ARAMAIC WATCH: FemaleFirst.co.uk has a series of articles on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, including one on "The Passion Of The Christ - Aramaic an ancient language comes alive." Looks pretty historically accurate, although Hebrew is the basis of the Talmud, not Aramaic. It also tells the story of William Fulco's involvement in providing the ancient Aramaic for the script and it gives some interesting information on the experience the cast had with Aramaic:

Ultimately, the entire international cast of The Passion of The Christ had to learn portions of Aramaic � most doing so phonetically � becoming perhaps one of the largest groups of artists ever to take on an ancient tongue en masse.

For Gibson, the film�s �foreign language� had another benefit: learning Aramaic became a uniting factor among a cast made up of many languages, cultures and backgrounds. �To bring a cast from all over the world to one place and have them all learn this one language gave them a sense of common ground, of what they share and of connections that transcend language�, he says.

It also compelled the cast to look more deeply into their physical and emotional resources above and beyond the use of words.

�Speaking in Aramaic required something different from the actors�, observes Gibson, �because they had to compensate for the usual clarity of their own native language. It brought out a different level of performance. In a sense, it became good old-fashioned filmmaking because we were so committed to telling the story with pure imagery and expressiveness as much as anything else�.

I suspect that learning it "phonetically" means not just that they didn't learn the Aramaic alphabet, but also that they mouthed the lines without any great knowledge of the grammar or vocabulary, which is not exactly "learning" a language in my book. Still, I'm sure even that was a lot of work.