Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and revive the world’s oldest living tongue, still close to what it probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the Christian era.

„In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same language as we do in Maaloula today,” said teacher Imad Reihan, one of the pillars of this picturesque village’s Aramaic Language Academy, where Barqil is studying.

„Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani” („My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me”) – Christ’s lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.

Recognised by Unesco as a „definitely endangered” language, Aramaic is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics (Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one now wholly Muslim.

Aramaic’s long decline accelerated as the area opened up in the 1920s when the French colonial authorities built a road from Damascus to Aleppo. Television and the internet, and youngsters leaving to work, reduced the number of speakers.

Nowadays, many local men are away driving the huge refrigerated trucks that cross the desert to Saudi Arabia. Still, many old traces remain: in nearby Sidnaya, worshippers at the Church of Our Lady speak Arabic with a distinct Aramaic accent.

But things are definitely looking up. „When I was at school over 30 years ago, we were not allowed to speak Aramaic,” said Mukhail Bkheil, standing behind the counter in Abu George’s souvenir shop in Maaloula’s main square, where buses disgorge tourists visiting the beautiful Church of Mar Takla, an early Christian martyr, in a grotto on the steep cliffside. „Now, thanks to President Assad, we even have an institute teaching it.”

Bkheil’s party piece is reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. But he chats freely to friends, underlining the fact that the language is alive and well, not just liturgical.

Saada Sarhan, the language academy administrator, learned Aramaic as a child and is teaching her own children, but often feels social pressure to speak Arabic when non-Aramaic speakers are present. „Otherwise it’s rude,” she says.

Improbably, Aramaic was given a boost by a Hollywood film, Mel Gibson’s controversial Passion of the Christ, released in 2004 before the academy was set up.

Founded by the University of Damascus with government help, its modern premises boast a bank of PCs, new textbooks, a teaching staff of six and 85 students at three different levels.

Elias Taja is another of them: this native Aramaic speaker and retired maths teacher wanted to learn how to write the language. „I talk to my wife and daughter Miladi only in Aramaic though my daughter does sometimes reply in Arabic,” he explained over cardamom-flavoured coffee and locally grown pears.

Miladi, 25, recently married a man from Sidnaya who does not speak Aramaic. Taja worries she will not manage to pass it on to her children – his grandchildren.

Syria being Syria, there are political sensitivities, not least because „Arabisation” was a key feature of government education policy after the Ba’ath party came to power in the 1960s.

„In Syria there are a lot of minority groups: Circassians, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians, so it’s a big decision to allow the teaching of other languages in government schools,” said Reihan. „But the government is interested in promoting the Aramaic language because it goes back so deep into Syria’s history.”

Observers say the opening of the Aramaic academy showed a more relaxed and confident attitude by the regime. Scholar George Rizkallah dedicated his 2007 Aramaic textbook to the „great leader and patron of the sciences and education Dr Bashar al-Assad”. A large portrait of the president hangs in the principal’s office, as in all public buildings in Syria.

Considering the bitter enmity between Syria and Israel, which still occupies the Golan Heights, it is striking that Aramaic letters are so similar to the Hebrew used in rabbinic texts; one reason, perhaps, why the only Aramaic sign in Maaloula is on the academy. „Otherwise people might think some buildings were Israeli settlements,” joked one visitor from Damascus.

Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part of its heritage. „Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula,” said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at Cambridge University. „It’s the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran that are really endangered.”

Reihan and colleagues were delighted recently when a Unesco team came to visit and hope for funds to allow them to collect vanishing words into proper dictionaries. The teaching, meanwhile, goes on.

Ilyana started classes last November. „My father speaks Aramaic but my mother doesn’t as she’s from Lebanon,” she said. „I speak OK already but I’m going to carry on as I want to become fluent. I don’t know too much about the Aramaic language but I do know that it’s ancient.”

Forrás: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/14/aramaic-revival-syria

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March 12, 2003|By Liz Sly, Tribune foreign correspondent.

MAALULA, Syria — In this quaint stone village perched high in the mountains above Damascus, the language of Christ has somehow, miraculously, endured through the millennia.

Aramaic, which was dominant in the region when Jesus was alive, died out elsewhere many centuries ago. But in Maalula, time and geography have conspired to keep it alive, and today this village is the last place on Earth in which the language spoken by Jesus is still the native tongue.

Perhaps not for much longer, residents fear. The modern world is encroaching upon the village at a rapid pace, and no longer can Maalula be considered remote. A paved highway whisks commuters to Damascus in 45 minutes. Satellite dishes beam programs from around the world–none of them in Aramaic–into local living rooms. Job opportunities are scarce, and the younger generation is moving away, to the cities and overseas, taking with them what may turn out to be the last memories of this ancient language.

Within a few decades at most, Maalulans believe, Aramaic will have passed into history.

„In 10 or 20 years, it will be dead. The children don’t speak it anymore, and all the young people are moving to Damascus,” said Maria Hadi, 30, who grew up speaking Aramaic but moved to the city to attend high school and has forgotten the language of her childhood.

That Aramaic, which was introduced from the Persian Gulf in the 9th Century B.C., has survived at all is remarkable. Countless foreign invaders, including Greeks, Romans, Turks and Arabs, have swept across the region, each seeking to impose their own language and culture.

Cut off from world

Historians attribute the survival of Aramaic in this farming community, clinging to steep mountains 5,000 feet above sea level, to the village’s isolation and harsh climate. Blanketed by snow in winter, residents were traditionally cut off from the outside world for half of every year, leaving them to chatter away in the language passed down by their ancestors.

The advances of the modern world are proving more powerful than those ancient conquerors, however. State schools teach in Arabic, the language spoken throughout Syria, and even the villages’ ancient churches conduct services in Arabic. No written version of Aramaic survives, not even the Bible, despite the fact that portions of it were originally written in Aramaic.

Half a century ago, 15,000 people lived in Maalula, and Aramaic was the only language spoken in the village. Today, there are just 6,000 residents, and though more than 80 percent still speak Aramaic, barely 2,000 can speak it fluently, according to George Rizkallah, 65, a retired local schoolteacher.

„Maybe it will survive another 50 years, but after that it will die, unless we do something,” said Rizkallah, who has made it his life’s mission to save the language.

Last year, he started a summer school to teach local children during vacations. He is composing Aramaic songs in the hope that music will breathe life into the language. He has researched and revived the Aramaic alphabet and is working to translate the Bible.

So far, he has completed two Gospels.

Although Rizkallah, like most Maalulans, is Christian, he does not regard his mission as a religious one. A quarter of the village’s population is Muslim, and they, too, speak Aramaic.

„This is a pre-Christian dialect that is part of our culture and our past,” he said. „Even the Muslims were Christians before they were Muslims, and before that, we all were pagans.”

Maalula is not the only place in which this form of Aramaic has survived. An estimated 5,000 people scattered in remote communities in Turkey, Iraq and Iran speak versions of the language. But those dialects wouldn’t be understood in Maalula today, or at the time of Jesus, who was born barely 200 miles away.

In Maalula, Rizkallah said, Jesus would easily be able to converse with the locals.

„When Jesus said to Lazarus, rise up and walk, he used the same words we would use today, and the words he spoke on the cross, those were the same as our words,” he said.

The isolation that helped preserve Aramaic in Maalula is also proving its biggest curse. The language has failed to evolve or adapt, and its limited vocabulary bears little relevance to those living in the modern world.

„There are lots of words for things like goat, tree and vineyard, but outside the village, it is not so useful,” Rizkallah said.

Recent history isn’t helping either. Maalula’s linguistic legacy has typically put it on the itinerary of most tourists visiting the region. But since Sept. 11, 2001, and with the threat of war in neighboring Iraq, there are few tourists.

Before 2001, Maalula typically had 70,000 visitors a year; this year, the local hotel has received just four bookings from overseas. The economy is in decline, and more residents are expected to leave in search of opportunities.

Outlook grim

Rizkallah is not optimistic his efforts will succeed.

„I feel a great responsibility to teach the new generation,” he said with a sigh. „But it is a big and difficult task, and I am alone in this work.”

Some Maalulans don’t share his pessimism. Maha al-Haj, 27, an archeology student, has enrolled in Rizkallah’s classes and is studying the written form of the language in her spare time.

„This language was spoken more than 2,000 years ago, and it is our duty to protect it,” she said. „It will survive and it must survive.”

Forrás: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2003-03-12/news/0303120198_1_aramaic-arabic-language

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