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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 31 2019, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-there-an-app-for-that? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:32PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 31 2019, @06:32PM (#873665) Journal

    In a Deep Space Nine episode where a few Ferengi landed in 1947 Roswell NM, (don't ask), the universal translators were in their ears, or skulls. One Ferengi's translator was malfunctioning and thus he couldn't understand the strange English language spoken by the Humans of New Mexico.

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