LINGUIST List 24.745
Mon Feb 11 2013
Media: Smithsonian Magazine Article on Documenting Aramaic
Editor for this issue: Anna Belew
<annalinguistlist.org>
Date: 07-Feb-2013
From: Anna Belew <anna
linguistlist.org>
Subject: Smithsonian Magazine Article on Documenting Aramaic
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'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
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Documentation
Language Family(ies): Aramaic
Page Updated: 11-Feb-2013