Wednesday, August 13, 2008

The language Jesus spoke

Jim Davila has posted on the Syrian village which still speaks Aramaic. Here is a favourite children's book recently translated into Aramaic. Malkuno Zcuro is The Little Prince in Aramaic.

Aramaic also appears on the Wind Tower at Regent College in Vancouver. The Lord's Prayer is written in Aramaic down the side.

Syriac is also notable for being one of the scripts on the Xian Stele in China, as well as on the tombstones in Quangzhou. (I have not found and image for this yet.)

(Oddly the Estrangelo Syriac script also appears on the bookplate for the Gleason Moss Collection of H.A. Gleason, Jr., who was my first and well-loved linguistics professor. His father was the botanist H.A. Gleason. Don't ask me how I know this, but somewhere there is a larger image of this tiny one. I seem to have lost it.)

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