Dabbling diary: Aramaic — the first “world language”?
About a decade after Marco Polo set out on his journey along the Silk Road to China in the late 13th century, a monk from Beijing (then known as Khanbaliq or Dadu/大都) was heading off in the opposite direction.
His name was Rabban Bar Sauma, and basically you should read the whole Wikipedia article I linked if you don’t know the story already. While Bar Sauma’s original plan was to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Crusades and Mongol conquests interfered, and he ended up staying in Mongol-ruled Persia for several years, before being sent to France (or Frangestan) in an effort to form a Franco-Mongol alliance against the Arabs.
The entire operation was a wild ride from a linguistic point of view, since Bar Sauma was a Turkic Christian from China visiting Western Europe. As Wikipedia describes it:
Rabban Bar Sauma traveled with a large retinue of assistants, and 30 riding animals. Companions included the Church of the East Christian (archaon) Sabadinus; Thomas de Anfusis (or Tommaso d’Anfossi), who helped as interpreter and was also a member of a famous Genoese banking company; and an Italian interpreter named Uguetus or Ugeto (Ughetto). Bar Sauma likely did not speak any European languages, though he was known to be fluent in Chinese, Turkic, and Persian, and he was able to read Syriac. Europeans communicated to him in Persian.
Obviously Persian was a key piece of the puzzle here (and I’ll be writing more about that next time, in my post about Iranian languages), but the language whose culture set this whole journey in motion (and the language that the name Bar Ṣauma/ܒܪ ܨܘܡܐ/“Son of Fasting” comes from) was Syriac — one of the major variants of the Aramaic language.
But first, a quick aside….
A real estate revelation
During the three years I spent working as a reporter/researcher at a real estate magazine in New York, one of my responsibilities (unsurprisingly) was to be the foreign languages guy.
Rather than Chinese, Russian, or German, etc., all of which I did have to use on occasion, the language I ended up having to use most regularly at work was Hebrew — primarily to read financial disclosure documents from Israel (here’s an article I wrote that explains the history behind that connection).
As I was figuring out how to read Tel Aviv Stock Exchange filings (with the help of a dictionary, of course), I was a bit surprised to discover how much Hebrew legalese could be traced back to Aramaic. Here are a few examples:
- the Hebrew word for “real estate” itself, nadlan/נדל״ן, is an Aramaic acronym for “non-mobile properties” (nikhse d’la nay’de/נִכְסֵי דְלָא נָייְדֵי)
- various common turns of phrase in documents, like k’dilqaman/כדלקמן and k’dilhalan/כדלהלן (both meaning “as follows” or “see below”), b’meysharin/במישרין (“directly”) and ba’aqifin/בעקיפין (“indirectly”) are of Aramaic origin, as hinted at by the use of “d-” as a relative marker and the “-in” endings
- many technical Hebrew words appear to be derived from Aramaic roots, such as hanpaqa/הנפקה (“(bond or stock) issuance”), based on the root n-p-q (“to go out; to exit”), which is common in Aramaic but not in Hebrew
For people who have had a Hebrew school education, I suppose none of this would be much of a surprise. But for me it was a revelation: basically, it seemed that Aramaic’s relationship to Hebrew (especially modern Hebrew?) could be compared to that of Latin and Greek to European languages; Chinese to Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese; or Arabic to Persian and of both of them to Turkish and Urdu etc.
Of course, there’s the added wrinkle here that Hebrew and Aramaic are closely related to each other to begin with. So maybe a closer analogy would be the relationship of Old Church Slavonic to Russian, or Sanskrit to Bengali, or Ge’ez to Amharic. And furthermore, the fact that Hebrew itself is a religiously significant language also makes the whole situation quite unique.
But anyway, how did this relationship come about?
Lingua franca, aramaica
To quickly summarize the history here, if you aren’t familiar with it: from the mid-8th century BCE onwards, Aramaic came to be used as an administrative language and lingua franca for several major empires in the “Middle” or Near East, including the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Persian Achaemenid Empire. Much of the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel-Palestine (as well as the diaspora in Babylon) would therefore have been quite familiar with the language. Aramaic eventually even replaced Hebrew as a spoken language among Jews, and the historical Jesus Christ most definitely spoke a form of Aramaic as his mother tongue, for example.
For a much more detailed look at this history, including who the original Arameans were, how the Akkadian language fell out of use in Assyria, Syriac’s influence on Arabic, and so on, you might want to check out the recently published book Aramaic: A History of the First World Language by Holger Gzella. I read (okay, skimmed) the book a few months ago and found it very eye-opening.
One part that struck me in particular was the book’s analysis of the portions of the Old Testament that are written in Aramaic instead of Hebrew. Basically, the reason these parts of the Bible were written in Aramaic is similar to the reason that long passages in Tolstoy’s War and Peace are written in French instead of Russian — to better reflect the actual socio-linguistic situation in which certain scenes take place, using the more “international” language of the time.
Roughly the first half of the Book of Daniel, for example, is in Aramaic (following a slightly awkward switch from Hebrew to Aramaic mid-sentence) because it involves interactions between the protagonist Daniel and various Babylonian notables. And the first part of the Book of Ezra, which describes the completion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the related bureaucratic wrangling, includes several Aramaic legal documents in an otherwise Hebrew text.
Later on, much of the Talmud would be written in another variety of Aramaic as well, and Yemenite Jews still include an Aramaic translation (Targum) of the Hebrew Bible in their liturgy to this day. Aramaic also became a major language for Christianity in the Middle East, in the form of Classical Syriac, which was also the original language of many of Manichaeism’s foundational texts. Both Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism would eventually spread all the way to China — which is why a Christian monk like Bar Sawma would be in Beijing in the first place. Furthermore, the Syriac script was adapted to write several languages to the east, starting with Sogdian and Old Uyghur and later forming the basis for the Mongolian and Manchu alphabets as well.
So there you have it: a really old language with an interesting, highly cosmopolitan history, related to a few languages I’ve already studied, and with a cool script to go with it — it was obviously just a matter of time before I’d try to learn Aramaic.
Family resemblance
As I mentioned in my last post, Arabic was one of the major foreign languages I put an effort into studying early on. I had already learned the script in high school and studied the language on my own during college, around the same time I was learning Russian in class.
A solid footing in Arabic proved to be helpful for learning a broad swathe of languages across the Middle East and beyond, like Persian, Uzbek, Uyghur, Turkish, Hindi/Urdu, Swahili and so on — languages that aren’t related to Arabic linguistically per se, but which have received a huge cultural influence from it through Islam.
But besides this practical, cultural side, another cool thing about Arabic is its structure, with grammar and vocabulary derivation built around triconsonantal roots, like in all Semitic languages. Although I did skim some books on Biblical Hebrew and Syriac back in college to find out more about the broader language family, I didn’t really have a breakthrough until later.
Awkwardly enough, I finally started trying to study modern Hebrew seriously in the autumn of 2014, in the wake of that year’s edition of the Gaza War. It helped that I was organizing the Polyglot Bar meetup group in New York City at the time, which brought in a good number of Hebrew (L2) speakers on a regular basis. My knowledge of Arabic was clearly helpful, to some degree in vocabulary but even more so with grammatical concepts, and I was having basic conversations in Hebrew after just a few months.
It also helped that the language-education ecosystem around Hebrew is highly developed for a language with relatively few speakers, so I had no shortage of material to study with. I kept at it for about an entire year before eventually getting distracted by some other language (Swahili maybe? I don’t remember). Then in 2019, once I realized that knowing Hebrew would actually be useful for my job, I brushed up on it again with the help of a few Israeli TV shows on Netflix.
And that, as I described above, would eventually lead me to try learning more about Aramaic as well.
The first issue was which form of Aramaic to learn. For a while, my answer to that question was simply “whatever variety I can find a textbook for.” One of the first Aramaic textbooks I read through to the end was An Introduction To The Aramaic of Targum Onqelos by Thomas Lambdin, not because I had any particular interest in reading Aramaic translations of the bible, but just because the textbook was structured in an accessible way with vocabulary lists and exercises for each lesson. I didn’t have to learn a new script yet either, since Jewish variants of Aramaic are written with Hebrew letters.
But eventually, I did want to learn the Syriac script. Or scripts, really, because several of the letter forms (and vowel markings) are different enough in the different styles (Esṭrangēlā, Maḏnḥāyā, Serṭā) that knowing how to read one doesn’t automatically allow you to read the others. I ended up getting a hang of that with the help of Introduction To Syriac by Wheeler Thackston, which is mostly in Estrangela. Later on, I also came across a Russian textbook for Syriac, which mainly uses the Serta style.
Afterwards, I also skimmed textbooks on Biblical Aramaic and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, the main language of the Babylonian Talmud.
Grammatically, thanks to my background with Arabic and Hebrew, none of these variants was particularly challenging. The most notable feature that distinguishes Aramaic from Arabic and Hebrew is the -ā suffix added to the end of nouns in the so-called “emphatic state”, which roughly functions like the definite articles al- in Arabic or ha- in Hebrew. Beyond that, verb conjugations basically follow the same general principles as other Semitic languages.
On the vocabulary front, one key thing was just learning the sound correspondences (e.g. “three” is tlātā in Aramaic, compared to shalosh in Hebrew and thalātha in Arabic (but also tlāta in most dialects); “land” is arʿā (or sometimes arqā) in Aramaic, compared to Hebrew aretz and Arabic arḍ). In general, Aramaic is a lot closer to Hebrew than it is to Arabic, although some features of Levantine Arabic do seem to show the influence of the Aramaic which was spoken in the region before Arab expansion (e.g. 3rd person suffixes like -o and -hon instead of Standard Arabic -hu and -hum).
Ancient scripts
I’ve attempted to learn plenty of old languages over the years, from Latin and Ancient Greek through Old Church Slavonic and Old Turkic to Akkadian and Sanskrit (and some Classical Chinese in high school, which also counts, I suppose), but I never really got any good at any of them. One reason is just that they tend to be hard: either due to a complicated grammar, or a complex writing system, or simply a lack of accessible resources. Time and again, the fact that these languages aren’t actually spoken any more would lead me to lose interest after a month or two.
Aramaic feels like a bit of an exception to the “old languages are complicated” rule, considering that Imperial Aramaic is about as old as Homeric Greek. Its grammar is no more difficult than Levantine Arabic or Modern Hebrew, and the alphabets it’s written in are all quite straightforward (in contrast to Akkadian, for example, which also seems quite simple grammatically, but whose cuneiform writing system is at least as complicated as Japanese). So after getting the hang of the basics of Aramaic with the help of textbooks, I was ready to try reading some real texts “in the wild.”
The first real world text I tried to read in Aramaic was pretty basic — the Bible. Since I wasn’t brought up in a religious environment, I haven’t really read much of either the Old or New Testament before, apart from some readings in college. In any case, Aramaic seemed like a fitting language to finally read some more of these ancient texts in.
From the Old Testament, I read the Aramaic portion of the Book of Daniel, which was helpfully included in full in the Biblical Aramaic textbook I used. The text features well-known stories like “the writing in the wall” and “Daniel in the lions’ den”, as well as some pretty wild apocalyptic dream visions, so it was an entertaining read.
For the New Testament, I made use of a great online tool I found for browsing the text of the Peshitta, i.e. the Syriac version of the Bible. (The New Testament is generally considered to have been first written down in Greek, although some people do believe in “Peshitta primacy.”) So far, I’ve read the first two gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in Aramaic, and plan to look at the other two gospels, a few epistles and the Book of Revelations at some point later on. The same website also comes with a lot of great resources for looking up words and their roots across several Aramaic varieties.
I’ve also come across a few websites that provide large libraries of Aramaic texts, like the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Project’s text browser, and Syri.ac. I haven’t looked through these archives much yet, but they seem like great resources for further investigation.
Modern times
Besides an interest in ancient history, one of the other reasons I’ve tried to study various old languages has been to understand how languages have evolved over time. For example studying a bit of Old Church Slavonic helped me better understand Russian (and Serbo-Croatian), and I read about Medieval Korean to understand the origins of some modern Korean grammatical forms.
While there was already a good amount of diversity among forms of Aramaic two thousand years ago, its modern descendant languages show an even broader range of linguistic variety — although the total number of native speakers of all these “Neo-Aramaic” languages is less than one million.
Learning anything about any form of Neo-Aramaic wasn’t really on my to-do list originally, until I happened to come across an amazing website for learning the Central Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Tur Abdin region in southeast Turkey, also known as Turoyo or Surayt. I’m a sucker for a well-structured language textbook, and this website included audio for all the dialogs and texts, detailed grammar tables and a dictionary full of usage examples. So I read the whole thing (but skipped the exercises, as usual).
I certainly wouldn’t say I actually learned to speak Surayt, though. I sped through the lessons a bit too quickly to retain much vocabulary actively, but I did pick up enough to appreciate how the language is structured, what the main differences between it and older Aramaic are, and how it was influenced by Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish.
In particular, one feature of Surayt that I found most remarkable was that it had developed split ergativity, where past tense transitive verbs agree with the object of the sentence like in Hindi, Georgian, or Kurdish. I assume language contact with Kurdish contributed to this development (although some sentence constructions in Classical Syriac seem to lay the groundwork for this change as well).
Afterwards, I got my hands on a whole bunch of linguistic surveys of other Neo-Aramaic languages, although I mostly just skimmed them. In addition to Christian groups in Turkey, Iraq and Iran, some of these Neo-Aramaic languages were spoken by Jewish communities in Kurdistan, which have entirely relocated to Israel nowadays. Another interesting Neo-Aramaic language is Mandaic, the language of a small gnostic religious community from southern Iraq and Iran, which has its own writing system too. I’ve found a few books on the language as well as Mandaic religious texts, but I haven’t read much of them yet.
What next?
As I’m wrapping up the writing of this post — and despite everything I’ve just said about why Aramaic is a cool language to learn — I can already feel myself approaching the tail end of my habitual four-month interest-to-boredom cycle, unfortunately. 😅 After I hit publish on this post, I’ll probably take Aramaic out of my daily study routine for a while (though I might still try reading the Book of Revelations or some other part of the Syriac bible at some point soon).
As tends to happen a lot, my interest in Aramaic also planted the seeds for its own demise: after studying Aramaic and the world around it for a few months, I got really into the other “smaller” languages of the region, starting with Kurdish, which then reignited my interest in Armenian…. and now that I’m pretty familiar with structure of Aramaic as well as the Syriac scripts, it seems relatively less interesting to me at the moment.
But my interest in learning other Semitic languages is still going strong, and I’m thinking about picking up some Ethiopian languages again — mainly Amharic, but also a little Classical Ge’ez, and hopefully some Tigrinya too. But I’m still early in the process there (I can probably recognize 80% of the symbols in the Ge’ez syllabary) so I don’t know if I’ll actually stick with that yet. It seems like an easy way back into the study of African languages, which I’ve neglected for a few years.
In the meantime, my plan for the next few posts remains the same: Kurdish and other Iranian languages a couple weeks from now, and then Armenian after that! Until next time!
