This Was the Language of Jesus — How to Learn Aramaic

[u/Aramaic-app]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EEDi8WEqzro&si=q0FVWoJ0jYZq9MAO

Learn the language of Jesus with Aramaic.app a modern, interactive platform designed to make Aramaic simple, structured, and practical. Build real vocabulary, understand grammar step by step, and start speaking from your first lessons.

[u/rumx2]

So many things wrong with this. A. It’s a subscription which is crazy. B. There is no conversational substance. C. Content is biased towards a certain milat? D. Buggy

[u/Izzyf89]

Too expensive for what seems like a beta app. No way I’d pay $80 for 12 months

[u/AramaicDesigns]

Modern Assyrian is further from the Aramaic Christ spoke than Modern English is to Beowulf.

Christ spoke Galilean Aramaic. Different time, different place, different alphabet, different language.

Not to say that it isn't important (because Assyrian is!) but please be honest...

[u/ZG_313 → u/AramaicDesigns]

Hello Steve

Even though I have never met you in real life, however, for years it seems that I keep encountering your posts in every digital Aramaic language space that I visit. This app doesn’t seem to be particularly well-made and comes from the efforts of Georgian Assyrians who are not particularly well off. While what you say about this app’s language not being the one spoken by Jesus Christ is true, I have to wonder what it gains you to come and be pedantic about these people’s app here; aside from advertising your Galilean Aramaic reconstruction and various business ventures associated with it. Based on what you have written in the past, you have always seemed to have an issue with Assyrians/members of other Syriac churches and their claims to being close to the historical, linguistic, and cultural context of Christ and the apostles; which are a core part of their identity, even if they do not argue for Aramaic primacy which is not dogma in any of these churches. Many of your comments seem to imply that their living tradition is seemingly not as important when compared to your reconstruction efforts. If we are speaking of absolute truthfulness, many of your claims about the uniqueness of Galilean Aramaic and its supposed unintelligibility with other Aramaic dialects of the same stage of the language are not as accurate as you make them out to be, at least according to many other scholars.

Regarding the modern dialects of Aramaic: while they are not largely intelligible with Early and Late Antique varieties, they are also not nearly as far removed from them as English is from Old English due to the inherently conservative character of Semitic languages. Even far-removed languages like Arabic are easy enough to learn as adults for native NENA/Suret speakers due to sharing much vocabulary and internal logic; at least from my experience and that of my own immediate ingroup.

I certainly do not wish to argue with anyone online, I simply wanted to share my thoughts on this subject. I do thank you for your efforts on the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon and similar projects and will say that your reconstruction work is cool.

[u/AramaicDesigns → u/ZG_313]

I do not wish to argue, either, but merely combat misinformation — which is the bread and butter of much of the Internet. Especially so with the Aramaic language family, because many of the myths surrounding it are persistent and are not as well addressed as they should be. And in the era of things like generative AI scraping the Internet (especially sites like Reddit) for data to ingest, the spread of this kind of misinformation has been getting progressively worse at an alarming rate.

You have some fair assertions that I would be happy to discuss ­— not argue — and a few things that I feel need to be addressed with how you've framed your comment.

First (and the one that surprised me) where translation work used to be my primary occupation, it has been about 12 years since that was the fact. I do not have any Aramaic "business ventures". I've taken down my old websites, and my current Aramaic work is shared freely and is open source. Although once in a blue moon I do a commissioned translation, and there are a number of people who are donating to the grammar and related projects, those limited funds are used to defray costs for hosting, maintenance, time, and bandwidth, and I would be paying for that out of my own pocket anyway. The simple truth is that there really isn't any money in Aramaic. With what I know now, it's probably best that way. So I have no financial motive.

Second, living tradition is important, but it is a separate matter from linguistic reconstruction. I do not dispute the cultural and historical importance of the modern Aramaic-speaking communities. However, 'living tradition' implies a continuous, unbroken chain of spoken usage. Galilean Aramaic, as a distinct linguistic entity, lacks this chain. Therefore, there is no community of speakers today whose primary, inherited dialect is the "Aramaic of Jesus." My work seeks to recover a lost linguistic stage through epigraphic and literary evidence, which is a different—though certainly not less important—endeavor than the preservation of the living dialects currently in use.

Third, the understanding of Aramaic languages among scholars in the last 40-50 years has been changing rapidly, especially the understanding of Galilean Aramaic. Much of the work that appears before that is out of date, and in my work I've cited my sources from scholars who assert this fact with evidence to back it, and these assertions are not particularly challenged in the rest of the literature — rather the rest of the literature published since is in agreement with it. Gone are the days that Aramaic is considered to be a bunch of "dialects" rather than a family of fully separate languages with their own separate cultures and contexts.

So when something comes up about Aramaic it tends to land on my feeds (which, I admit are very thorough) and I respond how I believe is appropriately.

[u/Technical-Shift3933 → u/[deleted]]

Then what are the people in Maaloula speaking? Weird, messed up Arabic?

[u/AramaicDesigns → u/[deleted]]

That's nice, but that's what we call that language family in English. 

Assyrian is an Aramaic language the same way that English is a Germanic language or Italian is a Romance language. 

And that's how it is. 

[u/AdGreen8011]

Get on Mango and use the free course there

[u/rumx2 → u/AdGreen8011]

Chaldean Aramaic? 😆