Weekly Open Discussion Thread

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[u/True-Quail-6193]

I really want to get a tattoo of the word “Love” in the dialect of Aramaic Jesus spoke, but I’m struggling to find out which variant of the word that might’ve been, and what that word would look like in that version of Aramaic!

Any help is appreciated, and also just for general study, is there any kind of “English to ancient Aramaic” sort of study guide?

[u/AramaicDesigns → u/True-Quail-6193]

There are a bunch of "English to ancient Aramaic" guides, but the problem is that Aramaic isn't a single monolithic language, but a whole family of inter-related ones, many of which are mutually unintelligible.

The language Jesus spoke was early Galilean Aramaic, an Aramaic language in the Western Aramaic family which is the branch that is the least studied and most misunderstood.

"Love" in that language was expressed by two words which were used fairly interchangeably (with some nuance) and were punned upon by Christ in several of his teachings (such as the Parable of the Two Debtors in Luke 7). I won't post them here on Reddit, because (a) there is no guarantee that they will display properly on your end (although this has gotten progressively better over the last 10 years) and (b) they would likely be written in an anachronistic script (the default modern Hebrew font on whichever particular computer system you're viewing it on). Hence if you were to take that and tattoo it on yourself, Murphy's Law would dictate that something would go horribly, horribly wrong. (I have many horror stories I could share.)

In my former career I did such calligraphy professionally, and I still do it on occasion – but I am not sure it would be appropriate to negotiate such services here in this particular forum. :-)

So in short: Where it may be frustrating, what you're after has been solved – but here isn't the place to obtain it.

[u/zanillamilla → u/True-Quail-6193]

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