As part of my graduate program at UCLA I was required to learn several dialects of Aramaic, including Syriac. Since that time, I had not done much work with the language. However, one summer a few years ago I was approached by an old Orthodox priest and one of his deacons. They asked me if I could offer a class in Syriac, since their church uses the language in its liturgy, but they didn’t even know the alphabet and had to do the liturgy each Sunday by reading it in transliteration.A rambling essay on the Syriac language and its long history up to the present.
Cross-file under, you guessed it, Syriac Watch.