My family is what is called St. Thomas Christian, part of a (fairly) endogamous and ancient community in South India. Though there is a lot of denomination diversity in the community these days, the most ancient denomination is Syrian Orthodox, which conducts its liturgy in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic. This language is part of my linguistic heritage, even though I only know a word here or there.
I've known about this. Fascinating history. So St Thomas somehow made it from the middle east to South India.
The way I came to look into this history is interesting. As an Arabic speaker I was curious about the last name "Martoma" which was in the news some years back (for insider trading). It sounds like Mar Touma which is Arabic for St Thomas.
I wonder how many people identify as St Thomas Christians in India?
Not sure why he omits this, but the author's name is Ariel Sabar and his father is Yona Sabar who is the one of the most influential scholars in the preservation of Aramaic.
I would highly recommend Ariel's book, My Father's Paradise. It documents the life of his father being born into the poor and uneducated, but happy, Jewish community of Kurdish Iraq, being stripped of his property and exiled by the Iraqi government as part of the Jewish exodus in the 50s, and going from a refugee to a PHD in Linguistics from Yale.
A huge amount of field linguistics is documentation of languages that are in danger of losing all their native speakers. Many Native American languages are in this category, for instance—it's common for these languages to have only a handful of native speakers left, all of whom are elderly. It's literally a race against the clock.
> 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.
In some cases, they try to use that knowledge to teach the language to new generations so that it doesn't totally die out. Wašiw (Washoe) is an example that one of my professors worked on: https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/where-wasiw-spo...
Yes. What little of it remains however. Much of the worlds languages are disappearing permanently. There is a small movement for foreign individuals to learn dying tongues and for some descendants to learn, but I would not expect this to counteract the prevailing homogenization of language globally. Regional differences in dialect can become new languages over time, but I don't expect this to countermand the number of languages lost in recent times to colonization and the cultural dominance of certain countries and languages.
I’m part of the problem here. My kids will never learn my first language. English has become the language of technology, and will probably become even more dominant as a result.
How old are your kids? The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time. The brain does the rest. You don't have to "teach" them anything.
It's not that simple. Kids learn language from their peers just as much as (maybe more than) from their parents.
I'm living in the US: I always speak Korean to my teen kids and they mostly answer in Korean, so they have no problem understanding phrases like "When is dinner today?" However, because they've never been to school in Korea, they basically have zero knowledge of Korean words for, say, "descendant", "ambassador", or "independence", while being totally familiar with their English counterparts.
OP is talking about how if kids learn to be bilingual+ at an early enough age then it makes learning languages that much more easier. This is compared to people who speak one language and try to acquire a second but start in, for example, middle school or later. People in the second boat are at a significant disadvantage. It's a well-studied area and one way of picking up second languages earlier is via peers at an early age as well.
It doesn't mean your points are invalid, but in general people like your kids are just going to be way better at learning language.
IMHO, it's almost cruel that many colleges expect all students to fulfill a 2 year foreign language requirement, even if they have no prior exposure or education. You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time, in addition to making their education more expensive.
> You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time
I agree it might often be a failure, in say, achieving fluency. But certainly no a waste. Exposure to foreign languages, and their cultural contexts, can be very enriching, especially the more distant they are from your own culture and language family. And the contrast with your own language and culture can teach you much about your own.
This is a common argument but it completely ignores any idea of efficiency in learning or learning outcomes that benefit the student.
Most people would get way more out of studying a culture and its context by directly studying that and in way less time. This time saved one could spend as 4 semesters of specialized cultural studies, one full cultural study abroad semester, or learning about other things (comparative linguistics?).
There's also the idea that you can only fully appreciate works of literature in their original language, but learning Russian to appreciate Dostoevsky is overkill and many people love his work who don't know the language. Learning about other cultures in translation is arguably going to be superior since any translation you can do is with skills way below fluency.
> The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time.
No need for them to be babies. That will work as long as they're younger than 12, and probably for a few years after. But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
> But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
The way to fix this is to find them things that only exist in that language and not in English. It could be other family members, friends, TV, music, time abroad, etc.
Kids, like adults, need motivation as the primary factor that determines success learning a language.
Why not speak to them in both? If they're near adulthood already it might be too late, but if they're young kids are basically sponges for languages. And growing up bilingual makes it much, much easier for them to learn a third language down the line if they ever want to.
Speaking to them in your native tongue isn't going to make them worse at English if they're growing up in an English-speaking environment.
My father's parents were immigrants and they spoke their native language to each other, but they didn't want their kids to learn it. I've tested my father and he has about a 5000 word vocabulary, pretty good for someone whose parents didn't want him to learn it!
Kids have an incredible ability to learn languages, given motivation, and they don't need to go to school to learn words like "accountant" reading books will do.
The reasons are non-linguistic - I emigrated partly to get away from the culture of my birth. I want to heavily curate my kids’ experience of that culture and teaching them the language isn’t going to help that.
To me, giving your children a second language is an incredible gift. Setting the pathways in the brain that separate concepts from the written and spoken representation, the abstractions of different grammars, etc, is very valuable. And something that I have really valued as I grew older.
But I (superficially, of course) understand perhaps why you'd like curate their experience of something you took fairly extreme steps to escape. That might well be the greater gift.
Appreciate your perspective -- thanks for sharing.
I was once hosted by a Syrian Jewish family for Passover. Their rendition of the classic had gadya (lit. "one goat") in the traditional melody brought over with them from Aleppo was hauntingly beautiful.
Aleppo was an amazing city with rich linguistic diversity and rich musical tradition of several minorities. With Aramaic mixed with Armenian! All the inhabitants used to sing along in one neighborhood, each in his own house when one musician starts a tune, other neighborhoods would compete with their own musicians it was a magic experience that I was not lucky enough to witness. The Arabic dialect in Aleppo is very distinctive though, we used to make fun of it in TV series and in daily conversation.
This article reads very strangely. Aramaic at least the Jewish Babylonian dialect is extremely alive. Children learn it in school, and thousands and thousands of adults study texts every day written in Aramaic.
The same is true of Latin, but that's still considered a "dead" language. It's not the same to learn to read something for scholarly reasons, vs using it as one's native tongue.
sort of. People learn to read it, but they don't really speak or write it. the ability to read a language doesn't make it an alive language.
This contrasts to Hebrew, which some say was a dead language, but was the living language of jewish law correspondence and jewish law / biblical exegesis, even when other languages were the day to day vernacular (ladino, yiddish or the like). People like to say that hebrew was a dead language before the modern hebrew movement, but that's not quite fair. It wasn't a day to day language of the streets, but new things in it were being written every day all over the diaspora. Basically, those who say it was a dead language are demonstrating their bias against religiously oriented texts and communications.
Syrian dialect still has few Aramaic words. The name of the city of Aleppo is a purely Syriac/an Aramic name and means the white city. The word Aleppo means white in Syriac. Since Aleppo is distinguished by its white limestone, it was called the White City.
Aleppo was an amazing city with rich linguistic diversity and rich musical tradition of several minorities. With Aramaic mixed with Armenian! All the inhabitants used to sing along in one neighborhood, each in his own house when one musician starts a tune, other neighborhoods would compete with their own musicians it was a magic experience that I was not lucky enough to witness. The Arabic dialect in Aleppo is very distinctive though, we used to make fun of it in TV series and in daily conversation.
Some other Aramaic words Martini: Mar means the master, and Tini is the fig, meaning the master of figs, , the shiah: the one who works by melting, and Touma: the twin.
Al-Bajuq: They are based on the effects of Al-Bajuq and use it to mean bad mouth.
I find it somewhat disappointing how cautiously the author avoids the subject on how Assyrians got "...scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished". It wasn't just an unfortunate occasion when "a Kurdish chieftain murdered a Church of the East patriarch there in 1918". It was a genocide.
Shhh it's politically incorrect to question exactly how all the Christians in the Middle East disappeared... Copts, Chaldeans, Assyrians, etc... were all displaced and/or slaughtered by invading Islamic armies.
I think you're reading too much into the omission of historical narrative in this particular article about linguistics. The author, Ariel Sabar, wrote an entire book about his father's forced exile from his native Kurdistan by the Iraqi government.
> No it’s not, this is pretty well known and discussed
It definitely isn't. Tons of people think Arabs are actually native to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, etc... or that Turks are native to Turkey/Anatolia. Most Americans and Western Europeans have no clue about the history of Christianity in the Middle East and Turkey, Arab conquests, etc... Or the fact that Christians were still a majority in a Middle Eastern country within the last 100 years.
Very few cultures are really "natives" of the area they live in. The Turkish came out of Asia and took over from the Greeks in Anatolia, but it's not as if the Greeks were "native" either, and were predated by the Assyrians, and the Hittites before that, It's actually quite hard to really define "native" beyond "the people who were living there when we got there".
History is full of migration, conquest, and everything in-between. I always find it a bit odd when people go on about "the Islamic conquest" when your own "native" culture's history is probably not that dissimilar in broad lines.
It also gets more complicated when considering that many "conquests" actually end up being cultural rather than genetic. So it might still be the same "people". And plenty of migration and mixtures as well further complicate matters.
From wikipedia, while not being a reliable source in general, I already know that Arabs came from the North from other sources:
> Arabs are first mentioned in Biblical and Assyrian texts of the ninth to fifth centuries BC where they appear as inhabiting part of Syria. Proto-Arabs are presumed to have originated from what is now modern-day northern Arabia, Jordan and southern Syria. Over time, Arabs spread further out sometimes replacing previously spoken Semitic languages.
"Most" people don't know _anything_ about history or the historical record of how groups of people found themselves where they are today.
It's not that it's politically incorrect. "Most" people just don't care, except of course when they can use it to get internet points.
The fact that Arabs occupy their current geographic distribution through conquest and migration is not some hidden knowledge or politically incorrect fact. Anyone who has access to wiki can know about it. I've never met anyone who wanted to die upon that hill.
Well yes… western education only teaches the history of places that westerners have been or their interactions with other cultures, with some exceptions. No one in the US is taught about China, India or Africa either.
Of course people came from all over the place, by your logic the Japanese are Chinese, the Koreans are Chinese, Indians are central Asian, Greeks and Romans are Arabs, Native Americans are Polynesian and Latin Americans are Spanish.
Or from a higher level just for rhetorics sake, everyone is African.
I don't think delving into christians' history in the ME was necessary in the original articles, however, it is not untrue that most people think the middle east "natives" are Arab Muslims and yes, it is tied to a "liberal" agenda depicting anybody who is not Arab Muslim in the ME as a "colonialist".
But like I said above, western education only teaches about places westerners have been or touched. There is zero history taught about China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa or literally any other place besides Europe or the United States unless it relates to an interaction with westerners.
I'm not even speaking about those ancient times. Rather, I mean the events in 1915-1922, when Turks of various political affiliations massacred Greeks, Armenians and Assyrians.
The Pact of Umar would like to have a word with you. The Copts exist today and their rights preserved because of the Muslims protecting them. "Slaughtering" people indiscriminately like you're implying is against Islam.
So ignorant to call them "tax base", when in actuality, Zakat that Muslims pay is much much more than the Jizya that Dhimmis pay.
The Copts exist today because of the Muslims, this is a fact, even if you try to twist the meaning of what I wrote. They are to be treated well, and with dignity, and their rights preserved.
Secondly, I don't see what makes them "second class citizens", not to mention that even wikipedia acknowledges discrepancies in the points they mention.
As a matter of fact, several Jewish and Christian historians and figures clearly expressed that they would rather live under a proper Islamic rule as it offers them better quality of life compared to secular modernity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc6yXYR01Vg&t=6s
One of my favorite encounters with Aramaic was coming across a tiny ancient church in the middle of the desert in Syria, where the mass was conducted in Aramaic. A humbling experience to hear a basically dead language still very much alive in the middle of nowhere.
Another observation: portions of Maronite Catholic mass are conducted in Aramaic. The prayer books are typically in Aramaic and Arabic side by side.
I think you are talking about Maaloula? a small town to the north of Damascus where its Christian population still speak Aramic, mostly old people. It is a fascinating place to visit.
Unfortunately, most of its inhabitants left after the 2012 civil war, or to a small percentage died protecting it against other islamist factions. Source: I'm from there.
What's sad to me is that so many languages were just fine 100 years ago. World Wars, state action (in both totalitarian and democratic states), mass media, and globalization are eradicating most of the world's linguistic diversity. As a kid, I assumed languages, ethnicities, and states were almost synonymous. States would certainly want you think that! In the present, I can see how much damage the concept of the ethnostate has done to minority languages in any given territory. At this point, we've already suffered irreversible loss, and a lot more is already baked in.
Aramaic has always had a certain charm for me. It sounds a little like Arabic, something like difference between Dutch and German (to someone who's not fluent in all these languages). I wish I knew a place to learn it.
A lot of the value of various languages is in the cultural nuances that are both expressed by the language and a part of it. Sometimes the nuances are in the spoken form, and properly understanding all the nuances would require living among the culture.
A translator program might be an interesting project in some other ways, and I guess technology might help some people get involved with the language or help bridge the gap. A translator doesn't really solve the problem, though.
Orthodox Jews learn Aramaic in order to study the Talmud, they learn it at a young age, does that count as native speakers?
The Irony: the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the greatest empire ever, for its time. They destroyed the kingdom of Judah and the first temple in Jerusalem, drove the Jews into Babylonian captivity. Now who are among the last speakers of the Aramaic language?
It would not really count as native speakers, because Talmud scholars didn't learn the language from birth, and would only use it for certain purposes rather than general communication. It's similar to Latin in the Middle Ages: Every European scholar could speak Latin, and in a medieval university you might be speaking Latin constantly, but the language was dead as no-one used it from birth or spoke to their families in Latin. Similarly, Hebrew was considered dead until it was revived and spoken by babies as their first language - even though people had a working knowledge of Hebrew for the entire period it was no longer spoken.
That seems far too simplistic. I'm a native Dutch speaker, and can understand written Afrikaans (spoken can be a bit harder), but it's still clearly a different language with different spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and literature.
I looked up some examples of Appalachian on YouTube, and I can follow it surprisingly easy – much easier than I would have expected after reading this thread – as a proficient but non-native English speaker. It's certainly not a different language; I have more trouble understanding some dialects in my native Dutch.
There is absolutely a grey area where things start to diverge, and this is where politics and the (self-)identification of the people who speak the language(s) can come in to play. Classification is always hard (see also: defining "species" of animals), but a blanket "it's a political question, full stop" is far too strong and hand-wavy.
In this case, it is, nevertheless, correct. There's simply no clear-cut objective boundary here. You can arbitrarily define one as N% of mutual intelligibility, but then your pick of N is itself a political question.
Keep in mind that many of what we today consider distinct languages historically formed a dialect continuum - usually geographic, where you can observe gradual changes as you travel, which may add up to the extent that there's no real mutual intelligibility between the beginning and the end of your path. Are they different languages at that point? If so, what does that make of all the gradual steps in between?
The stark language boundaries that we're more familiar with today are largely due to states aggressively encouraging (or outright forcing) some kind of language standard on what was before a dialect continuum area, smoothing out the differences within it while sharpening them at the borders. This process kicked into high gear with the rise of nation-states, which would often do so for ideological reasons - basically, to force conformity and reify the abstract notion of "one people". But it hasn't happened everywhere to the same extent as it did in Europe, and there are still plenty of places around the globe where clear language boundaries don't really exist.
So I looked it up. Wikipedia (for what that's worth) clearly says that linguistically it is a dialect of American English. The dispute is over whether it is a separate dialect, or part of the Southern dialect.
I'm not sure how effective this will be, you really need communities of speakers using it in daily conversation to keep languages alive, not some individuals learning it off some app. Speaking a language well is hard and full with nuance, much of which you can't really learn by "the elephant does not eat bread"-type stuff DuoLingo gives you.
None of my Irish friends really speak Irish for example, in spite of being taught at school from an early age. Not that Irish is "dead" by any means – there are still parts of Ireland where Irish is used in daily conversation – but it's a good example how you need more than just education to keep a language alive.
"Ya lets hit the elephant for a stomp on some bread" (meaning go for a pint at the heavy pub or whatever weird cokney weirdness your language is - yet *thats* not dying is it, too many of you folk around" or the other weird colloquial things? Not working,
"How do you say ; 'This is my home'?" in Aramaic?" <-- much easier to capture and translate. And from remaining speakers.
Or...
"Tell mw about your gods" (and then capturing/translating their responses)
Once the native speakers vanish, they can then go back and retranslate the new testament to read whatever they want it to, and only greybeard scholars could argue against it. Not that they haven't made X numbers of versions already
* The New Testament is written in Koinē Greek, not Aramaic.
* Even if we consider the portions of the Bible written in Aramaic (i.e. parts of the Old Testament), speakers 2,000+ years after the fact are speaking a different form of the language whose value to understanding older texts is limited and not straightforward.
* Theologically significant translation difficulties in the New Testament are overblown.
Attic Greek was the dialect of Attica (around Athens) before Alexander, c 500 - 300BC. Koine was the vernacular that spread around the Hellenistic world after Alexander's conquests, was used to write the New Testament and in the Eastern Roman Empire / Byzantine Empire.
Attic survived as a literary / prestige dialect because important philosophical works and plays and such were written in it, but it was the vernacular of the region when those plays, etc. were written.
The general progression of Greek, very simplified, can be said to be Homeric -> Attic / Ionic / other dialects -> Koine (mostly from Attic & Ionic) -> Medieval -> Modern
Homeric was IIRC a pretty artificial poetic idiom with vocabulary from different dialects, I wouldn't say it's the ancestor of Attic, at least in the form which was written down. Also you forgot Mycenean Greek.
The new testament is written in Koine Greek, not Aramaic. There are a few Aramaic phrases in the Greek texts we have and they are often accompanied by a translation or explanation in Greek.
Neat list. I wonder how old the German expression "Polnisch rückwärts" ( Polish [spoken] in reverse) is. I wonder if it has anything to do with Reverse Polish Notation.
Google Books found an example in the 1965 book "Sprache und Humor des Kindes". However, it does not appear to have anything to do with "Polnisch rückwärts".
While the term "Polish Notation" predates 1965, including in German as "polnische Notation", it appears to be in a specialized context not related to children's humor.
The only other Google Books reference for "Polnisch rückwärts" is a 1982 reference with nothing to do with computers.
> Der Programmiersprache Forth eilt das Schlagwort „umgekehrt polnische Notation“ voraus, was ein wenig wie „polnisch rückwärts“ klingt und auf den ersten Blick meist als Rückschritt gewertet wird.
Those are the only two uses of that phrase in archive.org. By comparison, "polnische Notation" is far more common.
Could someone shed some light on the "Spanish village" thing in southern Slavic countries? Had they found the (neighboring) Turkish easier than Spanish somehow?
> According to Keber[24], the phraseological unit španska vas comes from the German phraseological unit »für jemanden spanische Dörfer sein«, which is a mixture of two phraseological units: »das ist mir spanisch« (used in reference to the Spanish
and German king Charles V, who introduced unknown customs to the German lands) and »für jemanden böhmische Dörfer sein« (Germans did not understand the names of the Czech (= »böhmisch«) villages).
The citation is 24. KEBER J, Slovarslovenskih frazemov (Založba ZRC, Ljubljana, 2011).
> "Wait!" I hear you saying, dear reader! "Whence come these villages into our discussion?" I am relying here on one of my older and more historically minded informants, a native German, who maintains that these village-oriented expressions and the familiar (and popular)
> Es waren mir böhmische Dörfer
> arise from the unintelligibility (to the speaker) of the names of the mentioned villages.
