Language belonging to the Northwest Semitic subdivision of the Semitic
subfamily of the Hamito-Semitic family of languages. At some point during
the second millenium B.C., the Aramaeans abandoned
their desert existence and settled in Syria, bringing their language, Aramaic,
with them. By the beginning of the 7th cent. B.C.,
Aramaic had spread throughout the Fertile Crescent as a lingua franca.
Still later the Persians made Aramaic one of the official languages of
their empire. After the Jews were defeated by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.,
they began to speak Aramaic instead of Hebrew, although they retained Hebrew
as the sacred language of their religion. Although Aramaic was displaced
officially in the Middle East by Greek after the coming of Alexander the
Great, it held its own under Greek domination and subsequent Roman rule.
Aramaic was also the language of Jesus. Following the rise of Islam in
the 7th cent. A.D., however, Aramaic began to yield
to Arabic, by which eventually it was virtually replaced. In the course
of its long history the Aramaic language broke up into a number of dialects,
one of the most important of which was Syriac. Parts of the books of Ezra
and Daniel in the Bible were written in an Aramaic dialect, as were some
notable Jewish prayers, such as the kaddish. Other important documents
in Aramaic include portions of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds and
the Targum Onkelos, a commentary on the Pentateuch. Nabataean (the form
of Aramaic current among the Nabataean Arabs), Samaritan, and Palmyrene
were other significant ancient dialects of Aramaic. Modern forms of the
language (including Syriac) are still spoken today, though not by more
than a few hundred thousand people scattered in the Near and Middle East.
Grammatically, Aramaic is very close to Hebrew. The Aramaic alphabet is
a North Semitic script that is first attested in the 9th cent. B.C.
After c.500 B.C. its use became widespread in the
Middle East. Descended from the Aramaic alphabet are the Square Hebrew
alphabet, which is the ancestor of modern Hebrew writing; the Nabataean,
Palmyrene, and Syriac scripts; and the Arabic alphabet, among others. It
is believed that the alphabetic writing systems of India and Southeast
Asia also have the Aramaic script as their source.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
General
References Main Page
Orbis Latinus Main
Page
This page is part of Orbis
Latinus
© Zdravko Batzarov