Peaking out between the enormous enrollments of the CS50s and Ec10s of the Q guide sits NEC91r, a supervised research tutorial in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. Its sole student in the fall of 2013, Christian G. Sidak ’17 was the only undergraduate to study Syriac-Aramaic at the time.In my time at UCLA I was the only undergraduate taking the Biblical Studies degree and I took a number of courses on my own with Stanislav Segert, including Biblical Aramaic. If memory serves, he told me to go and read Rosenthal's grammar and all the Aramaic texts in the Bible and then come tell him when I was done so he could give me a final exam.
Sidak decided to attend Harvard with every intention of pursuing Aramaic. However, upon his arrival in Cambridge, he learned that the professor who taught Aramaic A, the beginner Aramaic course, was absent on sabbatical.
Unfazed, Sidak approached the director of undergraduate studies for NELC and petitioned for a class in Syriac-Armaic. According to Sidak, the petition process presented no challenges, as the department easily found a professor who was willing to teach a one-person seminar in the ancient language.
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Likewise, when I was a doctoral student at Harvard in the 1980s, I was the only registered student in a Sumerian reading class with Piotr Steinkeller, although there were also auditors in that case. Ec10, by the way, is an introductory Economics class at Harvard that is famous for its gigantic enrollments. For a while I dated one of the several secretaries who worked full time just for that one class.
A couple of times over the years I have taught a Hebrew seminar here with just one student, but my Aramaic class has, for some reason, always been well attended. And our Hebrew enrollments are considerably stronger now than back then.
