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I met a girl a while ago who told me her parents are from Iraq, and that the alphabet for their native language was the same as Hebrew. She wasn't Jewish, but some other minority group. (Possibly even a Muslim.) She mentioned that she still knew it because she went to Hebrew school as a child. I googled everything but couldn't find anything about it. It's not Aramaic or Amharic, and I'm not talking about Iraqi Jews or Samaritans. This is some sort of other culture or group native to Iraq or that region. Anybody know?
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Dec 26, 2014 00:36
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| # ? May 3, 2024 08:59 |
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Possibly Nabataean, although that seems to be Syria. So I'm hoping someone here knows something.
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Dec 26, 2014 05:50
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Maybe the Mandaeans? They're an Iraqi ethnoreligious group that had to flee the country after the US invaded. Their alphabet is based on the Syriac script. It looks somewhat different from Hebrew but it's similar in other respects. After a little bit of research, I think the Hebrew alphabet is only used in Jewish languages (e.g. Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino). Maybe she was talking about the Syriac or Aramaic alphabet, which are used for quite a few languages. Other Iraqi minority languages seem to be written in versions of the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:58
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There's a group of Iraqi Catholics, the Chaldean Catholic Church, who use Syriac script.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:19
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I went to school (in the Detroit suburbs) with a lot of Chaldean kids and Jewish kids. There were kids in both groups who were very serious about religion and the mother tongue. The Chaldean kids stated firmly that they spoke Chaldean, which is actually Aramaic, and is linguistically similar to Arabic. Many of the Jewish kids spoke Hebrew fluently. There was never any non-English communication between members of the groups, unless you count Spanish class. So maybe you can rule out Chaldean and look at smaller sects. Good luck, it is an interesting question.
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Dec 27, 2014 19:27
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| # ? May 3, 2024 08:59 |
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She's probably Christian. There are a sizable number of Christians who still use Syriac/Aramaic as a liturgical language, and some even still as an everyday language, similar to the Copts in Egypt. As for the specific church there's basically no common thread, every community is different. There are Syriac Arab Christians aligned with both Eastern/Greek Orthodox, the Catholics, and independent. As for the alphabet, the Internet is telling me the Hebrew alphabet is technically a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet, so she may be using the regular Aramaic alphabet or the same one as Hebrew. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 10:42 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 10:33
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