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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: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:10PM
Definitely agree with most of this. FYI:
Suffix is from Latin suffixus ("something fastened on"), the past participle of suffigere, which means "to fasten onto/under" from sub- + figere "to fasten." (Think of other words like affix and even fix, which mean to, well, "fix to/fasten" or "fix.")
Whereas suffice is ultimately from Latin sufficere, which means "to put under, to supply as substitute" and figuratively "to be adequate," from sub- + facere (often turns into -ficere in compounds) "to make/do."
Hint for etymology: words with su- followed by double letters are often combining forms in Latin using sub- + some other root word, where the b gets lost/transformed. And a huge number of English words come from Latin facere and its derivatives -- facere had dozens of different meanings in Latin depending on context, and with all the various compounds formed with prefixes, you get well over a hundred meanings in Latin that migrated in various ways to English, as noted in this table [wikipedia.org]. Actually, that table is really useful, as it makes clear that if you learn about a dozen Latin verbs and their combining forms, you'll see them in an enormous number of English words and thereby know where the words come from.