A night in front of the telly

[muckefuck]

• Assyrians on TV! I've been nostalgic for "the All-Foreign Channel" (as we lovingly called Channel 23 back in the day when "Saturday morning" was synonymous with "incomprehensible Hindi music videos") for a while now, but some of the recent crop of local-access stations are showing some potential as substitutes. Despite my hours with the reprint of Bersträsser's Intro to Semitic in English, I can't understand any Modern Aramaic, but I found myself watching the Assyrian programme for a while anyway because:
  1. Assyrian men--YUM!
  2. Cheesy pop music is always more compelling when you can't understand the lyrics, the video looks like it was shot by your art school dropout cousin at his friend's mom's place on the North Shore, and the singer could be your middle-aged half-Lebanese uncle who sells commercial real estate.
  3. Promiscuous code-switching has a spellbinding effect on me. Does modern Aramaic have no words at all for broadcast technology?
• Sharpe's what? I wonder about BBCAmerica's advertisers. First of all, there seem to be like three of them. Second, two of them sell lawn-care equipment. So there's a lot of time for the station to re-run ads for its upcoming programmes until you can recite them from memory. But even after seeing the spot for Sharpe's Challenge more times than I've seen that slide of me with my first bluegill, I still don't understand. There's a title card interspersed a half-dozen times into the scenes of Indian intrigue which has the name of the programme superimposed upon a string of foreign characters. At first I didn't believe my eyes, but now I'm sure of it:
  
  They're Hebrew. Backwards.
  
  I'm completely baffled. They don't even spell anything. I'm stuck on the first one, but the others seem to be (going right-to-left): aleph, peh, nun, tsade, final mem. It's not even "Sharpe" spelled with one-to-one equivalents, making it an even more flatfooted attempt to add an exotic touch than the teaser for Fearless with the random bopomofo in it.

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Of course I had to look up the Hebrew that you spotted in my dictionaries, and nothing comes close to matching what you saw. -_- So indeed, it seems like it's complete nonsense.

Does modern Aramaic have no words at all for broadcast technology?

I'm sure there ARE, but like tons of technological words in Hindi, the English variants end up being preferred over the local variants.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Or maybe they just switched from Arabic borrowings to English ones. Is there such a thing as an Aramaic Academy?

(P.S.: Und was machst du so spät noch wach?)

IF MEMORY SERVES...tmi

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

I met a bunch of Assyriani when I was studying about the Church of the East (Nestorians) They told me that the language was called "Chaldean" but wasn't Aramaic, and the the written symbols were similar to hebrew but older... based on cuneiform. Aramaic is used liturgically. Most of the writings about him are in Syriac. The Nestorius was Patriarch of Constantinople, and was tried before a the Council of Ephesus, found guilty of Heresy and his followers were banished from the Byzantine Empire in the latter part of the 400's C.E. The Heresy they (supposedly) taught was that Mary was the mother of Christ (Christotokos) and not the Mother of God, (Theotokos). Their Missionaries went all the way to China. Some time in the 1990's Nestorian Scrolls written in Syriac and Chinese were found in a Taoist Temple in North central China.
One of these documents states that Nestorius was an Orthodox Believer but that his students proclaimed the heresy as part of a mis-understanding.

The Current day Assyriani (Chaldeans) are very proud of their difference from the iraqi/irani within whose countries that they live. After the revolution in Iran, they became a highly repressed minority.

I am very sad to say that recently, a large part of the Nestorian Church joined up with the Uniat (fake) Chaldean Catholics. FWIW, the Roman Church can only legitimately claim one eastern Church as being continuously under the Roman yoke... those are the Syriac Christians living in the mountains of Lebanon... the Maronites.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Naturally, it's the prerogative of the speakers to call their language whatever they like, but it's an established linguistic fact that "Chaldean" is a form of Aramaic. I suppose a more neutral formulation would be that Chaldean (both ancient and modern), Syriac, and Biblical Aramaic, etc. are all closely related varieties of Northwest Semitic. As such, they are all more closely related to Biblical Hebrew than any of them is to the language of the historical Assyrian Empire, which was a form of Akkadian, an East Semitic language.

There was some Syriac script used in the programme in the form of the name of the Assyrian-American National Federation. This is a descendant of the Ugaritic alphabet and, thus, kissing cousins with the Hebrew alphabet and also the Phoenician alphabet, which gave rise to the Greek and Roman scripts. AFAIK, there's no direct connexion between it any cuneiform writing system.

Interesting about the Nestorian scrolls from China. I'll have to see if I can find a good book on them.

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

http://www.keikyo.com/xian/nestorians_chapter2.htm