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

[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