ARAMAIC WATCH: Iraqi Assyrians and their language are the subject of this Chicago Tribune article (this link is to the Monterey County Herald).

Assyrians find new hope for culture's survival in post-Saddam Iraq

BY STEPHEN FRANKLIN

Chicago Tribune

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Odisho Malko reaches deep inside a living room cabinet for a bundle tightly bound in cloth. Carrying it ever so gently, he undoes the wrapping, revealing a large, timeworn book, bound in thick, dark brown leather that he carefully places on a glass table.

Then Malko, a tall, soft-spoken, middle-age man with a pleasant smile, stands back, seemingly in awe. It is almost as if he has revealed an ancient secret in his Baghdad house. Handwritten by a priest more than 200 years ago in a lonely mountaintop village where his family once lived, it is an ancient prayer that is still part of the Assyrian liturgy.

"This is very precious," he says, opening the book, a 13th century prayer written in Assyrian, an ancient Semitic language that, like Hebrew and Arabic, sprang from Aramaic. Because Aramaic was the common language spoken at the time of Jesus Christ, Mel Gibson used it in his movie "The Passion of the Christ."

Malko, a professional engineer by training, vowed years ago to help keep Assyrian alive, churning out books and poems and an Arabic-Assyrian dictionary that he keeps updating, dutifully jotting down in blue ink new words for an edition that he says will come out someday soon.

It is the language that has bound the Assyrians in the 2,600 years since the fall of their one-time capital Nineveh and the collapse of an empire that had sprawled outward from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to ancient Egypt and the Caspian Sea.

Assyrians in the United States have clung to the language through classes at churches and their own organizations. Just barely, however.

[...]

The third paragraph contains a howler. Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic are all three Semitic languages, which means they all descend from a common source language we call Proto-Semitic. There are no texts preserved in Proto-Semitic; it is entirely reconstructed from comparison of the Semitic languages, but it is a neccessary solution to the linguistic puzzle of their origin. Assyrian is a dialect of Aramaic (not to be confused with the more ancient Assyrian language that is a dialect of Akkadian cuneiform.)