Tag Archives: aramaic

Is ISIS Threatening to Eliminate Aramaic, the Language Jesus Spoke?

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This is the image that's circulating with the story.

In a word: No.

In a few more words…

This claim has been circulating the Internet lately. It’s been on Brietbart, it’s been on Before It’s News, it’s spreading through Twitter and the rest of the Internet.

ISIS cannot, no matter how hard it tries, eliminate Aramaic. Aramaic is not a single language, but an entire family of languages. Sadly, the dialect spoken by Jesus is already dead. (Well, outside what I speak with my kids in reconstruction, but that doesn’t make it “living” by any means.) It died as a living language in the 6th and 7th centuries with Arab Conquest.

However, ISIS can certainly extinguish a few of the smaller Neo-Aramaic dialects if they strive to, which in some cases consist of a single surviving village — and let me not be equivocal about this: That is a serious problem.

Most Neo-Aramaic languages are severely endangered as it is and in the past 100 years we’ve seen dozens die due to violence (like this) or simply migration and adoption of another language (most Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects have been lost due to immigration to Israel and the adoption of Modern Hebrew). These language are certainly related (the dialect in Ma’loula the closest by lineage) but none of these are the language Jesus actually spoke.

Syriac Aramaic is the language of the liturgy of the Syriac Church (Syriac Orthodox, Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian, etc.) and recited every Sunday. That’s not going anywhere. Jewish Literary Aramaic is used in the Jewish liturgy nearly every Sabbath, and that’s not going anywhere either. There are Aramaic-speaking diasporas all over the place. Aramaic is global, and ISIS is not.

Peace,
-Steve

This Saturday (May 24): Expanded Talk on the Lord’s Prayer

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Lecture Advert

A reminder that my expanded talk is coming up this Saturday on my reconstruction of the Lord’s Prayer, prefaced with a bit of history about the Galilean dialect. This is the second time I’ve done something in this format, so I’m going to try and add in a number of things I was forced to leave out the first time around. 🙂 

Visit the Events page for more info.

Considering a Merger…

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So, I’m presently thinking long and hard about merging The Aramaic Blog and AramaicNT.org (The Aramaic New Testament) permanently.

Here at The Aramaic Blog, I get a heck of a lot of traffic, but I haven’t been doing much with it lately. The Aramaic New Testament, however, has a lot going for it, it’s on an up-to-date self-hosted WordPress install so I have much more control, it looks spiffier, it hosts all of my Aramaic courseware and translations, and it’s really where I wish to expand upon over the next year. Both often overlap in their purview so much that I’ve often found myself debating which blog to post something new to.

Historically they were separate because The Aramaic Blog had more of an academic focus where AramaicNT.org had more of a theological focus. However, when I re-designed AramaicNT.org it became much more academically centered with fewer personal theological elements. Since then, I only tend to expound theologically on my personal blog, so the need for two Aramaic “spots” is no longer an issue.

So, if a merger is to happen, I would be taking all of the articles here on The Aramaic Blog and adding them to The Aramaic New Testament and setting up the proper redirects so that when folks go looking for the old articles, they’ll land on the new pages.

What do you, dear readers, think?

Peace,
-Steve

You Won’t Believe These Unbelievable Aramaic Expressions!!

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Over on Ralph The Sacred River, there is a neat discussion about recent Aramaic sightings in fiction (books & TV).:

I was surprised, though, to hear Aramaic used in the scripts of the series Spartacus on the Starz network. The series (now defunct, I understand) narrates the “lives and loves” of characters in an ancient gladiatorial training academy, and makes liberal use of cable TV’s license to display nudity and use profanity. Interestingly, beginning in the second season, a number of foreign gladiators enter the “ludus”: Ashur and Dagan, “a hulking Syrian.” The Romans speak English — the producers apparently unwilling to emulate Gibson and put Latin in their mouths — but not these new guys. They speak potty-mouthed Aramaic.

A couple of fun things about curious word choices when a translator comes up against a phrase they cannot translate very well… such as profanity. However, there is plenty of good Aramaic profanity floating around — given most of it doesn’t translate well into English without some explanation.

Ed also goes to show that not all Aramaic is equal, due to some vocabulary choices.

Anyways, click through to read the rest. 🙂

Peace,
-Steve

New Babylonian Aramaic Grammar

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Elitzur A. Bar-Asher Siegal, Introduction to the Grammar of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Lehrbücher orientalischer Sprachen – LOS III / 3, 2013).

The dialect spoken and written by the Jews of Babylonia from the third century CE onwards is known as “Jewish Babylonian Aramaic”. This is the first comprehensive description of this dialect since Levias’ “Grammar of Babylonian Aramaic” of 1930. The current book offers a thorough reexamination of the grammar on the basis of a large corpus in its manuscript witnesses. It not only synthesizes the results of recent scholarship but introduces original insights on many important questions. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Babylonian Aramaic or the Babylonian Talmud. The discussion frequently makes reference to parallels in other Semitic languages and in other Aramaic dialects, as well as to a variety of topics in linguistics . The book is structured as a textbook: it introduces topics in an order determined by pedagogical considerations, and offers vocabulary notes and translation exercises at the end. At the same time, the book can be used as a reference grammar.

(HT Jim Davila)

Peace,
-Steve