Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: un'antica cultura che scompare in Medio Oriente

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/world/middleeast/22aramaic.html?ex=1366516800&en=7567f8aea9c339b2&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives
By ROBERT F. WORTH
MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old
people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of
Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by
a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely
Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that
existed before the arrival of Islam.
Now Mr. Khoury, 65, gray-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he
has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mother.
“It’s disappearing,” he said in Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed
in the mud-and-straw house where he grew up. “A lot of the Aramaic
vocabulary I don’t use any more, and I’ve lost it.”
Malula, along with two smaller neighboring villages where Aramaic is
also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic
island. In the Convent of St. Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above
town, young girls recite the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and
booklets about the language are on sale at a gift shop in the town
center.
But the island has grown smaller over the years, and some local people
say they fear it will not last. Once a large population stretching
across Syria, Turkey and Iraq, Aramaic-speaking Christians have slowly
melted away, some fleeing westward, some converting to Islam.
In recent decades the process has accelerated, with large numbers of
Iraqi Christians escaping the violence and chaos of their country.
Yona Sabar, a professor of Semitic languages at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that today, Malula and its neighboring
villages, Jabadeen and Bakhaa, represent “the last Mohicans” of
Western Aramaic, which was the language Jesus presumably spoke in
Palestine two millennia ago.
With its ancient houses clinging picturesquely to a dramatic cleft in
the mountains, Malula was once remote from Damascus, the Syrian
capital, and local people spent their lives here. But now there are
few jobs, and young people tend to move to the city for work, Mr.
Khoury said.
Even if they return, they are less likely to speak Aramaic. Buses to
Damascus used to leave once or twice a day; now they leave every 15
minutes, and with better roads the journey takes about an hour.
Constant exchange with the big city, not to mention television and the
Internet, has eroded Malula’s linguistic separateness.
“The young generations have lost interest” in Aramaic, Mr. Khoury said
sadly.
His granddaughter, a bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named
Katya, offered a few samples of the language: “Awafih” for hello,
“alloy a pelach a feethah” for God be with you. She learned Aramaic
mostly at a new language school in Malula, established two years ago
to keep the language alive. She knows some songs, too, and has started
learning to write the language — something even her grandfather never
did.
Mr. Khoury smiles at the words, but recalls how in his own childhood
60 years ago, schoolteachers slapped students who reverted to Aramaic
in class, enforcing the government’s “Arabization” policy.
“Now it’s reversed,” he says. Families speak Arabic at home and are
more likely to learn Aramaic at the language center, where some
foreigners also study.
In the town’s central intersection, a group of young people outside a
market seemed to confirm Mr. Khoury’s gloomy view.
“I speak some Aramaic, but I can barely understand it,” said Fathi
Mualem, 20.
John Francis, 20, said, “My father wrote a book about it, but I barely
speak any.” (Western-sounding names are common among Christians in
Syria and Lebanon.)
Malula — Aramaic for “entrance” — derives its name from a legend that
evokes the town’s separate religious heritage. St. Takla, a beautiful
young woman who had studied with St. Paul, is said to have fled from
her home in what is now Turkey after her pagan parents persecuted her
for her newfound Christian faith. Arriving in Malula, she found her
path blocked by a mountain. She prayed, and the rocks divided in two,
a stream flowing out from under her feet.
Today, tourists walk up and down the narrow canyon where the saint is
said to have fled, with rose-colored rocks rising 100 feet above a
well-trod footpath. Nearby, two dozen nuns live at the Convent of St.
Takla, presiding over a small orphanage. (“We teach the children the
Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic,” said one black-clad nun, “but everything
else is in Arabic.”) There is a shrine in the mountainside where St.
Takla is said to have lived, with a tree growing horizontally out of
it.
But even the town’s Christian identity is fading. Muslims have begun
replacing the emigrating Christians, and now Malula — once entirely
Christian — is almost half Muslim, residents say.
Malula’s linguistic heritage stirred some interest after the release
of Mel Gibson’s 2004 film “The Passion of the Christ,” with its mix of
Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew dialogue. Virtually everyone in town seems
to have seen the film, but few said they understood it. That was not
their fault: it included different dialects of Aramaic, and the
actors’ pronunciation made it hard to understand anything, said Mr.
Sabar, the Semitic languages professor.
Aramaic has also changed over the centuries, taking on features of
Syrian Arabic, Mr. Sabar said.
But most residents of Malula believe that their town’s ancestral
language is still the same one Jesus spoke, and will speak again when
he returns.
“Our parents and grandparents always spoke to us in this language,”
said Suhail Milani, a 50-year-old bus driver with a wizened face. “I
hope it will not disappear.”
...
Persio e Logi, ce la fate a spiegare quali sono le colpe di Israele,
questa volta? Dilungatevi pure, eh.

 questa volta? Dilungatevi pure, eh.
Non lo so. Ho conosciuto, una quindicina di anni fa, una famiglia di
cristiani che erano scappati in Svizzera e che a casa loro parlavano
l'aramaico. La bambina, che parlava solo aramaico e ticines, faceva
sorridere non poco. Però erano scappati dalla Turchia quando era ancora
il baluardo della NATO.
--
"il Logi è goi e quindi, poverino, abituato a credere che
quel che c'è scritto non necessiti di interpretazione"
(il cosiddetto agnosco/nahum/jabo/shampista/delafia/borat/andrea su
it.politica.internazionale, 26/10/06)