Christ's endangered language gets new lease of life in OxfordWell done! As it happens, I'm teaching biblical Aramaic next semester. I can't compete with those numbers, but I have six registered for credit and two or three have told me they want to audit. I am content.
An Aramaic course offered by Oxford University is drawing scores of scholars from as far afield as Liverpool and London
* Maev Kennedy
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 December 2010 16.34 GMT
It is the language that Christ spoke, but is regarded as "endangered" with ever fewer scattered groups of native speakers.
But in Oxford, Aramaic has been flourishing again, with a course in the ancient language drawing people from as far afield as Liverpool and London. There are now 56 people learning Aramaic at the university, including three classics professors, solemnly completing their weekly homework tasks and regularly attending the free lunchtime lessons, more than the numbers studying Greek.
Their first lesson might have surprised the writers of the books of David and Ezra in the Bible, and of the Talmud, both originally written in Aramaic: the scholars pored over a translation of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
David Taylor has previously taught the language to groups of two or three people in his study, and was astounded by the turnout for his first public lesson. Though a few fell by the wayside, more than 40 stayed the course until the classes ended in time for Christmas.
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Incidentally, there is no "book of David" in the Bible. I think the writer must have mis-heard "book of Daniel." Daniel and Ezra are partly written in Aramaic.
Oh, and this looks exciting:
The lessons were organised by Oxford University's classics faculty and faculty of oriental studies as part of Project Arshama, a collaboration between the universities of Oxford and Liverpool, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project is focused on one of the treasures of the vast Bodleian library, the 13 Arshama letters, written on leather in the Persian empire in the 5th century BC – priceless to scholars because so many documents on parchment or clay have not survived. There will be a seminar and an exhibition on the letters next summer.