Category Archives: Neat Stuff

New Galilean Aramaic Online Course BETA Open

Galilean, Neat Stuff, News

Happy New Year!

I was hoping to have this ready-to-release today, but instead I’d rather share what I have already competed, and solicit feedback to make it even better:

I’ve been working on a brand new Galilean Aramaic 101 course. 🙂

Using the LearnPress plugin, I’ve been able to more rapidly work on a bunch of stuff that was slow and difficult to handle before (when it came to making supporting multimedia, editing, or coding, coding, coding… it was off-putting). Now if I have an idea for a new lesson, I can put it together in a matter of hours instead of weeks, or if I have an idea for a new course, I can put it together in a matter of days, rather than months.

Right now it’s in BETA. That means it’s not complete, but it’s well on its way there, and that I also need your feedback to make it better. Visit the course page, sign up, try out the lessons and quizzes, and leave comments on the courseware.

Other courses I’m currently working on outlines for are the second level of this course (which will be more comprehensive), a re-do of the Lord’s Prayer course, and a course on the Sermon on the Mount. Once the Beta period is over for 101, we’ll see what direction these will go. 🙂

Peace,
-Steve

Wooden Aramaic Lord’s Prayer Bracelet

Galilean, Neat Stuff

So… we got a Glowforge. And I couldn’t help myself. I’m thinking I should make some of these in olive wood.

Since it’s so much lighter than the metal version (and not nearly as hard to make) I might change the design so that it’s made out of 12 one-sided plates rather than 6 double-sided ones.

What do folks think?

Peace,
-Steve

Pope Francis Suggests “Change” to Lord’s Prayer

Aramaic Blog, Galilean, Galilean Thoughts, Neat Stuff, News

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/08/569385769/pope-francis-suggests-changing-the-words-to-lord-s-prayer

So I’ve been asked a lot about this lately – especially because of my own attempts at understanding the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic – and my initial reactions were mixed. However, after my mind settled I did realize that this suggestion had genuine merit.

Context:

For those of you who are only casually familiar with what this is all about, Pope Francis made a suggestion about the traditional rendition of the Lord’s Prayer, specifically the phrase “lead us not into temptation.”

His argument was that, “It is not He that pushes me into temptation and then sees how I fall. […] A father does not do this. A father quickly helps those who are provoked into Satan’s temptation.”

His proposed solution was to alter the translation to, “Do not let us enter into temptation.”

The Language in Question:

The Greek, on its face, doesn’t seem to quite support this, using the word εἰσφέρω, which is usually rendered as “to lead into” or “bring into.” However, it is this word that is often used to translate the Aramaic verb עלל /’alal/ – and it is this verb that we see used in Aramaic renderings of the Lord’s Prayer (the Peshitta, the Old Syriac, and the Christian Palestinian Aramaic New Testament), as well as other similar petitions in other Jewish prayers.

Where it can mean and is extensively used to express “to bring in” the primary meaning of עלל, is “to enter.”

Because of this עלל is the verb I chose for my own reconstruction of the Lord’s Prayer, however even in doing so, the form I chose was assuming that the Greek had chosen the appropriate nuance.

The Conclusion:

“Do not let us enter into temptation” in my own opinion, is – when the original languages are taken into consideration – an appropriate translation of the Lord’s Prayer, and could quite possibly express the original intention of the petition.

Peace,
-Steve

Call For Crowsourced Help! – Galilean Dictionary Project

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“We need you!”

If you’d like to help out with the Digital, Interactive, and Topical Galilean Aramaic Dictionary project now you can!

If you are good at:

  • Finding free-to-use images.
  • Searching through Aramaic citations for glosses or orthographical variants.
  • Double-checking categories and spotting mistakes or duplicates.

Email me at AramaicDesigns@gmail.com and I’ll assign you a block of word IDs and a task (images, orthography, glosses, categories, duplicates, etc.) from the list over on the RVCC server.

We need these boxes checked off. 🙂

You’ll get your name and a link on the RVCC page under the Contributors section ranked by number of contributions.

Any amount of help is appreciated. We have over 600 words to gather data for.

Spread the word!

Peace,
-Steve

Initial Dataset Posted

Galilean, Galilean Dictionary, Neat Stuff, , ,

I’ve gone ahead and updated the dictionary site on the RVCC server. Added a bit of CSS to make it easier to read, and then added a table that represents the initial dataset.

Presently the table is populated directly from a JSON file and as I add things into the list, the JSON file will be updated.

Peace,
-Steve