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Syriac alphabet. Aramaic (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: ארמית, romanized: ˀərāmiṯ; Classical Syriac: ܐܪܡܐܝܬ, romanized: arāmāˀiṯ [a]) is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia [3] [4] and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written ...
Other speakers include Muslim and Christian Arameans (Syriacs) [7] [8] [9] from Maaloula and Jubb'adin, who speak the endangered Western Neo-Aramaic language, Mandaeans, and some Mizrahi Jews. Today, the number of fluent Neo-Aramaic speakers is significantly smaller, and newer generations of Assyrians generally are not acquiring the full ...
A Judeo-Aramaic inscription from Mtskheta, Georgia, dating to the 4th-6th century CE. The conquest of the Middle East by Alexander the Great in the years from 331 BCE overturned centuries of Mesopotamian dominance and led to the ascendancy of Greek, which became the dominant language throughout the Seleucid Empire, but significant pockets of Aramaic-speaking resistance continued.
Mandaic is both spoken and used as a liturgical language by the Mandaeans. Although the majority of Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken today are descended from Eastern varieties, Western Neo-Aramaic is still spoken in two villages in Syria. Despite the ascendancy of Arabic in the Middle East, other Semitic languages still exist.
Today, Western Neo-Aramaic is the sole surviving remnant of the entire western branch of the Aramaic language, [21] spoken by no more than a few thousand people in the Anti-Lebanon mountains of Syria, mainly in Maaloula and Jubb'adin. Until the Syrian Civil War, it was also spoken in Bakhʽa, which was completely destroyed during the war, and ...
In September 2014, Minister of the Interior Gideon Sa'ar instructed the PIBA to recognise Arameans as an ethnicity separate from Israeli Arabs. [4] [5] Under the Ministry of the Interior's guidance, people born into Christian families or clans who have either Aramaic or Maronite cultural heritage within their family are eligible to register as Arameans.
The vernacular dialects of Eastern Old Aramaic, spoken during the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid Persian empires, developed into various Eastern Middle Aramaic dialects. Among these were the Aramaic dialects of the ancient region of Osrhoene, one of which later became the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity.
Numbers of fluent speakers range from approximately 300,000 to 575,000, with the main languages being Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (40,000 plus speakers), [14] [15] Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (220,000 speakers) [16] and Surayt/Turoyo (250,000 speakers), [17] together with a number of smaller closely related languages with no more than 5,000 to 10,000 speakers between them.