"Hértevin language The Hértevin language is a modern Eastern Aramaic or Syriac language. It was originally spoken in a cluster of villages in Siirt Province in southeastern Turkey. Speakers of Hértevin Aramaic have emigrated mostly to the West, and are now scattered and isolated from one another. A few speakers remain in Turkey. Hértevin was 'discovered' by linguist Otto Jastrow in 1970, and first described in publication by him two years later. His recordings of the language are available on Heidelberg University's Semitic Sound Archive. The speakers of the Hértevin dialect of Neo-Aramaic are traditionally Chaldean Catholics. Their area of"
"Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (abbreviated JPA) was a Western Aramaic language spoken by the Jews during the Classic Era in Judea and the Levant, specifically in Hasmonean, Herodian and Roman Judea and adjacent lands in the late first millennium BCE and later in Syria Palaestina and Palaestina Secunda in the early first millennium CE. A dialect of this language (Galilean Aramaic) was spoken by Jesus. The Son of God Text (4Q246), found in Qumran is written in this language as well. There were some differences in dialect between Judea and Galilee, and most surviving texts are in the"
"though probably only as a liturgical language. It is also been called ""Melkite Aramaic"" and ""Palestinian Syriac"". The language itself comes from Old Christian Palestinian Aramaic, but its writing conventions were based on early Middle Syriac, and it was heavily influenced by Greek. For example, the name Jesus, although ישוע ""Yešua’"" in Jewish Aramaic, and ""Išo"" in Syriac, is written ""Yesûs"" (a transliteration of the Greek form) in Christian Palestinian. As the Western Aramaic languages of the Levant and Lebanon have become nearly extinct in non-liturgical usage, the most prolific speakers of Aramaic dialects today are predominantly ethnic Assyrian Eastern"
"Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million), Amharic (22 million), Tigrinya (7 million), Hebrew (~5 million native/L1 speakers), Tigre (~1.05 million), Aramaic (575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers) and Maltese (482,880 speakers). Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian, Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE) (both"
"spoken, the three villages represent an important source for anthropological linguistic studies regarding first century Western Aramaic. According to scholarly consensus, the language of Jesus was also a Western Aramaic dialect; more specifically the Galilean variety of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Despite frequent misstatements in the media, however, the Neo-Aramaic spoken in Maaloula, Bakhah and Jubb'adin is no longer identical to the dialect which Jesus of Nazareth spoke, firstly it evolved from a separate Western Aramaic dialect than the Galilean dialect of Jesus, and secondly, as a part of natural language evolution it has undergone significant changes since the first century"
"pagan communities living to the east of the Jordan. Their dialect is often then called Pagan Old Palestinian, and it was written in a cursive script somewhat similar to that used for Old Syriac. A Christian Old Palestinian dialect may have arisen from the pagan one, and this dialect may be behind some of the Western Aramaic tendencies found in the otherwise eastern Old Syriac gospels (see Peshitta). It is generally believed by Christian scholars that in the first century, Jews in Judea primarily spoke Aramaic with a decreasing number using Hebrew as their first language, though many learned Hebrew"
"the language of Jesus), being substituted for 'Russian' (i.e. Old Russian, aka Old East Slavic) by the later East Slavic copyist, to whom 'Syriac' here presumably made little sense. It is doubtless that Syrian (Syriac, Aramaic) speaking people, presumably prevalently merchants, could have resided in the Crimea in the late ninth century, especially in the port city of Cherson. Moreover, Syriac was the language of Syrian Christian refugees who had escaped from Arabic Islamic rule and could have made their refuge on Cherson at that time. Therefore, the Syriac hypothesis is generally held to have much arguments on its side"
"Hebrew language. Nevertheless, on the basis of this and other information Jerome (c. 327–420) claimed that all the Jewish Christian communities shared a single gospel, identical with the Hebrew or Aramaic Matthew; he also claimed to have personally found this gospel in use among some communities in Syria. Jerome's testimony is regarded with skepticism by modern scholars. Jerome claims to have seen a gospel in Aramaic that contained all the quotations he assigns to it, but it can be demonstrated that some of them could never have existed in a Semitic language. His claim to have produced all the translations"
"Aramaic, which is in turn a Semitic language. The language spoken in the first century would have been Old Aramaic, like the Judeo-Aramaic language, while Ancient Aramaic like Biblical Aramaic was used in Old Testament times. Lamsa was a strong advocate of a belief traditionally held by part of that Church; that the Aramaic New Testament of the Peshitta was the original source text, and that the Greek texts were translated from it. In support of this, he claimed that Aramaic was the language of Jesus and his disciples. According to Lamsa, ""Aramaic was the colloquial and literary language of"
"in Jesus' time. They were probably distinctive yet mutually intelligible. Old Judaean was the prominent dialect of Jerusalem and Judaea. The region of Ein Gedi had the Southeastern Judaean dialect. Samaria had its distinctive Samaritan Aramaic, where the consonants he, and ayin all became pronounced the same as aleph, presumably a glottal stop. Galilean Aramaic, the dialect of Jesus' home region, is only known from a few place names, the influences on Galilean Targumic, some rabbinic literature and a few private letters. It seems to have a number of distinctive features: diphthongs are never simplified into monophthongs. East of the"
"Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in often large expatriate communities in North America and Europe, with smaller communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. The most widely spoken"
"New Testament often preserves non-Greek semiticisms, including transliterations of Semitic words: Examples: The 2004 film ""The Passion of the Christ"" used Aramaic for much of its dialogue, specially reconstructed by a scholar, William Fulco, S.J. Where the appropriate words (in first-century Aramaic) were no longer known, he used the Aramaic of Daniel and fourth-century Syriac and Hebrew as the basis for his work. The 3rd century AD is taken as the threshold between Old and Middle Aramaic. During that century, the nature of the various Aramaic languages and dialects began to change. The descendants of Imperial Aramaic ceased to be"
"Koine Greek, and also a colloquial dialect of Mishnaic Hebrew. It is generally agreed by most scholars that the historical Jesus primarily spoke Aramaic, perhaps also some Hebrew and Koine Greek. The majority view is that all of the books that would eventually form the New Testament were written in the Koine Greek language. As Christianity spread, these books were later translated into other languages, most notably, Latin, Syriac, and Egyptian Coptic. However, some of the Church Fathers imply or claim that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and then soon after was written in Koine Greek. Nevertheless,"
"of Judaism and it was revived in the 19th century, in the form of Ivrit, the spoken tongue of modern Israel. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples were West Asian people who lived throughout the Ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, Arabian peninsula, and Horn of Africa from the third millennium BC until the end of antiquity. The languages they spoke are usually divided into three branches: East, Central, and South Semitic. Proto-Semitic was likely spoken in the 4th millennium BC, and the oldest attested forms of Semitic date to the mid-3rd millennium (the Early Bronze Age). Speakers of"
"with Aramaic being the predominant language. Most scholars agree that during the early part of first century Aramaic was the mother tongue of virtually all natives of Galilee and Judea. Most scholars support the theory that Jesus spoke Aramaic and that he may have also spoken Hebrew (Dalman suggests for the Words of Institution) and Greek. Stanley E. Porter concluded: ""The linguistic environment of Roman Palestine during the first century was much more complex, and allows for the possibility that Jesus himself may well have spoken Greek on occasion."" Critics of the mainstream consensus in favour of Greek being the"
"Jewish languages Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, which was supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages feature a syncretism of indigenous Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population. Early Northwest Semitic (ENWS) materials are attested through the end of the Bronze Age—2350 to 1200 BCE. At this early state, Biblical Hebrew was not highly differentiated from the other Northwest Semitic languages (Ugaritic and Amarna Canaanite), though noticeable differentiation did occur during the Iron"
"Kuwait, Eastern Arabia, Northern Arabia, and to a lesser extent parts of southeast and south central Turkey, and parts of northwest Iran. Aramaic was the language of Jesus, who spoke the Galilean dialect during his public ministry, as well as the language of large sections of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra, and also one of the languages of the Talmud. The scribes of the Neo-Assyrian bureaucracy had also used Aramaic, and this practice—together with other administrative practices—was subsequently inherited by the succeeding Neo-Babylonians (605–539 BC), and the Achaemenids (539–323 BC). Mediated by scribes that had been trained in"
"different from the language of Paradise invented by Adam, while most medieval Jewish authorities maintained that the Hebrew language was the language of God, which was accepted in Western Europe from at least the 16th century and until the early 20th century. The sacred language in Islam is Classical Arabic, which is a descendant of the Proto-Semitic language. Arabic, along with Hebrew and Aramaic, is a Semitic language. It is considered to be sacred, as, in the Muslim view, it is the language by which Allah revealed the final revealed book, the Quran, to Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, through the"
"Abba BenDavid Segal suggested, as early as 1908, that Mishnaic Hebrew shows the character of a living language and that the Jewish people in the land of Israel, at the time of Jesus, used Hebrew as their primary spoken and written language. Understanding how the Synoptic Gospels work and relate within the context of the language, land, and culture in which Jesus lived is more common than it was decades ago in its beginnings, but its vision and gatherings still provide a unique opportunity for Jews and Christians to gather around Greek Synoptic Gospel texts and discuss them in modern"
"back to the 2nd millennium BCE. The Song of Moses () and the Song of Deborah () were written in Archaic Biblical Hebrew, also called Old Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew (10th–6th century BCE, corresponding to the Monarchic Period until the Babylonian Exile). The only descendants of the Israelites who have preserved Hebrew texts are the Jews and the Samaritans and, of the latter, there are but a few hundred left. Both the Samaritan religion and the indigenous Samaritan language, which today is used only liturgically, differ somewhat from their Jewish counterparts, though the difference between the language varieties is only dialectal."
"Biblical Hebrew Biblical Hebrew ( ""Ivrit Miqra'it"" or ""Leshon ha-Miqra""), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of Hebrew, a Canaanite Semitic language spoken by the Israelites in the area known as Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term ""Hebrew"" was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as (""sefat kena'an"", i.e. language of Canaan) or (""Yehudit"", i.e. Judaean), but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. It is more or less mutually intelligible with modern Hebrew. Hebrew is attested epigraphically from about"
"However Jesus and his disciples' native language was Aramaic (as in Matthew 27:46; Mark 5:41), which could not distinguish between a blood brother or sister and a cousin. Aramaic, like Biblical Hebrew, does not contain a word for ""cousin"". Aramaic and Hebrew inclined to use circumlocutions to point out blood relationships, calling some people ""brothers of Jesus"" would not have always implied the same biological mother. Scholars and theologians, who assert this view, point out that Jesus was called """"the"" son of Mary"" rather than """"a"" son of Mary"" in his hometown (Mark 6:3). By the 3rd century, the doctrine"
"ancestor of Hebrew and Phoenician is called Canaanite, and was the first to use a Semitic alphabet distinct from Egyptian. One ancient document is the famous Moabite Stone written in the Moabite dialect; the Siloam Inscription, found near Jerusalem, is an early example of Hebrew. Less ancient samples of Archaic Hebrew include the ostraca found near Lachish which describe events preceding the final capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE. In its widest sense, Biblical Hebrew means the spoken language of ancient Israel flourishing between the 10th century BCE and the turn of the 4th"
"Proto-Semitic language Proto-Semitic is a hypothetical reconstructed language ancestral to the historical Semitic languages. A 2009 study proposes that it was spoken from about 3750 BCE in South West Asia during the Early Bronze Age. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic urheimat; scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Sahara, or the Horn of Africa. The Semitic language family is considered to be part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages. The earliest attestations of a Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to around the 23rd century BC (see"
"Testaments, there were others. At much the same time as the Septuagint was being produced, translations were being made into Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine and the Near East and likely the language of Jesus: these are called the Aramaic Targums, from a word meaning ""translation"", and were used to help Jewish congregations understand their scriptures. For Aramaic Christians there was a Syriac translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Peshitta, as well as versions in Coptic (the everyday language of Egypt in the first Christian centuries, descended from ancient Egyptian), Ethiopic (for use in the Ethiopian"
"the name for Jesus, which is not a simple transliteration of the Greek form as would otherwise be expected, as Greek did not have an ""sh"" sound, and substituted ; and likewise lacked and therefore omitted the final ""‘ayin"" sound . Moreover, Eusebius (early fourth century) reports that Papius (early second century) reports that Jesus's disciple Matthew wrote a gospel ""in the Hebrew language"". (Note: Scholars typically argue the word ""Hebrew"" in the New Testament refers to Aramaic; however, others have attempted to refute this view.) The Aramaic of the Peshitta does not distinguish between ""Joshua"" and ""Jesus"", and the"
"of Northwest Semitic were the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians and the Hebrews) and the Aramaeans. South Semitic peoples include the speakers of South Arabian and Ethiopic. The region of origin of the reconstructed Proto-Semitic language, ancestral to historical and modern Semitic languages in the Middle East, is still uncertain and much debated. A 2009 Bayesian analysis identified an origin for Semitic languages in the Levant around 3750 BC with a later single introduction of Ge'ez from what is now South Arabia into the Horn of Africa around 800 BC, with a slightly earlier introduction into parts of North Africa and"
"Mahmoud M. Ayoub. Many miracles are attributed to a young Jesus while in Egypt. (see ""Miracles"" and ""Other miracles"" section) It is generally agreed that Jesus spoke Aramaic, the common language of Judea in the first century A.D. and the region at-large. The first and earliest view of Jesus formulated in Islamic thought is that of a prophet — a human being chosen by God to present both a judgment upon humanity for worshipping idols and a challenge to turn to the one true God. From this basis, reflected upon all previous prophets through the lens of Muslim identity, Jesus"
"different Semitic Christian culture developed on the eastern borders of the Roman Empire and in Persia. Syriac Christianity owed much to preexistent Jewish communities and to the Aramaic language. This language had been spoken by Jesus, and, in various modern Eastern Aramaic forms is still spoken by the ethnic Assyrian Christians in Iran, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey and Iraq today (see Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and Senaya language). From Persian-ruled Assyria (Assuristan), missionary activity spread Eastern-Rite Syriac Christianity throughout Assyria and Mesopotamia, and from there into Persia, Asia Minor, Syria, the Caucasus and Central Asia, establishing the Saint Thomas Christians of India"
"Arabic-influenced Judaeo-Spanish variety also derived from Old Spanish, with numerous Hebrew and Aramaic terms was spoken by North African Sephardim, taken with them in the 15th century after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The main feature of this dialect is the heavy influence of the Jebli Arabic dialect of northern Morocco. Early Modern Spanish and Early Modern Portuguese, including in a mixture of the two was traditionally spoken or used liturgically by the ex-converso Western Sephardim, taken with them during their later migration out of Iberia between the 16th and 18th centuries as conversos, after which they reverted to"
"Adamic language The Adamic language is, according to Jewish tradition (as recorded in the ""midrashim"") and some Christians, the language spoken by Adam (and possibly Eve) in the Garden of Eden. It is variously interpreted as either the language used by God to address Adam (the divine language), or the language invented by Adam with which he named all things (including Eve), as in the Genesis creation narrative (). Traditional Jewish exegesis such as Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 38) says that Adam spoke the Hebrew language because the names he gives Eve – ""Isha"" (Book of Genesis 2:23) and ""Chava"" (Genesis"
"language of Middle Syriac. However, they also have roots in numerous, previously unwritten, local Aramaic varieties, and are not purely the direct descendants of the language of Ephrem the Syrian. The varieties are not all mutually intelligible. The principal Christian varieties are Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, both used by the ethnic Assyrians of Iraq, southeast Turkey, Iran, and northeast Syria. The Judeo-Aramaic languages are now mostly spoken in Israel, and most are facing extinction. The Jewish varieties that have come from communities that once lived between Lake Urmia and Mosul are not all mutually intelligible. In some places, for"
"Lashon Hakodesh Lashon Hakodesh (; lit. ""the tongue [of] holiness"" or ""the Holy Tongue""), also spelled L'shon Hakodesh or Leshon Hakodesh (), is a Jewish term and appellation attributed to the Hebrew language, or sometimes to a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic, in which its religious texts and prayers were written, and served, during the Medieval Hebrew era, for religious purposes, liturgy and Halakha – in contrary to the secular tongue, which served for the routine daily needs, such as the Yiddish language. The phrase's first appearance is already in the Mishnah: In its narrow sense, ""Lashon Hakodesh"" refers not"