Learn Aramaic

Ancient Aramaic was the language of the Arameans who first appeared in about the 11nth century B.C.E. in the region of Aram in modern-day Syria. The first document of Ancient Aramaic is an inscription dating from the 10nth century B.C.E. This form of Aramaic was originally used in the Aramean city states. The end of its era corresponds with the rise of the Sassanids.It was written in the Old Aramaic script whose letter forms came from and look much like the Phoenician alphabet.

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans,keepers of the Torah,the Shamerim ( שַמֶרִים ),an ethnoreligious group for purposes of religion for the languages of Samaritan Hebrew,Samaritan Aramaic and Samaritan Arabic.  The script evolved from the Old Hebrew alphabet and ultimately from Phoenician. This is an example of handwritten Samaritan script. Samaria and Judea after Herod. A handwritten example in the Samaritan script follows , Exodus chapter 20 by Lestat Lam . External links A dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic

Aramaic was written mostly in consonants from right to left just like Phoenician from which it derived .It was originally used for the Aramaic language which was actually a whole group of  West Semitic languages. Later two great empires the Assyrian and Achaemenid adopted the language and its script as official (6-4 BC). It was the anscestor of many alphabets of the Middle East and most of Semitic alphabets such as Jas Samaritanewish, Palmyrene, Nabataean, Syrian, Palestinian, Mandaic and Manichaean. 9th century stele of king Kilamuwa,kingdom of Yadiya found in Turkish Zincirli (Sam'al) Parent alphabet of many others The Aramaic writing system was parent even to some Central Asian scripts such as Parthian, middle Persian, Sogdian, and Khorezmian. It also gave birth to Uighur, Mongolian, and the Orkhon-Yenisei alphabets through Sogdian. It has also being hypothesized that the Brahmi writing system and Kharosthi of the Indian subcontinent originated from the Aramaic s...

the Syriac Estrangelo Aramaic alphabet Estrangelo is the oldest of the Syriac scripts used to write Classical Syriac which stopped being widely used since the 10th century. Nowadays some scholarly publications,titles and inscriptions are written in the Estrangelo.Its' name comes from Greek and it means 'rounded'.It later evolved into the cursive Serto -the Western Syriac script   Estrangelo did not use vowel diacritics. They were used later in some cases. In the following image I have put some letters together that look alike for ease of learning them. But two later versions of the Syriac alphabet (Serto and Madnkhaya) that evolved later did use vowel signs. Two vowel systems developed,the western based on Greek vowels under the Byzantines for Serto and the eastern under the Persian Sassanids for Madnkhaya which used dots. More on vowels in Syriac Aramaic here. Now let's give it a try to write the Syriac Estrangelo alphabet. Apart from Syriac various languages use...

Serto is one of the Syriac scripts for Aramaic used to write West Syriac.Its name comes from the word serta (ܣܪܛܐ) which means line. It was a cursive,easier to write evolution of the Estrangela script. The letters are simpler and go with the flow. The Serto script developed under Byzantine rule. This is also evident in its vowel diacritics which were adopted directly from Greek  writing. The letters are Α,Ο,Ε,Η,ΟΥ or a,o,e,i,u respectively. While the Eastern Madnkhaya developed under the Sassanids. Table of Serto letters Serṭā Transliteration IPA ʾ [ʔ] or silent hard: b soft: ḇ (also bh, v) hard: [b] soft: [v] or [w] hard: g soft: ḡ (also gh, ġ) hard: [ɡ] soft: [ɣ] hard: d soft: ḏ (also dh, ð) hard: [d] soft: [ð] h [h] consonant: w mater lectionis: ū or ō (also u or o) consonant: [w] mater lectionis: [u] or [o] z [z] ḥ [ħ], [x], or [χ] ṭ...