Save the language of Jesus

Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is facing the danger of dying when the number of people capable of speaking this type of language plummeted globally.

Once thought to be the mother tongue of Christian founders and apostles more than 2,000 years ago, the endangered Aramaic language can disappear forever if it is not intervened in time. It is a warning of the linguistic professor Professor Geoffrey Khan of Cambridge University, who implements an important mission in the effort to record language related to Jews and Arabs before it wiped out. According to Khan, to do this, it is necessary to make journeys to communities still using Aramaic scattered around the world. He himself traveled to Georgia to meet this speaker.

Part of the language in the Dead Sea scrolls written in Aramaic - (Photo: Reuters)

The 3,000-year-old language has been widely used throughout the Middle East in commercial transactions, government archives and religious ceremonies from holy lands to India and China. The main language in Israel from 539 BC to 70, experts say it may also be the mother tongue of Jesus. Aramaic is the language most used in the bibles of Daniel and Ezra, and is the main language of the Talmud, a collection of ancient texts of Jewish masters. Besides, part of the scrolls on the Dead Sea are written in this language. Legend has it that when Jesus died on the cross, he uttered in Aramaic: 'Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?' (roughly translated: God, God, why did you abandon me?).

After the heyday, Aramaic gradually disappeared over time. There are only these small spoken groups scattered across the globe, from the city of Erbil in northern Iraq to Chicago in the US, home to several thousand Assyrians. According to the Smithsonian.com website, Professor Khan said he felt an urge to record this precious language after a conversation with a Jew in Erbil. Aramaic is not the only language in the area about to disappear. It is expected that between 50 and 90% of the 7,000 languages ​​spoken on the earth's surface will be destroyed by the end of the century, according to Smithsonian.com.

Arame, the first Aramaic-speaking people, was a nomad in the desert, and since then the language has spread to Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Samari communities . However, Aramaic has been lost. its position in the Middle East in the 7th century, when the Muslim legions from the Arab world occupied the area, and replaced Arabic as the regional language. The language still exists in remote areas like the Kurdish community in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. It is estimated that only about half a million people in the world speak Aramaic, and some local versions no longer exist, according to Smithsonian.com.