Aramaic is a Northwestern Semitic Language stemming from kingdoms in Syria and Southeast Turkey.http://books.google.com/books?id=nbUOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://cal1.cn.huc.edu/In the 8th Century B.C, these Aramean kingdoms were conquered by the Assyrians, who then made Aramaic the official language for trade and bureaucracy.http://cal.huc.edu/aramaic_language.html Aramaic subsequently became the imperial language of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires. Even with the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek did not displace Aramaic.http://www.peshitta.org/initial/aramaic.html In the first centuries of the Common Era, the New Testament was translated into local dialects of Aramaic, such as Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean. The main translation is called Peshitta, or "simple (translation)".http://www.aramaicpeshitta.com/peshitta.htmhttp://cal.huc.edu/aramaic_language.html Aramaic was also used as a scholarly tongue in Judaism as well.In the 5th century, the Jewish community of Babylon compiled the Babylonian Talmud, a 37 volume work on Jewish law written in Aramaic.http://www.tyndalearchive.com/tabs/jastrow/http://cal.huc.edu/aramaic_language.html

Although the Muslim conquests of the Middle East elevated Arabic to the lingua franca, pockets of Aramaic survive in villages in Syria, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Iraq, Iran and Israel.http://www.ethnologue.com/15/show_family.asp?subid=90041 Speakers of Aramaic pride themselves that there language is similar to the one that Jesus and his apostles spoke.http://sor.cua.edu/Bible/index.htmlhttp://www.learnassyrian.com/home.html The Syriac dialect of Aramaic is also the liturgical language of the Syrian Orthodox Church.http://sor.cua.edu/History/index.html In 2004, Mel Gibson produced the film, the Passion of Christ, where the characters spoke mostly in Aramaic.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335345/

• Aramaic, like other Semitic languages, has three letter root that are inflected upon to make words.http://www.vbm-torah.org/talmud2/01grammar.htm

• There are three main forms of verbs, pe'al (basic), pa"el (intensive or frequent) and 'af'el, each with a passive-reflexive form.http://balshanut.wordpress.com/essays/a-short-introduction-to-aramaic/imperial-aramaic-c600-c200-bce/http://books.google.com/books?id=nbUOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

• There are three states of nouns: absolute, construct and emphatic.http://books.google.com/books?id=nbUOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
  • Construct nouns mark the nominative or accusative part of a genitive construct. (Such as "flag" in "Flag of Assyria".)http://www.learnassyrian.com/home.html
  • Emphatic nouns are marked by the definite singular suffix "-a" and the plural definite suffix "-aya".
  • Absolute nouns are not marked in the singular, but have an "-n" suffix in the pluralhttp://balshanut.wordpress.com/essays/a-short-introduction-to-aramaic/old-aramaic-c-850-to-c-612-bce/

• Feminine have a "-h" suffix in the absolute, which turns into a "t" in other states(placed before state in emphatic. Note: the feminine emphatic plural ends in "-ata", not "-taya" )http://books.google.com/books?id=nbUOAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

• Possessive and accusative pronouns are suffixed to either verbs or prepositionshttp://balshanut.wordpress.com/essays/a-short-introduction-to-aramaic/old-aramaic-c-850-to-c-612-bce/