DARIUS Up and Running

Apparently our hosting service was having trouble with one of its database servers that was hosting the DARIUS database which caused things to slow down to unbearable sluggishness.

I've since moved it over to a new server and things should be fixed.

Peace,
-Steve

100 Free Subscriptions to GAL010: Everyday Aramaic During the 12 Days of Christmas

Yep, the title pretty much says it all.

Click here for the Learning Pass.

Merry Christmas!

Pass it along. :-)

(PS The enrollment glitch is fixed now, so have fun!)

Peace,
-Steve

Dr. David Taylor Teaching Aramaic at Oxford

(Dr. David G.K. Taylor)

I picked up on Twitter that Dr. David Taylor (who I was fortunate to meet and talk to for a bit at the First Hugoye Syriac Symposium where he gave a fascinating lecture on Syriac printing in the 19th and early 20th-century in the Middle East) just finished teaching a class on Imperial Aramaic over at Oxford to the tune of about 40+ students. :-)

With the pending "official" release of GAL010: Everyday Aramaic (Galilean) I've been working on over at DARIUS (which has managed to attract a few students already), I'm more than thrilled to see more Aramaic language courses and classes being offered in a way that is meant to make it easier to learn and more conversational.

Perhaps I should get in contact with him and bounce some ideas back and forth. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Announcing GAL010: Everyday Galilean Aramaic

Everyday Galilean Aramaic (GAL010)

How better to get back into the swing of things than sharing a family project?

Inspired by the serendipitous find of a metal-backed classroom-sized chalkboard (who just throws out a full sized chalkboard??!), we've embarked on an old-fashioned one room schoolhouse style experiment in teaching and learning Aramaic. But which dialect of Aramaic to use? Any dialect of Aramaic we chose would functionally become a private language in the hands (mouths?) of our family. We first considered Classical Syriac (a la Kthobonoyo) as it is a well-established literary dialect with a very wide vocabulary; however, Classical Syriac is admittedly only about 5-10% of what happens at Aramaic Designs.

Most of the translations I do focus upon reconstructing Old Galilean, i.e. Jesus' Dialect) which is, needless to say, rather obscure, rather slim in attestation... and rather *dead.* Eastern Aramaic dialects are by far more common and survive to present day, where Western Aramaic dialects, like Galilean are only survived by *one* example (Ma'loula).

Nevertheless, the challenge that the idea presented seemed to be intriguing: Adapting a form of Galilean Aramaic to be an at-home language that would allow my family greater understanding of my work (and perhaps even the spark to carry it on).

So the following plan was devised:

As a matter of keeping a family routine, every day I put a short lesson up on the board (small enough to go over in 5 minutes) and we keep it in mind during the day and reward ourselves.

In these lessons, I'd devise a way to make this ancient dialect applicable to modern life while keeping as many archaic features intact as possible. There will obviously be compromises, but a working knowledge of a language in modern context (which is what a large number of our clients are after) would certainly make things easier to cast back into older literary forms in the day-to-day work that I take part in.


So, now it's been about a month of lessons based on the alphabet and phrases relevant to our everyday lives, and it's amazing how quickly my wife and eldest daughter are picking things up.

Things were going so well, that about a week ago my wife inquired why I didn't put this up on DARIUS. I still felt that there were a number of kinks to work out, and that the lesson plans were very unstructured, but after some discussion, we realized that the way lessons were progressing was more of an advantage than a disadvantage.

Despite any drawbacks, sharing this on DARIUS looked like the best thing to do, not only to promote awareness, but to see who else was interested. So, I took the time to work out a consistent orthography and a rather "have at it" approach on whatever subjects come up in daily life.

The current lesson will always be up and available on DARIUS here for free:

http://darius.rogueleaf.com/courses/GAL010

The archives with extended commentary, exercises, and questions and answers will be available to access for less than a dollar a day. Anyone can enroll in the archive here:

http://darius.rogueleaf.com/courses

Before the archive opens, I'm going to have at least a week's-worth of content ready to go, but preregistration, as well as the current day's lessons (as soon as they are posted in the morning) are both up and ready.

Tell me what you think. :-)

Peace,
-Steve

Ugh Another Long Stretch

Seems like this year is getting to be a bit more crazy afterall. I have a number of updates to post, which I hope to get to soon, so stay tuned and watch this space. :-)

Peace,
-Steve