MORE ON ARAMAIC and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ:

In 'Passion,' ancient Aramaic again finds its voice (Newark Star-Ledger)
Sunday, February 29, 2004

BY MARY JO PATTERSON
Star-Ledger Staff

At the searing blockbuster "The Passion of The Christ" last week, a retelling of the last hours of Jesus' life, George Kiraz sat rapt as moviegoers around him wept.

All around him people succumbed to their emotions, but Kiraz quietly exercised his brain and ears. He was focusing on the dialogue, spoken in the ancient tongue of Aramaic.

"We felt a bit guilty. People were sobbing all around us," said the Piscataway resident, who went with his wife Christine. "We were really concentrating on the language. It was so exciting to hear it."

[...]

Most Americans have probably never heard of Aramaic, although it figured in one episode of the TV show "Law and Order" and was actually spoken in a 1998 Denzel Washington movie, "Fallen." Most of the Talmud, the sourcebook of Jewish religious law, is in Aramaic. So are portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Most of the Talmuds (there are two of them) are in Hebrew, but there's some Aramaic. Aramaic has also figured in the movies Stigmata and The Order.

"I would like my children, when they go to church and hear liturgical Syriac, to understand it," said Kiraz, who worships at Saint Mark's Syrian Orthodox Church in Teaneck and at a new Syrian Orthodox parish he helped found in Cranbury.

Kiraz also has published teaching aids for Tabetha, including a coloring book, so that she is learning her ABCs in Aramaic as well as English -- plus Turkish. Mom Christine Kiraz, a chemist for Colgate-Palmolive, was born in Istanbul and speaks Turkish to her daughter. That makes Tabetha, who learns English at the baby sitter's next door and from TV, trilingual.

At the opening-day showing of "The Passion," Kiraz found he only understood about 60 percent of the dialogue. His wife, who studied Aramaic as an adult, understood a bit less.

No matter. They were thrilled to hear the sounds of a 2,000-year-old language come off the big screen.

"Thanks to this movie, there is a realization that there are communities that speak Aramaic," said Kiraz, director of the Syriac Institute in Piscataway, an organization that promotes the study of Aramaic. He earns his living as a consultant in the field of computational linguistics, which combines computer science with the study of language.

[...]

"It's kind of a dream for us," George Kiraz said, one day after viewing the movie. Little Tabetha played nearby, thumbing through her Aramaic dictionary and coloring in the letters.

"We hope that this interest in Aramaic will not peak and then disappear," he said. "We hope it will continue."

Me too.

Also, here's an interview with renowned Aramaic scholar Joseph Fitzmyer which I seem to have missed.