LONDON — Geoffrey Khan had almost given up. A linguist at the University of Cambridge, he was in Tbilisi, Georgia, to find the last speakers of a rare dialect of Aramaic. The first of his three leads, ...

Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys ...

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A Facebook post paraphrases a translation of the Lord's Prayer by mystic, author, and scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz. As Douglas-Klotz wrote in "Prayers of the Cosmos" (published in 1990), "The ...

On a hot August day in the Galilee, a group of schoolchildren in the Arab Christian village of Jish counted diligently, from one to 10, after their instructor. But the words, though similar to Arabic ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...

The Aramaic language, one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in the world, holds a special place in the hearts of those who cherish linguistic heritage and cultural identity. As a native of ...

This study is the first attempt to apply a masked language modeling approach to corrupted inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic languages. More ancient texts are discovered throughout the Near East every ...

If a Middle Eastern man from 2,500 years ago found himself on his home territory in 2015, he would be shocked by the modern innovations, and not just electricity, airplanes, and iPhones. Arabic as an ...

MAALUA, Syria — In the ancient Syrian village of Maalula, whose residents still speak the same language as Jesus, volunteers rake stones and scrub graffiti in preparation for the return of Christian ...