Aramaic language

Aramaic is a Semitic language. It has been written for 3100 years^[1] and has been spoken for longer than that.^[2]

It is one of the Northwest Semitic languages. Other Semitic languages include Amharic, Hebrew, Arabic and many other languages.

Words are written with the 22 characters of the Aramaic alphabet,^[3] which was widely adopted for other languages and is an ancestor to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets.

1. ↑ Beyer (1986: 11) suggests that written Aramaic probably dates from the 11th century BC, as it is established by the 10th century, to which he dates the oldest inscriptions of northern Syria (Beyer, Klaus 1986. The Aramaic language: its distribution and subdivisions. Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. ISBN 3-525-53573-2). Heinrichs (1990: x) uses the less controversial date of the 9th century, for which there is clear and widespread attestation. (Heinrichs, Wolfhart, ed. 1990. Studies in Neo-Aramaic. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press. ISBN 1-55540-430-8)
2. ↑ Royal Aramaic inscriptions from the Aramean city-states date from 10th century BC, making Aramaic one of the world's oldest recorded living languages. Richard, Suzanne 2003. Near Eastern Archaeology: a reader. Eisenbrauns, p. 69. ISBN 978-1-57506-083-5
3. ↑ Languages from the World of the Bible, ed. Holger Gzella (Berlin; Boston: Walter de De Gruyter, Inc., 2011), p. 131