ARAMAIC LANGUAGE (ar'a-ma ik), (Heb. • : 2 Kings xviii:26; Dan. ii:4).
The Aramaic language, of which the Chaldee and Syriac dialects form parts, constitutes the northern and least developed branch of the Syro Arabian family. Its cradle was probably on the banks of the Cyrus, according to the best inter pretation of Amos ix :7 ; but 'Mesopotamia, Baby lonia, and Syria form what may be considered its home and proper domain. Political events, however, subsequently caused it to supplant He brew in Palestine ; and then it became the pre vailing form of speech from the Tigris to the shore of the Mediterranean. and, in a contrary direction, from Armenia down to the confines of Arabia. After obtaining such a wide dominion, it was forced, from the ninth century onwards, to give way before the encroaching ascendency of Arabic ; and it now survives as a living tongue only among the Syrian Christians in the neigh borhood of Mosul.
According to historical records which trace the migrations of the Syro-Arabians from the East to the Southwest, and also according to the com paratively ruder form of the Aramaic language itself, we might suppose that it represents, even in the state in which we have it some image of that aboriginal type which the Hebrews and Arabians. under more favorable social and cli matical influences, subsequently developed into fulness of sound and structure. But it is diffi
cult for us now to discern the particular vestiges of this archaic form; for, not only did the Aramaic not work out its own development of the original elements common to the whole Syro Arabian sisterhood of languages, but it was pre eminently exposed, both by neighborhood and by conquest, to harsh collision with languages of an utterly different family. Moreover, it is the only one of the three great Syro-Arabian branches which has no fruits of a purely national literature to boast of. We possess no monument whatever of its own genius ; not any work which may be considered the product of the political and re ligious culture of the nation, and characteristic of it—as is so emphatically the case both with the Hebrews and the Arabs. The first time we see the language it is used by Jews as the ve hicle of Jewish thought ; and although, when we next meet it, it is employed by native authors, yet they write tinder the literary impulses of Christianity, and under the Greek influence on thought and language which necessarily accom panied that religion. These two modifications, which constitute and define the so-called Chaldee and Syriac dialects, are the only forms in which the normal and standard Aramaic has been pre served to us.