The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

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It's Five A.M. A new wikiday has begun...

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Friday, April 27 2012, 11:16:58 (UTC)
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...the editor put a link up for video of Professor Khan, a Semanticist, giving a talk, in Aramaic, to an Assyrian club in Turlock, California...he said this guy is an expert on the existence of modern Assyrians..and then he told me, "if you are Assyrian, as you say...then you should understand..." Well, I did understand, sort of, the poor guy mangled the speech so but youy have to give him credit for trying...and, just to be clear, I never said I am Assyrian...I said my family THOUGHT we were Assyrian...but I know I'm not...but I understand the Aramaic language, not the Akkadian.

Anyway, my response;

Professor Khan....

Well, he's no historian, that's for sure. He's not much with the language either but bravo to him for trying. The Aramaic language, and he calls it that, is not the language of the Assyrians, it's the language of the Arameans. To call it "Assyrian" is wrong, as a matter of history. It's a language they ADOPTED (around 100 years before their empire collapsed), but a language they failed to translate their Assyrian history INTO...that's the reason you won't find the Epic of Gilgamesh, plus a lot more, written in Aramaic...it was written in the language of the Assyrians, which was Akkadian and not Aramaic. I guess it just sort of slipped their minds.

The Assyrian language was lost to history till the Euros dug the tablets out of the ground...until then modern "Assyrians" knew nothing about their "ancestors" except what was written in the bible, and it wasn't very much....these "Assyrians" had to wait for George Smith to decipher "their" language for them, because they didn't know it, or "their" history, written in that language. Aramaic is no more the language of the Assyrians than Gaul is the language of the modern French.

And this is the basis for Roux's comment that the Assyrians "disappeared" from history...and the editor here must know what Roux is talking about because all of us heard our parents say, "Don't forget your language (through they meant the Aramaic we speak now) or else you'll forget your IDENTITY...and that held true for the ancient Assyrians as well...they forgot their mother tongue of Akkadian and soon forgot their Assyrian identity and in THAT sense, disappeared.

Khan is making the same mistake Rassam did, Rassam himself was there when Layard and he dug out the cuneiform tablets, written in Akkadian not Aramaic...yet he insisted that "the Assyrians always spoke Aramaic", even though he had the evidence right before his eyes that they did NOT "always speak Aramaic", for the greater part of their history they spoke Akkadian, which was indeed the Assyrian language, Aramaic became the language of the Christian Church, the language Jesus spoke, and that has gone to everyone's head and is one of the ways Nestorians and other Eastern Christian sects have tried to push the idea that they are Assyrians...because they speak the language of the Arameans...makes a whole lot of sense...

A German is going to adopt French, and forget his mother tongue of German, and then he's going to forget German history because he failed to translate German history books into French...and then a thousand years later he's going to tell me he is GERMAN...why? because he speaks FRENCH!

..you have any other "experts" you want to toss our way?

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