New West Aramaic Language

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New West Aramaic

Spoken in

Syria ( Maalula , as-Sarcha , Dschubb-'Adin )
speaker approx. 15,000
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

-

ISO 639-3

amw

New West Aramaic is one of the Aramaic languages and is spoken today only in Dschubb-'Adin and partly in Maalula , until the civil war in Syria also as-Sarcha , i.e. only in three Syrian mountain villages in the Qalamun Mountains.

distribution

The three mountain villages Maalula , Bacha'a ( Bach'a , Arabic as-Sarcha ) and Dschubb-'Adin (Jubb'adin) are or were the rest of the once extensive westaramäischen language area. The West Aramaic language area once included Palestine and Lebanon . In the 18th century, New West Aramaic dialects were still spoken in today's Lebanon. Each of the three villages has its own dialect.

Dialects

Of the three dialects, Bach'a is probably the most conservative; he was least influenced by Arabic. The dialect of Jubb-'Adin, whose inhabitants are Muslim, has most strongly absorbed Arab influences.

Origin and language of Jesus

New West Aramaic is traced back to dialects of West Aramaic that already existed at the time of Jesus . Jesus of Nazareth , whose mother tongue is Aramaic, lived in Galilee , where the Galilean dialect of what was then Western Aramaic was spoken. The best-known quote from Jesus, reproduced in Aramaic in the New Testament, is the exclamation on the cross “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In Matthew Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani? ( Mt 27.46  EU ) and with Markus as Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani? ( Mk 15.34  EU ). To this day, the identification of the vernacular Maalula with the language of Jesus plays a central role in the ethnic identity of the Christian villagers. The Western Aramaic spoken in Galilee and in the rest of Palestine was, however, completely supplanted by Arabic. The dialects of New West Aramaic that have survived to this day are probably derived from a variant of Western Aramaic spoken further north of the time of Jesus and have gone through a two-thousand-year history with language change . So does the Aramaic teacher from Maalula Emad Rehan give Jesus' words on the cross with Ili ma'schbaktani? again.

Writing and writing dispute

In contrast to Assyrian-New Aramaic or Syriac (Syriac) , which can look back on a rich literary tradition in Syriac script , the New West Aramaic was passed on exclusively orally until 2006, i.e. not used in written form.

In 2006, an Aramaic language institute (language school) was founded in Maalula with the support of the Syrian government. Co-founder was George Saarur, who remained in Maalula in 2019 as the only Aramaic language teacher. The chairman of the language institute, George Rizkalla (Rezkallah), was commissioned to write a textbook in Western Aramaic. The language was previously not written, and Rizkalla opted for the Hebrew alphabet , in which Jewish texts had been written in Galilean Western Aramaic over 2000 years earlier - not in the area of ​​Maalula, but in the area of ​​today's Israel. This decision met with opposition from the Syrian government and parts of the population. In view of this, Rizkalla decided to use a modified square font . Because of its similarity to Hebrew, the Syrian government banned this script in February 2010 and had all Aramaic inscriptions in Maalula that had been made in the meantime removed. In response to this, Rizkalla decided to write the next textbook in Syriac script, as it is also used by the Assyrians, for example in the Peshitta . However, this was shortly before the outbreak of civil war in Syria .

Sociolinguistic situation before the civil war

The Erlangen professor of Aramaic Otto Jastrow described Western Aramaic in 2010 as “very lively. It does not need any measures to be revived. ”It does not need its own script, but can also be written with Arabic letters. The Greek Orthodox Christian Emad Rehan, who was still a young teacher at the recently founded Aramaic language institute in Maalula in 2009, confirmed that Aramaic is the colloquial language in his hometown of Maalula and that he himself only learned Arabic at school. In his words, however, it was "mainly the old who actively use Aramaic" as early as 2009, and Aramaic was hardly heard in the churches either, because the liturgy is in Latin or Greek , depending on the church (Catholic or Orthodox) and the sermon in Arabic. The Heidelberg Semitist Werner Arnold noted in 2003 that many young people in Maalula were growing up with New West Aramaic, but questioned whether the language would survive the next generation. Most of the villagers live only two to three months in Maalula and the rest of the time in Damascus and other places where Aramaic is not passed on to the children.

Situation due to the civil war

As a result of the civil war in Syria, New West Aramaic is acutely threatened with extinction. Maalula and Bacha'a ( as-Sarcha ) were occupied by Islamist rebels from the al-Nusra front from the end of 2013 to April 2014 . According to the language expert George Saarur, who comes from Maalula, a large part of the young generation from Maalula now lives in Damascus and in other places where Aramaic is no longer passed on to children and they only grow up with Arabic. According to him, 80% of Maalula's Christians no longer speak Aramaic, and the remaining 20% ​​are over 60 years old. After the Islamists were driven out, only around a third of Maalula's residents had returned to their homeland by 2019. The 80-year-old mayor of Maalula, Elias Thaalab, sees the preservation of Aramaic as very important, but admits that young people have a lack of language skills. There are attempts to promote language skills in kindergarten, but there are only 30 children there, compared to 100 before. Bacha'a (as-Sarcha) was completely destroyed in the war, and all of the survivors fled to other parts of Syria or Lebanon , where the children also grew up speaking Arabic. The Muslim Jubb-'Adin , on the other hand, never fell under the control of the rebels and was not destroyed, so that a large part of the residents remained. Thus Jubb'adin is the only one of the three western Aramaic villages from which the Arameans were not expelled.

literature

  • Werner Arnold : The New West Aramaic. 5 volumes. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden ( Semitica Viva 4),
  • Werner Arnold: Textbook of New West Aramaic. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1989, ISBN 3-447-02910-2 ( Semitica Vva. Series Didactica 1), (2nd revised and expanded edition. Ibid 2006, ISBN 3-447-05313-5 ).
  • Jean Parisot: Le dialecte de ma'lula: grammaire, vocabulaire et textes. Imprimerie Nationale, Paris 1898 (reprint from Journal Asiatique. 1897–1898).
  • Anton Spitaler : grammar of the neo-Aramaic dialect of Ma'lūla (anti-Lebanon). Brockhaus (on commission), Leipzig 1938 ( Treatises for the Kunde des Morgenlandes 23, 1, ISSN  0567-4980 ) (Authorized reprint. Kraus-Reprint, Nendeln Liechtenstein 1966).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Werner Arnold about Aramaic in an interview with Barbara Stülmeyer: The language that Jesus heard first. Die Tagespost , No. 6, June 9, 2016.
  2. ↑ Stefan Drüeke and Arend Remmers: In which language did Jesus Christ call out on the cross “My God, my God, why did you leave me”? Bible Commentaries, March 19, 2017.
  3. ↑ a b Alastair Beach: Easter Sunday: A Syrian bid to resurrect Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. The Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2010.
  4. ↑ a b Karin Leukefeld : A visit to the Christians of Maalula in Syria. Where one speaks "Jesus language". Domradio , January 19, 2009.
  5. ↑ a b Fabian von Poser: Voices of the Lord. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , December 21, 2003.
  6. ↑ a b Language of Christ in Danger. George Saarur warns that Aramaic has become a language of the ancients. Wiener Zeitung, June 1, 2019.
  7. ↑ a b Maissun Melhem: font strife in Syria. Deutsche Welle , January 29, 2010.
  8. ^ Wolfgang Günter Lerch: Syria - Discrimination against the Christian minority. The trapped people of Maalula - The Aramaic script is no longer allowed to be used in two Syrian villages. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , February 23, 2010 ( article in the Working Group Religious Freedom - Human Rights - Persecuted Christians of the Evangelical Alliance).
  9. ↑ Destroyed Bacha'a. Help for the Aramäerdorf Maaloula eV, December 6th 2018 with linked Youtube-Video Destroyed Bacha'a in Syria .
  10. ↑ Jubb'adin in Qalamoun. Interview by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi with a resident of Jubb'adin. May 13, 2019.