From the Old Written to the New SpokenThe last paragraph is a little garbled. Modern "Assyrian" is Aramaic, but with some Akkadian vocabulary absorbed in antiquity (the Aramaic of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra already has quite a few Akkadian words in it), plus vocabulary from the other, more recent languages mentioned.
Posted GMT 12-12-2011 19:41:12 (AINA)
Sacramento -- In a small apartment in Sacramento California, there lives a Seventy-two year old Assyrian Deacon named Elisha Simon who spends many of his hours typing away on his computer; translating hand-written Aramaic texts into Assyrian Neo-Aramaic.
"For over Forty years, I have been doing this," he told me as we drank tea at his kitchen table, "Each day I spend about six hours, on average."
Through the reflection in the window across from me, I could see his wife Ramziya standing in the kitchen, nodding her head in agreement. "Should I pour you another tea broonee? [my son]" She asked as soon as we made eye contact through the reflection.
Before I could answer, my tea cup was already filled, and there she was sitting next to us at the table.
"So what exactly are these documents that you're translating?" I asked Elisha.
"Well, the biggest of my work has been the seven volumes containing the stories of Martyrs and Saints, Sharbe d'Sahde; I have translated various documents written by Assyrian bishops and priests--The Book of the Bee or Ktawa d'Dabasha being the most popular one; I have translated and digitized the hand-written constitution of the Assyrian Church of the East; and one of my recent projects was an Aramaic/Assyrian Neo-Aramaic/Arabic/English dictionary containing around five thousand words--I finished that too. Whatever Aramaic texts we've written, I want to get my hands on to translate into the dialect that we are speaking today, Assyrian."
The ancient Assyrian language is classified as Akkadian, which was written in cuneiform and spoken by ancient Assyrians and Babylonians as early as 2800 B.C. Aramaic, a similar language from the region, became the next official language in 752 B.C. Because Aramaic was similar to Akkadian and more systematic containing only 22 letters compared to the roughly 600 characters of the cuneiform system, it rapidly integrated and became the lingua franca of the region. As a result, modern day Assyrian people speak a language that is mainly comprised of Akkadian and Aramaic, and with a modicum of invading Arabic, Farsi, Greek, and Turkish. Linguists have classified this language as Assyrian Neo-Aramaic.
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The Book of the Bee is one of the books to be translated in Tony Burke's More Christian Apocrypha project.