Learn Aramaic

Is Aramaic the oldest language in the world? Aramaic is the oldest language of the Middle East more accurately older even than Arabic and Hebrew. Nevertheless Aramaic is indeed one of the oldest written and spoken languages of the world. Its ancient form was used by some city-states in the Middle East one of them being Damascus first attested from the 10nth century BCE.It was written in a variation of the Phoenician script. Descendent languages of Aramaic are still spoken by some people in the M.E. and immigrants abroad who left their countries due to the ongoing war there.

Here's an interesting one and half minute video about the emegergence and spread of the Aramaic script through its descendatns. Aramaic evolved from Phoenician and then a dozen or more scripts sprung from it or were influenced by it all the way to India,even Eastern Asia. Hebrew is a direct descendent of the Aramaic script.The Hebrew script is essentially what is known as block Aramaic script.Arabic evolved from Nabatean an offshoot of the Aramaic alphabet.Some letters of the Brahmi script from witch so many alphabets derived in the Indian peninsula seem to have been borrowed from Aramaic.Further into Asia,Sogdian ,Uighur ,even the traditional Mongol script are based on Aramaic!

Aramaic was a consonantal script mostly lacking vowels and was wriiten from right to left.It originally served Aramaic (west semitic languages. And letter became the official script for the assyrian and Old Persian (Achaemenid) empires from 6-4 BC It was the source of many alphabets of the world and the vast majority of Semitic scripts (Samaritan, Jewish, Palmyra, Nabataean, Syrian, Palestinian-Christian, Mandaean, Manichaean). The Aramaic writing had an impact even on Iranian writing systems (Parthian, middle Persian, Sogdian, and Khorezm).It was the basis (through the medium of Sogdian) for Uighur, Mongolian, and the Orkhon-Yenisei alphabets. There is a hypothesis about the Indian Brahmi scripts and Kharosthi originating from the Aramaic script. The center for the spread of Aramaic culture was the city of Damascus, and later - Palmyra and Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey). Aramaeans mingled everywere with the local population and they assimilated it relatively eas...