Media: Smithsonian Magazine Article on Documenting Aramaic
| Submitter: |
Anna Belew
|
| Submitter Email: | anna@linguistlist.org |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Language Documentation |
| Language Family: |
Aramaic
|
| Media Body: |
'It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, Geoffrey Khan of the University of Cambridge, was nominally in town to give a speech at Northwestern University, in Evanston. But he had another agenda: Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war. The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects before the language—once the tongue of empires—follows its last speakers to the grave.' Full article: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/How-to-Save-a-Dying-Language-187947061.html |
| Issue Number: | 24.745 |
| Date Posted: | February 07, 2013 |
