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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: 2) by mendax on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:32PM (3 children)

    by mendax (2840) on Wednesday July 31 2019, @11:32PM (#873782)

    Is Aramaic really doomed? Yes, it is true that the people who speak it natively are disappearing, rendering it no longer a living language, but is it not true that there will always be people who learn this language in universities as Biblical scholars? After all, significant parts of the Old Testament are written in Aramaic. There is some comfort in knowing that all is not lost I suppose. The loss is not quite as radical as, say, a language that has never been written down going silent forever.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:38AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:38AM (#873873)

    The study of the Talmud, which is mostly written in Aramaic, is s central part of the Jewish religion and is not going away.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:07PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:07PM (#873988)

      Muslims have a plan to fix that.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:49PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @01:49PM (#874010)

        My money is on the lawyers. In any conflict they always win.