Posted on 02/28/2004 8:15:53 PM PST by jwalburg
Thanks to 'The Passion of the Christ,' a near-dead, 2,500-year-old language will reach the ears of millions
Leave it to pop culture -- and Mel Gibson -- to revive a couple of dead languages. Well, one that's dead and one that's in linguistic intensive care. Gibson's controversial film The Passion of the Christ, opening today, utilizes two tongues from way back in the day: Latin and Aramaic. (Don't worry, there are subtitles in the movie.)
Now Latin (the dead one) is not a complete stranger to American ears. Carpe diem, e pluribus unum and all that. But Aramaic? This nearly dead, generally unknown language is going to be heard by more people through this movie than have heard it in generations.
Well, one of the men to thank for its newfound exposure is a 68-year-old Catholic priest of Italian descent, the Rev. William Fulco.
He may live in Southern California, but Fulco is about as far from Hollywood as anyone could be. As a National Endowment for the Humanities professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he's more likely to be found poring over age-old texts than hot, new scripts.
So when the phone rang in his hotel room during his visit to Jerusalem in May 2002, Fulco didn't quite know what to make of the voice on the other end.
"He said, 'Padre, it's Mel. I have a project for you.' I said, 'Mel who?' "
Fulco laughs at the memory now. After all, it was Gibson, one of the big screen's brightest stars, asking Fulco if he could translate the script for his film, The Passion of the Christ, into ancient Aramaic and Latin. The director, who wanted his actors to speak in the authentic tongues of Judea 2,000 years ago, had inquired at Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley before being told that Fulco was the person he needed.
Now, Aramaic, a Semitic tongue related to Hebrew and Arabic, is back in the spotlight. That's quite a boost for a 2,500-year-old language whose current incarnation -- spoken in small pockets of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, as well as by some Middle Eastern immigrants in North America, Europe and Australia -- is on the verge of extinction.
"It's difficult to give numbers, but there are about 800,000 [speakers]," says Yona Sabar, a professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the University of California at Los Angeles.
However, the Aramaic spoken today, called the Eastern group of dialects, is different from the Aramaic spoken by Jesus Christ, dubbed the Western group, a branch that is considered extinct.
That made it difficult for Fulco to translate the Passion script, as no one really knows how Jesus spoke.
"We don't know much about ancient Aramaic," says Fulco, who stitched together a language from a variety of sources, including the Old Testament of Daniel, fourth-century Syriac and Hebrew. "Almost every town had a different dialect. I created a possible reconstruction and had to coach all the actors."
Then, Fulco translated his Aramaic and Latin script back into English for the subtitles, as the original English-language script was now inaccurate. "[English and Aramaic] are not just different languages, they're different ways of seeing the world," Fulco says.
Today, Fulco entertains many calls from the movie industry. He has been hired to coach Keanu Reeves in Latin for an upcoming film and to help out on a project about exorcism.
However, if Fulco's Hollywood future is bright, it might not be so for Aramaic.
Passion is likely to be most viewers' first -- and last -- exposure to the language. In the region where it was born, it has been largely overtaken by Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew. Emigration is its latest threat.
"Most of the people who speak it have been living in the Middle East and emigrating to other countries. Once they get to South America, Australia or the U.S., they shift to the second language," says Sabar. "Eventually, it will disappear. It will be mostly in literature . . . Any cultural loss should make us all sad. We are losing some of ourselves . . . But reality has its own law, people immigrate, you can't stop them from studying English. They have to make a living and not be too nostalgic because that holds them back."
Sabar is not too optimistic that Gibson's film, even if it's a hit, will launch any large-scale interest in the study of Aramaic.
"If Mel Gibson can succeed at that," he says with a laugh, "I'll be his best friend."
A fresh look at an ancient language
What is aramaic?
Go back about 2,000 years, walk around the eastern Mediterranean and you would have heard it. Related to Hebrew and Arabic, Aramaic was the language of many Semitic people of the Near East, including the Assyrians, Hebrews, Chaldeans and Syrians. It was the language of the Palestine area, and that's why Jesus and his followers used Aramaic.
Where did the name come from?
The word "Aramaic" comes from "Aram," the fifth son of Shem, Noah's first-born.
Where was it used?
It was in used in the Old Testament and in many Jewish holy texts, including the Gemara section of the Talmud. Many Aramaic scrolls, found in the 1950s in Qumran near the Dead Sea, have yet to be deciphered and may offer another view into a vanished world.
Why don't we run across it more often?
The Aramaic that Jesus spoke no longer exists, but a modern version is still spoken in small regions of the Middle East, Georgia and Armenia. Some immigrants from these areas to the United States, Western Europe and Australia continue to speak it, but that practice, too, may vanish within a few generations.
Why is it disappearing?
Aramaic found it hard to stand up to Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Greek and Russian as they spread through the regions where Aramaic speakers lived. Today, immigration to the West is further depleting the number of speakers.
Why is it important?
According to professor Franz Rosenthal, a scholar of Aramaic, "It was the main instrument for the formulation of religious ideas in the Near East. … The monotheistic groups continue to live on today with a religious heritage, much of which first found expression in Aramaic."
Sources: Cox News Service; Rocco A. Errico and Michael J. Bazzi's The History of the Aramaic Language; F. Rosenthal's "Aramaic Studies During the Past Thirty Years" from The Journal of Near Eastern Studies; wikipedia.com
"If Mel Gibson can succeed at that," he says with a laugh, "I'll be his best friend."
Let's see Treckies have their Klingon,
Lord of The Rings has it Elvish,
Aramaic from the Passion,? now-a-days I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, and know it's killing me!
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