How to Save a Dying Language

Geoffrey Khan is racing to document Aramaic, the language of Jesus, before its native speakers vanish

  • By Ariel Sabar
  • Smithsonian magazine, February 2013, Subscribe
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St. Andrew’s church in Glenview Illinois.
St. Andrew’s church in Glenview, Illinois. (Greg Ruffing)

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Aramaic is still spoken by immigrants in Chicago suburbs such as Skokie (home of Nemo Toma, pictured).

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The number of Aramaic speakers alive today is difficult to calculate. Though some estimates set the figure as high as a half-million, that number is misleading. Because of its ancient lineage, lack of standardization and the isolation of speakers from one another, the modern tongue, known as Neo-Aramaic, has more than 100 dialects, most with no written analogue. Many dialects are already extinct, and others are down to their last one or two speakers.

As an everyday language, linguists told me, Aramaic is safe now in only one place: the Christian village of Maaloula, in the hills outside Damascus, where, with Syrian state support, elders still teach it to children.

***

Like many Neo-Aramaic experts, Khan, whose accent bears traces of his working-class childhood in northeast England, stumbled on the field almost by accident. In his early years at Cambridge, he worked on a trove of ancient Jewish manuscripts—in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic—known as the Cairo Geniza. But the long hours squinting at microfilm were a downer. Eager for change after a dispiriting day in a Jerusalem microfiche lab in the early 1990s, he asked a local organization of Kurdish Jews for referrals to actual native speakers of Aramaic.

No sooner had Khan sat down with a Jew from Erbil, a northern Iraqi city whose Aramaic dialect was undescribed, than he felt he had found his calling. “It completely blew my mind,” he told me. “To discover a living language through the lips of a living person, it was just incredibly exhilarating.”

The traditional aim of fieldwork is to produce for undocumented languages what linguists sometimes call “the holy trinity”: a grammar, which is a road map to sounds, syntax and structure; texts, which are chunks of unedited speech that reveal a language’s texture; and a dictionary. Over the past two decades, Khan has published highly regarded grammars on the previously undocumented dialects of Barwar, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulemaniyya and Halabja, all areas in Iraq, and Urmi and Sanandaj, in Iran. He is also at work on a web-based database of text and audio recordings that allows word-by-word comparisons across dozens of Aramaic dialects.

Aramaic speakers tend to greet microphone-toting linguists with traditional Middle Eastern hospitality. The widow we visited in Niles, Agnes Nissan Esho, would not let us leave before serving an elaborate lunch of kubba hamuth (sour dumplings), masta (yogurt), chicken with rice, and kadeh (spiced-walnut pastry).

“I’m getting very excited about some vowels here,” Khan said as Esho carried in the steaming plates of food.

“And I’m getting excited about the kadeh,” Bet-shmuel deadpanned.

The half-dozen Neo-Aramaic lin­guists I spoke with said informants often served feasts, confided family gossip and plied them with take-home boxes of fruit. But some are puzzled by the outside interest in their language, and others suspicious that their interlocutors are spies.

And bum steers abound. On our drive to one informant’s house, Khan told a story about his multiyear search for a Chicago man from Iraq’s Barwar region who had been described to him as a font of Assyrian folklore. “When we finally met, I said, ‘I heard you know lots of stories.’”

The man’s response: “I’ve forgotten them all.”

When we arrived at homes around Chicago, Khan, in dress shirt and blazer, explained his research, then drew from his backpack a digital voice recorder, a microphone and a sprawling loose-leaf questionnaire. Each session lasted two or three hours, as Khan worked, like an archaeologist with a soil sifter, to tease out nuances, among dialects, in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.


It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus.

The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language—once the tongue of empires—follows its last speakers to the grave.

The tax preparer, Elias Bet-shmuel, a thickset man with a shiny pate, was a local Assyrian who had offered to be our sherpa. When he burst into the lobby of Khan’s hotel that morning, he announced the stops on our two-day trek in the confidential tone of a smuggler inventorying the contents of a shipment.

“I got Shaqlanaye, I have Bebednaye.” He was listing immigrant families by the names of the northern Iraqi villages whose dialects they spoke. Several of the families, it turned out, were Bet-shmuel’s clients.

As Bet-shmuel threaded his Infiniti sedan toward the nearby town of Niles, Illinois, Khan, a rangy 55-year-old, said he was on safari for speakers of “pure” dialects: Aramaic as preserved in villages, before speakers left for big, polyglot cities or, worse, new countries. This usually meant elderly folk who had lived the better part of their lives in mountain enclaves in Iraq, Syria, Iran or Turkey. “The less education the better,” Khan said. “When people come together in towns, even in Chicago, the dialects get mixed. When people get married, the husband’s and wife’s dialects converge.”

We turned onto a grid of neighborhood streets, and Bet-shmuel announced the day’s first stop: a 70-year-old widow from Bebede who had come to Chicago just a decade earlier. “She is a housewife with an elementary education. No English.”

Khan beamed. “I fall in love with these old ladies,” he said.

***

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.

Its first speakers, the Arameans, were desert nomads. (The Bible describes the mythic forebear of the Hebrews as “a wandering Aramean.”) Spreading out from ancient Syria, they so blanketed Mesopotamia that when the Assyrians conquered the Middle East in the eighth century B.C., they adopted Aramaic—not their own tongue, Akkadian—as a language of empire. So did the Babylonians when they vanquished the Assyrians, and the Persians when they toppled the Babylonians. The language crossed the lips of Christians, Jews, Mandeans, Manicheans, Muslims, Samaritans, Zoroastrians and pagans.

The writing on the wall (the proverbial sort) came for Aramaic in the seventh century A.D., when Muslim armies from Arabia conquered the Middle East, and Arabic routed Aramaic as the region’s lingua franca. Aramaic survived only in the Kurdish mountains of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, places so remote they never got the memo. Jews and Christians there (though not Muslims, who spoke Kurdish) kept up Aramaic as an everyday tongue for another 1,300 years.

The number of Aramaic speakers alive today is difficult to calculate. Though some estimates set the figure as high as a half-million, that number is misleading. Because of its ancient lineage, lack of standardization and the isolation of speakers from one another, the modern tongue, known as Neo-Aramaic, has more than 100 dialects, most with no written analogue. Many dialects are already extinct, and others are down to their last one or two speakers.

As an everyday language, linguists told me, Aramaic is safe now in only one place: the Christian village of Maaloula, in the hills outside Damascus, where, with Syrian state support, elders still teach it to children.

***

Like many Neo-Aramaic experts, Khan, whose accent bears traces of his working-class childhood in northeast England, stumbled on the field almost by accident. In his early years at Cambridge, he worked on a trove of ancient Jewish manuscripts—in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic—known as the Cairo Geniza. But the long hours squinting at microfilm were a downer. Eager for change after a dispiriting day in a Jerusalem microfiche lab in the early 1990s, he asked a local organization of Kurdish Jews for referrals to actual native speakers of Aramaic.

No sooner had Khan sat down with a Jew from Erbil, a northern Iraqi city whose Aramaic dialect was undescribed, than he felt he had found his calling. “It completely blew my mind,” he told me. “To discover a living language through the lips of a living person, it was just incredibly exhilarating.”

The traditional aim of fieldwork is to produce for undocumented languages what linguists sometimes call “the holy trinity”: a grammar, which is a road map to sounds, syntax and structure; texts, which are chunks of unedited speech that reveal a language’s texture; and a dictionary. Over the past two decades, Khan has published highly regarded grammars on the previously undocumented dialects of Barwar, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulemaniyya and Halabja, all areas in Iraq, and Urmi and Sanandaj, in Iran. He is also at work on a web-based database of text and audio recordings that allows word-by-word comparisons across dozens of Aramaic dialects.

Aramaic speakers tend to greet microphone-toting linguists with traditional Middle Eastern hospitality. The widow we visited in Niles, Agnes Nissan Esho, would not let us leave before serving an elaborate lunch of kubba hamuth (sour dumplings), masta (yogurt), chicken with rice, and kadeh (spiced-walnut pastry).

“I’m getting very excited about some vowels here,” Khan said as Esho carried in the steaming plates of food.

“And I’m getting excited about the kadeh,” Bet-shmuel deadpanned.

The half-dozen Neo-Aramaic lin­guists I spoke with said informants often served feasts, confided family gossip and plied them with take-home boxes of fruit. But some are puzzled by the outside interest in their language, and others suspicious that their interlocutors are spies.

And bum steers abound. On our drive to one informant’s house, Khan told a story about his multiyear search for a Chicago man from Iraq’s Barwar region who had been described to him as a font of Assyrian folklore. “When we finally met, I said, ‘I heard you know lots of stories.’”

The man’s response: “I’ve forgotten them all.”

When we arrived at homes around Chicago, Khan, in dress shirt and blazer, explained his research, then drew from his backpack a digital voice recorder, a microphone and a sprawling loose-leaf questionnaire. Each session lasted two or three hours, as Khan worked, like an archaeologist with a soil sifter, to tease out nuances, among dialects, in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar.

How would you say, “There they are”? he asked. How about, “Here I am”? How about, “He wants to come”? And on it went: “You want to come. I want to come. Come!”

To make sure he heard words correctly, Khan repeated them slowly. He held his mouth open an extra second to verify a vowel or ran a finger over his Adam’s apple to confirm a guttural.

At a public housing tower, we spent more than an hour with a 97-year-old Assyrian from Turkey and his 90-year-old wife. When we stopped for coffee afterward, I asked Khan whether he’d found the meeting productive. “Some pronunciations of one of the consonants in the word for ‘hen’ are not according to what I predicted,” he said.

Advances in field linguistics, I saw, come in dribs and drabs, not eurekas.

The work has its exhilarating days, though, and few moved Khan more than his 2008 trip to the former Soviet republic of Georgia. He was in the capital of Tbilisi in search of Aramaic speakers from Salamas, a city in northwestern Iran. One wave of Assyrians fled Salamas after a Kurdish chieftain murdered a Church of the East patriarch there in 1918; another, after an earthquake a dozen years later.

In Tbilisi, people told Khan that all but three of the dialect’s “pure” speakers had died. At the first house, the man’s daughter apologized: Her father had recently suffered a stroke and was mute. At the second, an older woman lived with a quartet of energetic Rottweilers. “I took out my microphone and they just started howling and barking,” Khan recalled. “It was impossible.”

Finally, a local Assyrian escorted Khan one night into an imposing Soviet-era apartment block. At the top of a dark flight of stairs was a one-room apartment. A frail woman in her mid-90s answered the door.

Khan looked at her brittle physique and wondered how much she could handle. He told himself he would stay for just a few minutes. But when he got up to leave, the woman stretched a bony hand across the table and clasped his wrist.

“Biqir, Biqir,” she pleaded, in a small voice. (“Ask, ask.”)

“She literally grabbed onto me,” he said. “It was as if this was her last breath and she wanted to tell me everything.”

For two hours she hung on his wrist as his recorder filled with the sounds of a language in twilight.


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Comments (46)

Re Jesus speaking Aramaic, please consider the following article posted at http://www.biblescholars.org/members/passageexplained.php/653 In John 5 there is an interesting account of Jesus and a certain man who had an infirmity for 38 years. It is not the fact that Jesus healed the man that makes this story so unusual, but, that there was no such custom in Judaism of an angel troubling the water. The whole story is couched in a pagan context. However, that isn’t even what I want to focus our attention upon in this passage from John 5:2, which says: "Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches." I am simply focusing on the word “Hebrew” and specifically the “Hebrew tongue,” which is used a number of other places in John 19:13, 17 and 20 and also two places in Revelations 9:11 and 16:16. I have had several people ask me in the last few days about an article entitled, “Last Words,” that appeared in the February 2013 issue of Smithsonian. This article cites an attempt to document Aramaic in the suburbs of Chicago before its native speakers vanish. In the article Aramaic is mentioned as the predominant language spoken by Jesus and his followers. At one point in the article they even quote from Mark’s account of Jesus (Mark 15:34) Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani, which of course is a reference back to Psalms 22:1 where Jesus says Eli Eli lama sabachthani. Actually, in the original Hebrew he said azavtani instead of sabachthani although both words mean the same. We have known for the last 40 years that the language of Jesus was Hebrew and not Aramaic and a whole host of material documents that fact. In the Talmud (Nedarim 66b) it speaks of the difficulty an Aramaic speaking Jew from Babylon had in communicating with his Jerusalemite wife who spoke only Hebrew. Read the remainder of this article by Dr. Roy Blizzard at www.biblescholars.org.

Posted by Dr. Roy Blizzard on May 6,2013 | 10:35 PM

Could someone please help me find a speaker of the Aramaic language. I want to include the language in an app for iphone. It will be a free download and it is my attempt to create wider interest in this important by fading language. I want to amass 200 to 300 phrases--not necessarily religious, more practical and living--with written, phonetic break-down and audio. The app I have build in a communication app that tries to specialize on dialects, living language and historically important ones.

Posted by Brian on May 6,2013 | 06:02 AM

Hi I have worked on Syriac documents, and am learning Syriac, because I felt led to do that. It is an incredible thrill to be able to listen to audios in aramaic, and then to be able to begin to understand the ancient bible I downloaded. The work done to completion is to textualize Mcleans Syriac Dictionary, to pdf. It runs with Adobe, and has text of aramaic, phonetic and english, and original pixelation. These are comments that I wish to make: 1. The Assyrian language needs to be standardized. I wish there would be a big get together, and the assyrians decide on one standard word usage. Different regional pronunciations are OK, but the spelt word should be defined and set. This will make syriac much more easy to grasp for those beginners, and desirous to learn. 2. The Assyrian Church is a major preserver of the language, and a leader. I wish there was an assyrian king. 3. There must be computer apps developed which make the use of Syriac more spread. However, accuracy is a vital part to preserve the purity of the language. 4. The Assyrian language must be marketed to the world, for it is, in my opinion, the most important language ever: for obvious reason. If anyone in Cape Town is interested, I would like to have formed, an aramaic group, for the study, learning, and speaking of syriac. Shlama Rishad Youkhan

Posted by rishad youkhanan on March 11,2013 | 12:49 PM

To James In CA You wrote : "Ramsen: The author is the son of Yona Sabar, a distinguished scholar of Semitic languages who is, himself, a Kurdish native of northern Iraq, and a native speaker of Aramaic." It is obvious that Mr. Sabar is a Jew as is his father and all his family. Where did you come up with "a kurdish native of northern Iraq, and a native speaker of Aramaic" mixed together? The kurds claim to be of an aryan race (even though till now nothing has been found indicating their race and origins). The Jews are Semites. What do the Jews have to do with the kurds? Also, the Jews who lived in Iraq spoke a form of Assyrian in the north called the accent of Zakho and in Baghdad those who spoke it spoke fluent Assyrian as did those who were in Syria. Kindly verify your information and history of the region. The north of Iraq are Assyrian lands as is all of Iraq.

Posted by on February 22,2013 | 08:35 PM

To Sarah You will find the answer to your question in my comment if the Smithsonian decides to post it.

Posted by Mary on February 22,2013 | 08:09 PM

An appreciation goes to Mr. Sabar for this interest in writing about the Assyrians, but as an Assyrian I have few reservations on his article. Even though it is nice to see every now and then an article which deals with the situation of the Assyrians and sheds some light on their plight but most of the time, the writers of articles fall into some mistakes which are repeated over and over without attention. The writer Mr. Sabar, says that his father speaks aramaic and that he was born in Iraq. I would like to draw Mr. Sabar's attention and that of the readers that when Mr. Sabar's father was born he was born in Iraq and if he was born in the north that means he was born when there was no such a thing as the so-called ... Does Mr. Sabar realize that the north of Iraq is an Assyrian land ? And that the Jews who were forced to leave Iraq when they left there was no such a thing as the name he used ? Is it too hard to use the term northern Iraq or is Iraq the only country that does not have a north any more? Or that some insist these days on promoting all that has to do with defacing, and obscuing the Assyrian lands in the north and their history in favour of an entity which is being forced upon the land and has nothing to do with its proper and true history?

Posted by Mary on February 22,2013 | 08:06 PM

I just loved this article, it brought tears to my eyes....

Posted by Roberta Bemis on February 14,2013 | 05:55 PM

Great article. I read Sabar's book a few years back, and found it deeply moving. I just wanted to point out that the words purported to be Jesus' are actually from chapter 22 of Psalms, composed by King David, and are in Hebrew, not Aramaic.

Posted by LP on February 13,2013 | 11:26 PM

@Sarah, The aramaic of the church is and old version of Aramaic, knowed as Ktobonoyä. The people speak at home an modern version of Aramaic/Syriac. This is Syriac-Neo Aramaic. I'm an Chaldean and I speak modern Aramaic. But we Chaldeans, Assyrians, Syriacs have an identity problem. We are all one people but we use different (church/political) names. The most of the people accept the Aramean as hystoric name. The Assyrian name is more an political name since 150 years.

Posted by on February 12,2013 | 08:01 AM

If anyone on this board could clarify one thing for me it would be greatly appreciated! Why do Assyrians use Aramaic in their mass and not their own Assyrian language? Aramaic and Assyrian are two separate and distinct languages, no?

Posted by Sarah on February 11,2013 | 02:01 PM

e-li e-li lamah zabachtani is Hebrew not aramaic

Posted by joseph on February 10,2013 | 01:16 PM

35 year ago, I sat in a public library in Worcester MA, and read the newsletter of the local Assyrian community. Because of the similarity to the language of the Talmud, I understood about half of it. An Assyrian priest walked up to me, astounded that I could get it. My neighborhood in Jerusalem is about 1/4 immigrants from Iraqi Kurdistan. Until recently, the elderly women were recognizable by their double head scarves, and henna colored braids. Ironically, people called their Judeo-Aramaic dialect "Kurdish". It has pretty much died out. The similarity to Hebrew, made it easy for even the most illiterate home-bound housewives, to quickly learn Hebrew. BTW the Aramaic letters used in schools in Maaloula Syria, are identical to the square "Aramaic" calligraphy, that has been the standard Hebrew lettering for the past 2000 years.

Posted by Nanushka on February 10,2013 | 05:30 AM

The village of Maaloula is Syria is also one of the last places where Aramaic is still spoken. It is the site of the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. Thecla.

Posted by Fr. John Morris on February 7,2013 | 07:33 PM

Wonderful article. Powerful and moving closing sentennce. Good job.

Posted by DF on February 7,2013 | 09:46 AM

Aramaic has been alive and living thoughout the world. It is the language of the Talmud which is and has been studied by millions of Jews for more than 2,000 years.

Posted by Thom McCan. on February 7,2013 | 07:35 AM

I am neither Christian nor religioius, but was moved almost to tears by the last few words of the above article - a language in twilight. I love languages and have learned a number of them - mostly in the Romance family. They are neither difficult to learn (well, Portuguese has been a challenge!) nor threatened, but I feel I'm doing my bit to not come across as a bull in a china shop when I visit any of the countries.

Posted by Steven on February 6,2013 | 10:19 PM

This was really a great read! As a Chaldean, I have seen first-hand the decline of the Aramaic language. While my parents and grandparents can speak it perfectly, I myself do not know it very well, as I was taught Arabic more when I was younger, and it saddens me that myself and many young adults in my generation will not be able to pass it on as successfully. Therefore, I truly hope that great people like this are able to document and save our language fully, so that it can never be lost.

Posted by Mehe on February 5,2013 | 12:05 AM

well, many jewish religious texts are in old Aramaic. Any Talmudic scholar reads it. the bible has abram as the founder of the jewish religion. his grandfather described as priest and idol maker in the city of ur. Abram was raised in that city. he left the city but was culturally no wandering aramaic nomad. of course, anyway, there is no evidence he existed.

Posted by susan on February 5,2013 | 07:51 PM

It is always interesting to see a regular linguistic tracking. The linguistic archeologists do not get the coverage they deserve. They preserve the culture before it disappears. Thank you for including this article. I will always stop for articles like this.

Posted by Dan Feske on February 5,2013 | 03:15 PM

There is an effort in Lebanon to revitalize Aramaic. It is now confined as a language of liturgy to the Maronite Christian Church. But in order to revitalize it into a vernacular, it must be used in commerce. Aramaic lost ground to Arabic, when that become the language of trade and commerce. A language goes extinct, when it loses its currency in the marketplace.

Posted by Tim Upham on February 5,2013 | 01:40 PM

Ramsen: The author is the son of Yona Sabar, a distinguished scholar of Semitic languages who is, himself, a Kurdish native of northern Iraq, and a native speaker of Aramaic.

Posted by JamesInCA on February 3,2013 | 03:06 PM

The people who calling themeselves Assyrian are not the old Assyrians before Christ. These so called modern Assyrians of this article are east-Arameans. The term Assyrian is new since 1850 after work of the English missionaires of England. Here more info: http://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Assyria_Syria_John_Joseph_5_7_2008.htm

Posted by Abgar on February 3,2013 | 01:55 PM

Hi, thanks for the article. I thought they still speak Aramaic (Western Aramaic?) in Syria in a place not far from Damascus, near the Lebanese border?

Posted by Pirkko on February 3,2013 | 10:07 AM

I enjoyed the article very much. It was very informative. Southeastern Michigan is home to hundred thousand Chaldeans, whose primary language is Aramic, the language there ancentors spoke. A large number of them were born in Mosul and lived in a Village called Telkaif. There are over 6 local Chaldean church's that are located in the Michgian Suburbs that Chaldeans often frequent with there families.

Posted by Lauren Kassab on February 2,2013 | 09:25 PM

I'm an Assyrian. I'm alive. My language is alive, but don't know how long it will remain alive now that we have no home because of the volatile situation in the Middle East and the Kurdish takeover of our lands. (Kurds are NOT foreign to Northern Iraq, they were brought by the Ottomans from South Eastern Asia to fight our people in the late 1800s-early 1900s and eventually replace us) Please help my people save our language, the language of Christ, before it completely disappears. Many thanks to scholars such as Geoffrey Khan who care!

Posted by Leena on February 2,2013 | 01:10 PM

the comments of the Mr Ariel sabar miss many historical facts: the Assyrians arent semetic groups since infact the word semetic is historically inaccurate and was created by schlautser to designate a specific group of people. Aramaic wasnt the tongue of the middle east at lest during the 8th B.C.. the dialogue mentioned in kings II between Rabshaqeh and The israeli mister (Elyakim bin hazakia) proves that the Aramaic was unknown to jews and wasn't a lingua franka. i quote a famous phrase from the dialogue to prove that: "mallel am awdik aramaiit mottol d shamiinan w la tmallil ihudaiit kdam amma d al shura" meaning : speak to your slaves in Aramaic which the common DO NOT UNDERSTAND; and do not speak the jewish language. of course there are tenths of references to prove that Aramaic was a second language of choice used as diplomatic language of choice as professor linderburger in his book "Aramaic and hebrew letters" specifies. assyrians didnt vanish as you claim that is a big historical error claimed by you. you can refer to professor Simo Parpola and many manuscritpts for Mikhael the great and the archive of rome to see that they had kingdoms even after christianity. of course i am able to expand much more in proves and referencees but the space is not enough im sorry to say that, but the prophecies of jewish prophets lied regarding the "vanishing of Assyrians". and us the Assyrians of today are a living proof

Posted by Sargon Giwargis on February 1,2013 | 03:40 PM

As a half Assyrian and half Polish born in Chicago I feel terrible that I can only barely speak both languages. I wish I could start to relearn without giving up.

Posted by AssyrianPolish on January 31,2013 | 12:11 PM

Great article in short. However as an Assyrian born and raised in Chicago it does have its drawbacks. Want to hear actual Aramaic? Go to any Assyrian church (like also mentioned in these comments) and the Raza (mysteries/mass) is given in the original Aramaic language. I also question some of the references to Kurds in this article. As stated also in the comments, the Kurds really have no real claim to the area if you are talking about aboriginal/original. Also, I still have family in my village in Barwar North Iraq who speak the un-touched Aramaic that is the context of the authors work. Why search in the USA or other diaspora? Sounds like the author should have gone where the language still exists today and in fact there are schools in North Iraq that even teach in the Assyrian language (all subjects: math, science, arts, etc.)

Posted by Ramsen on January 30,2013 | 03:34 PM

I speak Aramaic and so does over 100,000 Assyrians/Syriacs living in Sweden. Germany, the U.S., and other nations have very large Aramaic speakers too.

Posted by Matt on January 30,2013 | 09:58 AM

The Syrian Christian community in Kerala, India still uses Aramaic as its language of worship in their churches. I learned it as a child from my father who was a priest in the Orthodox Syrian Church in Piravom, Kerala. The immigrants from this community to the United States still use this language in their churches in America and Europe.Perhaps Kerala, India is the only place where this language is actively used and taught. The Theological Seminary in Kottayam, Kerala is one of the best places I know of to learn this language today.

Posted by DR. JOSEPH E THOMAS on January 29,2013 | 01:02 PM

WOW! Speechless. Being an assyrian myself and reading this article, it just makes you speechless. It amazing to see that our language has survived (not suprising) for thousands of years and will do so for until the end of time! Mr Geoffrey Khan, There are many Assyrians in Sydney that still speak the pure Assyrian language. If you ever wish to further your research perhaps thing about coming to Sydney, Australia. Here you will find people speaking the dialects of Barwar, Nochy and Darnayee. At the Assyrian Church Of The East, there are A LOT of prayers that are still read out loud in Aramic. God Bless! and again, an absolutely terrific and amazing article.

Posted by Eddy on January 28,2013 | 04:02 PM

The people who calling themeselves Assyrian are not the old Assyrians before Christ. These are east-Arameans. They use the word Assyrian since 1850 after work of the English missionaires of England. Here more info: http://www.aramnahrin.org/English/Assyria_Syria_John_Joseph_5_7_2008.htm

Posted by Ephrem Lahdo on January 26,2013 | 02:50 PM

Beautiful! Thank you :)

Posted by on January 25,2013 | 08:40 PM

Wow, what a great story and an excellent piece of writing! The content is fascinating to me as a student of languages (on my own time) but this article was very well written, Ariel. I'll be looking forward to more content from you.

Posted by Rod on January 25,2013 | 08:07 PM

I hope he posts that online library of words soon, that will be a great resource for the future!

Posted by Jason Malki on January 25,2013 | 03:45 PM

Many thanks for your comments on my work. They are much appreciated. If you would like to be in touch with me directly, my email address is: gk101@cam.ac.uk Geoffrey Khan

Posted by Geoffrey Khan on January 25,2013 | 03:42 PM

Great article, the work that people like George do is important and inspirational really.

Posted by Alex on January 25,2013 | 10:16 AM

Is there anyway I can get in touch with Professor Khan?

Posted by Matthew Boudwin on January 25,2013 | 09:28 AM

I was really thrilled to read this article which I found on Digg, it certainly has piqued my. A few churches in India in the region I come from, still use Syriac which I understand has evolved from Aramaic, and I have always wondered if the original form managed to survive the test of time. It would be a great loss to humanity if we lose another historically significant language while we take great pains to decipher other ancient languages. We may never know of the archeological finds of future and what implication the current knowledge of these ancient languages can have. Sharing more of the language and its elements over mediums like the internet may help it survive among non-native speakers. I hope the diversity of expression that languages like Aramaic brings, is there for generations to come..

Posted by Vivek on January 25,2013 | 06:35 AM

Although I believe Jesus spoke Aramaic, “Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) In Hebrew is "Eli Eli Lama shechachtani" which is very close.

Posted by max roth on January 24,2013 | 09:23 PM

Excellent article,Everything you said was well defended and completely truthful.This beautiful language is the gift of my birth and heritage. It carries a power and beauty I have found in no other tongue. Thank you Ariel Sabar,for your great service and sacrifice for our culture and language to keep it a live.

Posted by Hamurabi on January 24,2013 | 08:49 PM

Dear Mr. Khan, Thank you for your interest and efforts. I, as an Assyrian appreciate your work. However, I would like to clarify the followings: 1. The Assyrian Empire adopted Aramaic as the official language of the State. That is a fact; however, Assyrian Akkadian continued to be used. There are evidence discovered that prove clearly that the Assyrian Akkadian script was used in the 3rd Century of the Christian Era. 2. You stated, quote: "Aramaic survived only in the Kurdish mountains of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, places so remote they never got the memo." End quote. The mountains that you refer to are historically Assyrian mountains, not Kurdish. Kurdish history in the region in question is recent and short. Kurds are new arrival to the region. Assyrians presence in that region is rooted deep in history. Again, thank you for this beautiful article. Fred P.S. Please read my book "Assyrians: The Continuous Saga" and visit my web site www.fredaprim.com for more info.

Posted by Fred Aprim on January 24,2013 | 06:17 PM

Thank you for all your research! I myself am and Assyrian and I get very excited when people outside of our culture are intrigued and inquire about it. I'm not sure if you have looked into it already, but the Baz dialect (what I speak) has many difference from the other dialects.

Posted by Ashor Sworesho on January 24,2013 | 04:54 PM

I find this very interesting. I read a UN report on dying languages a few years ago that found this very same thing about Aramaic. My heritage is Chaldean and we speak Aramaic. My parents were both born and raised in Tel Kaif, in northern Iraq but moved to America in the 70s. They speak both Arabic and Aramaic fluently. I have found that 1st generation Chaldean-Americans speak more Arabic than Aramaic because more people speak Arabic and they will get more use out of it. I unfortunately speak neither. The professor should come to the suburbs of Detroit, MI where 100,000 of us live and speak Aramaic

Posted by Mason on January 24,2013 | 04:34 PM

dear professor Geoffrey Khan, you're one of the greatest that I've ever seen in my life, the way that you speak it and explain it so eloquently century after century time after time and so on, may God bless you for your family, for Assyrians and for all civilizations. Regards, Eskhiria Z. Gilyana (Zak)Chicago IL.

Posted by Eskhiria Z. Gilyana on January 24,2013 | 04:23 PM

Thank you Professor Geoffrey Khan, you are a Legend, Keep up the good work.

Posted by Moon on January 24,2013 | 07:55 AM



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