SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:31PM (1 child)
That was my original position, but after a long discussion with someone I decided that there was no reason to presume that the original records would have survived. But it appears definitely true that he did not appear significant to Suetonius, the Roman historian contemporary who traveled in Palestine and wrote of his travels. There's something that *could* be a reference to him, but ???
My original position was that he was the Jewish Underground's Adam Selene. After reviewing the evidence that would be expected to have survived, however, I'm forced to admit that he may have existed, and not be the resurrection of an Essene story.
P.S.: Accepting his existence doesn't mean accepting that either his actions or his words were accurately reported. The probabilities for that are a lot weaker.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 31 2019, @07:17PM
Contemporary??? I wouldn't call a guy who wrote about him SEVENTY years after his supposed existence, a contemporary. I don't "accept" anything. Show me proof or shut up.