It was very emotional. For most people, that there are any native speakers of Aramaic left at all will come as a surprise. In fact there are half-a-million, and Khan is one of a tiny band of researchers trying to document their speech. But it is a race against time.
The most fluent speakers are all beyond retirement age, and the language is expected to die within a generation. Partially as a result, there has been a recent surge of interest, with 11 of the leading academics in the field spending up to 10 months this past year at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University HUJI , comparing notes on individual projects and working together on a new book of neo-Aramaic.
At the end of May, an academic conference marking the end of the joint study year attracted around 50 people. What makes the effort so difficult is that modern Aramaic is not one language but more like a family of languages, with up to different dialects.
None of them sound like the language of the Babylonian Talmud or of Jesus. Nevertheless, there is a direct relationship. Like all languages, it evolved over time Khan notes that modern English-speakers can barely understand texts like Beowulf, written in old English just 1, years ago.
It also evolved geographically, particularly as many speakers lived in isolated villages deep in the mountains. And for the past millennium, there has also been a split between Christian and Jewish speakers, whose dialects can differ radically. Jewish speakers moved mainly to Israel between the s and s. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser. Aramaic: Does anyone still speak it? I know that Aramaic is still used as a religious language in Judaism and by some Middle-Eastern Christians. Pictured is a bilingual inscription in Aramaic and Greek from Kandahar, in Afghanistan. Ancient: A Christian pilgrim prays as a wooden cross is carried towards the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where Aramaic was once widely used.
Aramaic is not alone as an endangered language. Around Fifty to 90 percent of the roughly 7, languages currently spoken worldwide are expected to die out by the end of the century, reports Smithsonian. There are a wide variety of different Aramaic dialects spoken worldwide - with the language still used by certain Eastern Christian churches, in the form of Syriac. Work: Professor Geoffrey Khan is creating a database of the recordings he has made with speakers of Aramaic.
Modern Aramaic is now spoken by many small, and often isolated communities of different Christian, Jewish, and Mandean ethnic groups of West Asia. Its first speakers, the Arameans, were desert nomads, and the language has also been used by groups as diverse as Christians, Jews, Mandeans, Manicheans, Muslims, Samaritans, Zoroastrians and pagans. The language lost its standing in the Middle East in the 7th Century AD when Muslim Muslim armies from Arabia conquered the area, establishing Arabic as the key tongue.
Estimates of the current number of Aramaic speakers is thought to be around half-a-million, although the modern version of the language Neo-Aramaic, has dozens of different dialects - some of which have already died out, Smithsonian.
Prof Khan has published highly regarded works on previously undocumented Aramaic dialects and is working on a web-based database of text and audio recordings of the language. He has travelled as far afield as the former Soviet republic of Georgia in search of its different dialects.
Ancient: Aramaic is related to Hebrew and Arabic. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Care home boss breaks down in tears after having to sack SIX members of staff over No10's 'no jab, no job' policy - as she pleads with Boris Johnson to 'give us a break'.
Argos AO. Privacy Policy Feedback. Race to save the language of Jesus: Aramaic in danger of becoming extinct as number of speakers of ancient tongue plummets Language once widely used in Middle East but speakers are now scattered Aramaic is believed to have been used by Jesus and his disciples British linguist Geoffrey Khan, who met with journalist Ariel Sabar, is developing database of recordings By Sam Adams Published: GMT, 25 January Updated: GMT, 9 October e-mail View comments.
Share this article Share. Share or comment on this article: Race to save the language of Jesus: Aramaic in danger of becoming extinct as number of speakers of ancient tongue plummets e-mail. What became known to many as the language that Jesus spoke is much more complex than its portrayal in that particular film. For starters, Aramaic is actually comprised of many dialects, some of which are extremely different from each other.
The Aramaic that Jesus supposedly spoke was only one of these dialects. Both the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets are based on Aramaic script, so you can see just how influential it was, and still is, to the languages of the Middle East and Western Asia.
At one point, Aramaic was even the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent. The native speakers of Aramaic were known as Arameans, and settled in an area around BC where modern-day Syria is. The area was then known as Aram, and is considered by linguists to be the hub and home of Aramaic. The Arameans later began to move to other areas, namely Mesopotamia, both voluntarily and involuntarily.
Along with their belongings, they took the Aramaic language and alphabet with them when they left. As it spread it became more varied, thus the different dialects still around today. The main division is between dialects found on either side of the Euphrates River. The dialects can also be categorized based on time period, falling under either Old, Middle, or Modern Aramaic.
Around BC, after Darius I conquered Mesopotamia, the Aramaic of that region and time period became the official language used by different regions of the empire to communicate with each other.
0コメント