o jezyku aramejskim dla Krystiana i innych

[manny_ramirez]

kiedys byla tu dyskusja na ten tenat. Znalazlem to . Moze cos wyjasni wiec
wklejam.

The passion of Aramaic


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JAY BUSHINSKY, THE JERUSALEM POST Apr. 14, 2005

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Trying to unravel the mysteries of Aramaic is like embarking on an odyssey
across the deserts, mountains and valleys of the Middle East and onwards to
Europe and North America.

It is an intellectual adventure that leads to an array of secular scholars,
devout clergy and laymen - Jewish and Christian - who are experts in the
history of these Semitic languages, which in some places still survive.

They tell of Israeli rock groups that sing modern Aramaic songs, of popular
radio and TV programs in Aramaic or Syriac broadcast in Canada, the US and
Scandinavia and of remote villages in Syria and Iraq, where Aramaic, rather
than Arabic, is the local vernacular.

Aramaic is revered by Jews because it alternates with Hebrew in the later
books of the Bible, is the Talmud's principal tongue and comprises several of
Judaism's most important prayers, including the mourners' kaddish. Christians
respect it as the language spoken by Jesus Christ and his apostles, while its
eastern version, Syriac, is used in the liturgies of the ancient churches of
Iraq and Syria.

Kurdish Jews brought Aramaic with them from northern Iraq, Iran and Turkey to
Israel, where it is still spoken at home by the older generation, in much the
same way Ashkenazi Jews speak Yiddish with their parents or grandparents. But
they also regard it as evidence of their being descendants of the "Ten Lost
Tribes" who were deported by the Assyrians nearly a century before the two
remaining tribes of Judea were expelled by the Babylonians.

Hezy Mutzafi, an expert in Aramaic, contends that contemporary Aramaic is in
danger of extinction, as the younger generation of families that have left
the Middle East assimilates linguistically.

Prof. Geoffrey Khan of Cambridge University's Faculty of Oriental Studies has
been mapping the neo-Syriac dialects linguistically for fear they may soon
disappear. Mutzufi, who teaches Aramaic at Tel Aviv University, learned
several of them and can converse fluently in each. Estimates of the number of
Aramaic speakers in the world range from 500,000 to five million.

The head of the National Organization of Kurdish Jews in Israel, Avraham
Simantov, interviewed in his Jerusalem office, said he takes pride in the
fact that his people "preserved the language of the Targum," referring to the
monumental translation of the Torah into Aramaic, which is known as Targum
Onkelos. The latter evidently is a misnomer, however. Experts believe this
term was erroneously adopted from the Greek translation by Aquila, a work
cited in both the Jerusalem Talmud and in Christian lore.

Most scholars credit Rav Joseph, a third-century Babylonian scholar, and his
students with having produced the authorized Aramaic translation attributed
to Onkelos (a name possibly derived from Aquila).

"We read the Torah twice in our synagogues," said Simantov, "Once in Hebrew
and once in Aramaic. This is because the leader of the congregation must be
sure everyone present understands the text."

Simantov, who is the executive director of the Prazot housing company,
arrived in Jerusalem from Kurdistan in 1951 with his family.

"My Aramaic made it easy for me to pick up Hebrew," he said, recalling that
he was admitted to Jerusalem's elite Ma'aleh school, where many of the
teachers were German Jews and where he made a swift transition from a quasi-
medieval lifestyle to a modern Israeli one.

Unlike Jerusalem's Kurdish Jews, who speak Aramaic at home and Hebrew
outside, their compatriots who settled in other parts of Israel use Aramaic
in all facets of their daily lives.

"Generally speaking," Simantov explained, "our young generation speaks
Hebrew. But even though it is the third generation since our mass
immigration, its members still understand the language of the Targum. And in
our synagogues, especially in the agricultural sector, they still alternate
the text of the Hebrew scriptures with that of the Targum."

IN NAZARETH, home of Atallah Mansour, the distinguished Israeli journalist
who was on the staff of the Hebrew daily Haaretz for more than three decades
and now serves as a columnist for Jerusalem's Arabic daily al-Quds, Aramaic
is a constant feature of the linguistic landscape, especially its liturgical
aspect.

He cited an unusual source book published 14 years ago in Cairo by Izzat
Zaki, in which the Nestorian Christians describe themselves as "the children
of Israel" and claim they are the remnant of the Ten Lost Tribes. Zaki
contends that they do not marry outside their religious faith and live in the
most defensible mountainous regions of Kurdistan. Zaki quotes them as
saying, "we use Aramaic just like the Jews."

Mansour refers to these exotic Christians in his newly published book, Narrow
Gate Churches, a history of Christianity in the Holy Land and the surrounding
regions of the Middle East from the time of Jesus to the present era. He
invited the local head of the Maronite Church, Abouna (Our Father) Yusuf
Issa, to explain his 1,000-member congregation's integration of Syriac into
its prayer services.

"Only members of the clergy are taught the Syriac language," Abouna Yusuf
said, noting that he learned it as a seminarian in Rome.

"I don't speak it," he admitted, "but I understand every word."

Abouna Yusuf pointed out that until a century ago, there were many villages
in what is now Syria where Aramaic was the spoken language. Today, only three
are left, all of them relatively close to Damascus. For political reasons,
the Syrian authorities tried to shield them from inquisitive foreigners,
especially foreign correspondents, but persistent requests by BBC Television
to produce a documentary about their cultural traditions were eventually
granted reluctantly.

"We pray in Syriac," explained Abouna Yusuf, "but find it necessary to switch
to Arabic more and more."

He equated Syriac with Aramaic, allowing for the fact that it is a different
dialect, but confessed, "I am very proud to be able to speak the same
language in which Jesus Christ spoke."

Outside of prestigious universities like Cambridge and Tel Aviv University,
there are few, if any, schools where Aramaic or Syriac is taught as a
language to read, write and speak.

This is the educational reality that confronts most Jewish yeshiva students,
whose primary goal is to learn the contents and theological principles
expounded in the Talmud or the Gemara, as it is called in Aramaic. They are
not taught Aramaic grammar, are not challenged with vocabulary enrichment and
are not required to converse in Aramaic, despite the fact that the Talmud
itself consists of rabbinical discourse conducted 2,000 years ago in that
language. Instead, they learn Aramaic only in the Talmudic context and mainly
by rote.

"An experiment conducted at Cambridge to teach young Orthodox Jews Aramaic as
a classical language and thereby enable them to peruse the Talmud's text
independently, without rabbinical guidance, ended in failure," said Mutzafi.

"The boys were not adept at grasping linguistic structures such as the verb
categories or grammatical usage that could be found in the ancient text."

At the same time, he noted that the range of words used in the Talmud
is "quite limited" to those that reflect Jewish religious life and
observance.

ARAMAIC MADE its debut 3,000 years ago as the language of the ancient
Arameans, the nation that lived in the Bible's Padan-Aram and the Patriarch

cdn

[manny_ramirez]

It served as the Assyrians' lingua franca soon afterward and became their
imperial language as well as that of the Babylonians and Persians, all of whom
applied it to diplomacy and trade from India to Ethiopia. Those within their
respective imperial realms who could not speak Aramaic could at least read and
understand it, one scholar said.

By the Second Temple period, 2,000 years ago, Palestinian Aramaic was widely
used by the Jews of the Land of Israel. After the birth of Christianity, its
adherents developed their own dialect, which differed somewhat from that of the
Jews. But Aramaic remained supreme in the Fertile Crescent until the Muslim
conquest in the seventh century, after which it was gradually overtaken by
Arabic.

The very name of the Syriac translation of the Bible, the "Peshitta," is a
derivative of the Hebrew word pshat, or simplification.

Many of the common cognate words are easily comprehensible to Hebrew speakers.
For example, toda raba ("thank-you") is pronounced with the accent on the first
syllable of each word rather than on the second, as is the case in modern
Hebrew.

During Aramaic's linguistic heyday, when it enjoyed the same international
status as English does today, it not only split into Western and Eastern
versions (the former always known as Aramaic and the latter as Syriac), but
Syriac spawned countless dialects, which were often unintelligible to close
neighbors who spoke the very same language. By then, the alphabet used by the
Jews to transcribe the Hebrew language was the Assyrian one they had
encountered during their captivity, while the original one, which was of
Phoenician origin, was abandoned. Syriac's linguists opted for a different
alphabet.

One consequence of these diversions was that Talmudic Aramaic was
incomprehensible to Christians. Instead, they used the various Aramaic
dialects, gradually incorporating foreign words from Greek and Arabic.

A CHRISTIAN scholar based in Jerusalem, who also insisted on anonymity, said
the Aramaic- or Syrian-speaking diaspora encompasses Canada, Sweden, Norway,
Australia and England. (This list was extended by a secular colleague to
include France, especially Marseilles, Lebanon and the southern reaches of the
former Soviet Union.)

He listed the four main eastern churches in which Syriac is the language of
prayer as the Syrian Jacobite, Syrian Catholic, Nestorian and Chaldean churches
(the latter previously known as the Church of Jerome).

Judean or Palestinian Aramaic was the dominant language among the Holy Land's
Christians until the 16th century, he explained, noting that their shift to
Arabic was very gradual - faster in the highlands than in the valleys and
plains.

A similar process occurred in Syria, Iraq and Iran, where the descendants of
the original Arameans and the successive Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian
ethnic groups had converted to Christianity and adopted the northwestern
Mesopotamian dialect of Aramaic, which is known as Syriac.

The pervasiveness of Aramaic was such that it virtually replaced Hebrew as the
preferred language of the Holy Land's Jews, a declining number of whom were
familiar with the biblical tongue. This was also true of their coreligionists
in Babylon and the surrounding regions of Mesopotamia - so much so, this
scholar noted, that the Book of Daniel, which emerged from that milieu, "is
more than 80 percent Aramaic."

Emanuel Doubchak, a linguist and translator who emigrated to Israel from
France, attributes the spread of Aramaic in the ancient world to the fact that
its namesakes, the Aramaeans, were merchants who plied the far-flung trade
routes of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean Basin.

"They did not engage in empire-building and never had an empire of their own,"
he contended, "but their language attained the status of being the main
linguistic vehicle for diplomatic discourse" and international trade for nearly
a millennium.

He credited Aramaic's universality with the fact that many of the great
philosophical, historical and scientific works of the ancient world were
translated into it from Greek and Latin and thereby were saved for posterity.

Despite the powerful cultural impact of Greek language and culture during the
Hellenistic period, "Aramaic remained the dominant language of this country and
its square alphabet replaced the cursive letters of the preceding Canaanite-
Phoenician writing system originally adopted by the Hebrews," he said.

The rise of Christianity and the fact that the New Testament was written in
Greek posed "an obstacle" to Aramaic's local longevity, however. Concurrently,
the eastern Christians had adopted a variation of the Assyrian alphabet, whose
letters are reminiscent of the Hebrew ones, but not enough to make them legible
to most Jews. The anonymous Christian scholar from the Old City, however, was
able to jot them down in a jiffy.

My big fat Aramaic wedding
There is no better proof of modern Aramaic's vitality than the spectacular
weddings held by the Jewish "Nash Didan" community, which hails from the remote
foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.

"Nash Didan" means "Our People" and its distinctive music and dance have been
immortalized by Nissan Aviv, a brilliant composer and orchestrator who arrived
in Israel 55 years ago during the peak of the "Nash Didan" immigration, and has
devoted his life to preserving and continuing this culture ever since. In
addition to the many CDs he's put out over the years, Aviv was also the subject
of a documentary by Channel 1's Gil Sedan.

Soon after the late Naomi Shemer's Yerushalayim Shel Zahav ("Jerusalem of
Gold") became a hit on the eve of the Six Day War, Aviv obtained her permission
to render it in Aramaic. Translated as Yerushalayim Ai Dheba, it is a beloved
staple at "Nash Didan" weddings.

Aviv was born in Urmia, an ancient city in Iranian Azerbaijan.

"We spoke Aramaic at home, Turkish on the street and learned Persian at
school," he said.

"I knew a fair amount of Hebrew when we came to Israel because it was taught in
our Jewish schools. And partly thanks to my Aramaic, I was able to speak like a
sabra in no time."

Aviv's lyrics are written in modern Aramaic and his songs not only draw
audiences from the various Aramaic-speaking communities in Israel - located in
Holon, Givatayim and Jerusalem - but are also played on the Aramaic (or Syriac)
radio and TV stations in Australia, Canada and Sweden.

"Jerusalem of Gold is as popular abroad as it is here," he said.

Aviv's music is based on three instruments: a drum known as a dair'a, a five-
stringed instrument plucked like a balalaika or mandolin known as a kar kavkazi
and a Central Asian version of the cello known as a kamanncha.

Aviv has won the unstinting acclaim of one of Israel's leading experts in
cognate Semitic languages, Hezy Mutzafi, who speaks half a dozen of the Aramaic
and Syriac dialects fluently. Noting that the "Nash Didan" community consists
of "only a few thousand" Israelis (its members constitute a relatively small
percentage of the influx of nearly 200,000 immigrants from Iran, Turkey and the
Caucasus), Mutzafi points out that it also is one of the least known Jewish
ethnic groups.

"Its focus is on culture, folklore and spoken Aramaic," explained Mutzafi,
referring to the latter as lishan noshan or "our language."

Mutzafi singled out Aviv as one of the most outstanding activists in the "Nash
Didan" community, a man who has contributed mightily to its spiritual and
cultural life.

Privately, Aviv is rather pessimistic about what the future holds for the
language and lifestyle he loves and has tried to preserve.

"Our Aramaic is being forgotten," he said. "The younger generation can
understand it, but cannot speak