Similarities Between Assyrian Aramaic and Hebrew

In today’s episode, we’ll be comparing some of the similarities between two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, with Berta and Sidorie (Assyrian Neo-Aramaic speakers) and Hila and Noa (Hebrew speakers from Israel) challenging each other with a list of words and sentences. Hebrew and Aramaic have many similarities, which Hebrew being a Northwest Semitic language and the only living Canaanite language left in world, while Neo-Aramaic consists of several languages which are varieties of Aramaic. Among these, the Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and Central Neo-Aramaic dialects are spoken primarily, but not exclusively, by ethnic Assyrians, who are native to Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey. Assyrians are among the Christian minorities in the Middle East, being members of the Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church (Eastern Rite Catholics), Syriac Orthodox Church, Ancient Church of the East, Assyrian Pentecostal Church and Assyrian Evangelical Church. Ancient Hebrew went extinct as a spoken language many centuries ago. However, it survived as a liturgical language for Judaism thanks to Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and other texts. For this reason, Hebrew is now considered the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. In the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language. Hebrew became the lingua franca of Palestine’s Jews, and subsequently the official language of the State of Israel. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population in the world. If you live in the Greater Toronto Area and would like to participate in a future video, and if you have any suggestions or feedback, please contact us on Instagram as we are unable to respond to all YouTube comments. Shahrzad (@): Bahador (@BahadorAlast): My apologies for the few typos in the video. I would like to take a minute to address them. In the video the words nefesh (נפש) and sakhah (שחה) were read, but I had written נְשָׁמָה and לשחות as I had multiple terms. “len“ (ܠܢ) in the first Assyrian Aramaic sentence is a vernacular contraction and should be spelt (ܠܐ ܝܘܢ). “reshakh“ (ܪܫܟ̣) has a silent feminine yod at the end, so should be spelt (ܪܫܟ̣ܝ). Also, just to note, the word “shna“ (ܫܢܐ) is the absolute state of the feminine noun meaning year - and that’s more a feature of Biblical Aramaic and Classical Syriac. In modern Assyrian absolute state is only used in fossilized vocabulary borrowed from Classical Syriac, so it’s practically never used. So in almost all cases, the emphatic state which is “sheta“ (ܫܢ̄ܬܐ) in the singular, and “shinne“ (ܫܢ̈ܐ) in the plural are used.