Aramaic

Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, Sinai, southeastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Arabia, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over 3,000 years. Aramaic served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires—particularly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, and Achaemenid Empire—and as a language of divine worship and religious study within Christianity and Gnosticism; it also has appeared to a limited degree in Judaism, where Hebrew remains primary. Several modern varieties of Aramaic are still spoken. The modern eastern branch is spoken by Assyrians, Mandeans, and a small contingent of Mizrahi Jews. Western Aramaic is still spoken by the Muslim and Christian Aramean inhabitants of the towns of Maaloula, Bakh'a and Jubb'adin in Syria. Classical varieties are used as liturgical and literary languages in several West Asian churches, and appear in a few places in Judaism (where Hebrew remains predominant), Samaritanism (where Samaritan Hebrew remains predominant), and Mandaeism. The Aramaic language is considered endangered, with several varieties used mainly by certain older generations. Researchers are working to record and analyze all of the remaining varieties of Neo-Aramaic languages in case they become extinct. Aramaic belongs to the Northwest group of the Semitic language family, which includes the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages such as Hebrew, Edomite, Moabite, Ekronite, Sutean, and Phoenician, as well as Amorite and Ugaritic. Aramaic varieties are written in the Aramaic alphabet, a descendant of the Phoenician alphabet. The most prominent variant of this alphabet is the Syriac alphabet, used in the ancient city of Edessa. The Aramaic alphabet became a base for the creation and adaptation of specific writing systems in some other Semitic languages of West Asia, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet. Early Aramaic inscriptions date from the 11th century BC, placing it among the earliest languages to be written down. Aramaicist Holger Gzella notes, "The linguistic history of Aramaic prior to the appearance of the first textual sources in the 9th century BC remains unknown." Aramaic is believed by most historians and scholars to have been the primary language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth both for preaching and in everyday life.

Name

The connection between Chaldean, Syriac, and Samaritan as "Aramaic" was first identified in 1679 by German theologian Johann Wilhelm Hilliger. Other scholars followed, such as Anton Theodor Hartmann, who explained in 1807:

I deliberately refrain, with good consideration, from using the expression “Chaldean language,” because the Aramaic language had already existed long before the Chaldeans flooded into Aram, and in the Bible the language that is usually called Chaldean is never designated by that name, but is always referred to as the Aramaic language. Likewise, I find the designation “Syriac language” as a means of distinguishing it from Aramaic to be equally inappropriate; both are entirely one and the same language. The insignificant differences by which people have believed themselves justified in recognizing a separate language are merely changes that tend to arise over time in any living language. In 1819–1821 Ulrich Friedrich Kopp published his Bilder und Schriften der Vorzeit ("Images and Inscriptions of the Past"), in which he established the basis of the paleographical development of the Northwest Semitic scripts. Kopp criticised Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and other scholars who had characterized all the then-known inscriptions and coins as Phoenician, with "everything left to the Phoenicians and nothing to the Arameans, as if they could not have written at all". Kopp notes that some of the words on the Carpentras Stele corresponded to the Aramaic in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Ruth. Josephus and Strabo (the latter citing Posidonius) both state that the "Syrians" called themselves "Arameans". The Septuagint, the earliest extant full copy of the Hebrew Bible, a Greek translation, used the terms Syria and Syrian where the Masoretic Text, the earliest extant Hebrew copy of the Bible, uses the terms Aramean and Aramaic; numerous later bibles followed the Septuagint's usage, including the King James Version. This connection between the names Syrian and Aramaic was discussed in 1835 by Étienne Marc Quatremère. In historical sources, Aramaic language is designated by two distinctive groups of terms, first of them represented by endonymic (native) names, and the other one represented by various exonymic (foreign in origin) names. Endonymic terms for Aramaic language were derived from the same word root as the name of its original speakers, the ancient Arameans. Endonymic forms were also adopted in some other languages, like ancient Hebrew. In the Torah (Hebrew Bible), "Aram" is used as a proper name of several people including descendants of Shem, Nahor, and Jacob. Ancient Aram, bordering northern Israel and what is now called Syria, is considered the linguistic center of Aramaic, the language of the Arameans who settled the area during the Bronze Age c. 3500 BC. Unlike in Hebrew, designations for Aramaic language in some other ancient languages were mostly exonymic. In ancient Greek, Aramaic language was most commonly known as the "Syrian language", in relation to the native (non-Greek) inhabitants of the historical region of Syria. Since the name of Syria emerged as a variant of Assyria, the biblical Ashur, and Akkadian Ashuru, a complex set of semantic phenomena was created, becoming a subject of interest both among ancient writers and modern scholars. The Koine Greek word Ἑβραϊστί (Hebraïstí) has been translated as "Aramaic" in some versions of the Christian New Testament, as Aramaic was at that time the language commonly spoken by the Jews. However, Ἑβραϊστί is consistently used in Koine Greek at this time to mean Hebrew, and Συριστί (Syristi) is used to mean Aramaic. In Biblical scholarship, the term "Chaldean" was for many years used as a synonym of Aramaic, from its use in the Book of Daniel and subsequent interpretation by Jerome.

History

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