of cultural preservation and an investigation into how ancient languages shift and splinter over time.
In a highly connected global age, languages are in die-off. Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today are expected to go silent by century's end. We live under an oligarchy of English and Mandarin and Spanish, in which 94 percent of the world's population speaks 6 percent of its languages. Yet among threatened languages, Aramaic stands out. Arguably no other still-spoken language has fallen farther.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-to-save-a-dying-language-4143017/?all
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:18PM (3 children)
Make it a language in some popular TV series.
Look how many people study made-up languages like Klingon or
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothraki_language [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 31 2019, @05:49PM
First, you'll have to create a popular TV series. You don't just sit down, and create a Star Trek on a whim. I don't believe the creators of Star Trek knew what they were doing when they did it. It took a couple seasons (or more) for Trekkies to create themselves. Way back then, Star Trek was just a somewhat more modern, slightly more Sci-Fi savvy version of Lost in Space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG0ochx16Dg [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @08:13PM
I remember watching Lord of the Rings and hearing Gandalf refusing to utter the black speech of Mordor and wondering if he was talking about jive or ebonics.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @12:42PM
That is probably not the problem. Few people are offended dismissive or have negative emotions towards some character on a TV show or in a book. If you asked them if they thought someone named Daenerys would attack them you'd be laughed at.
Now try that with names of historically evil people.
"Do you know how to pronounce muhammad?"