̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Israel

Developing Arab leadership in the Israeli business community

sc604 — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 11:39:14 +0000

An organisation that seeks to boost Arab leadership in Israel, Kav Mashve, in cooperation with Edmond de Rothschild Foundation, brought 12 MBA students to Cambridge for an immersive Executive Education programme at Cambridge Judge Business School.

Women waging peace

tdk25 — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 16:00:00 +0000

Two members of a mass movement that has united thousands of Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli women in opposition to the recurring conflict in Gaza are to give a one-off talk in Cambridge next week, revealing how recent warfare in the region has united women from both sides of the divide in a series of ground-breaking joint initiatives.

̽��ֱ��discussion, which is free and open to all, will involve Michal Barak, a social entrepreneur and political activist, and Samah Salaime Egbariya, a researcher and activist on gender issues, director of Na’am Arab Women in the Center. It will take place at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, on Tuesday, 20 January, at 5pm.

Both speakers have been involved in important women’s initiatives which emerged following the most recent eruption of violence between Israel and Hamas during July and August last year. In just a few weeks, more than 2,000 people were killed as Israel launched a military operation in Gaza that left many more thousands of Palestinians homeless and in desperate need of emergency aid. During the same period, more than 4,000 rockets were fired from Gaza on Israel.

In the shadow of this short and savage conflict, women’s organisations began to unite to demand an end to years of intermittent warfare. Operating under the banner of Women Wage Peace, the movement has quickly attracted support from across Israel, with women of all ages, backgrounds and political beliefs pledging support.

In November, more than 1,000 women travelled on what became known as the “peace train” to the town of Sderot, just a mile from the Gaza Strip, where every year ministers, politicians, social activists and academics meet at a major national conference. Dressed in white, the group gathered on the lawn at Sapir Academic College, where the event was being held, and demanded peace negotiations with the Palestinian leadership to prevent future wars.

Elsewhere, thousands of people have participated in peaceful demonstrations at major transport intersections across Israel, or attended political hustings to press candidates in the forthcoming elections on how they plan to stop the violence. Commentators increasingly portray the group as a mouthpiece not just for women, but for a broad-based pro-peace camp in Israel that feels marginalised from the political process supposedly aimed at bringing the conflict to an end. It has been described as “spreading like wildfire”, and as having the potential to transform the nation’s political landscape in a decisive manner.

Yet despite this progress, the women’s peace movement, including Women Wage Peace itself, still only exists on the periphery of Israel’s political establishment. Beyond the country’s borders, it has received little attention and has barely featured in any reporting of the conflict, even though it represents a significant swathe of public opinion.

̽��ֱ��aim of the discussion at Cambridge is partly to raise awareness of the constructive role that the movement is playing in advancing a non-military solution to the conflict. Drawing on the speakers’ own experiences of the events in the summer, however, it will also attempt to show how the movement is, in many ways, a model for how women can and should play a central role in conflict resolution.

Among other issues, the speakers will investigate how various women’s initiatives successfully created a safe space in which people of different political persuasions were able to discuss their views together, and strive towards common goals, at a time when any engagement between their counterparts in the political mainstream was defined by hostility and tension.

Samah Salaime Egbariya, who was herself instrumental in uniting Palestinian and Jewish women in the heat of the conflict in the summer of 2014, said: “In the midst of the war, Palestinian and Jewish women came together to find a common language which enabled them to do something constructive towards ending the bloodshed. Women involved in the summer peace initiative sought to humanise what was happening and this was key to bringing them together. As a result, women are redefining the very notion of what security means in the Israel-Palestine conflict. This was also an effort to compel Jewish Israeli women to engage with the consequences of the violence on people in Gaza through the eyes of women.”

Michal Barak, a key activist of the movement, said: “There have been important and impactful initiatives in the past. What Women Wage Peace has so far succeeded in doing is bringing those disparate efforts together. We have created a movement in which women from across the social, ethnic and political spectrum are engaging with the urgency of peace across the country.”

̽��ֱ��event has been co-organised by Dr Ornit Shani, an Israeli Visiting Scholar at St John’s College, who was actively involved in the women’s peace movement in Israel during the 2014 war, and Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner, Senior Research Fellow at the Woolf Institute, an interfaith organisation which studies the relations between Jews, Christians and Muslims.

“In part, we simply want to tell the story of something that is happening in Israel and is largely unknown,” Dr Shani said. “What we hear about in the news tends to be representative of the political right on both sides of the conflict. ̽��ֱ��simple truth is that not enough women are involved in decision-making concerning any peace settlement. At the same time, there are findings from many recent peace settlements that suggests women can have a hugely positive effect when they are involved.”

̽��ֱ��event, Active Women in the Shadow of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Reflections from the Summer of 2014, will be held in the Main Lecture of the Divinity School, St John’s College, Cambridge, at 5pm on Tuesday, 20 January. All are welcome to attend.

Thousands of Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli women have joined a movement that is spreading across Israel in opposition to repeated cycles of violence in Gaza. Yet Women Wage Peace remains overlooked by the political establishment, and largely unknown outside Israel. An event at Cambridge will ask why, and examine its significance as a model for women’s action in times of war.

̽��ֱ��simple truth is that not enough women are involved in decision-making concerning any peace settlement

Ornit Shani

Women Wage Peace

Members of the Women Wage Peace movement arriving at the Sderot Conference for Society in the Israeli town of Sderot, November 2014.

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Yes

̽��ֱ��Penultimate Supper?

bjb42 — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:00:10 +0000

̽��ֱ��Last Supper, which millions of Christians will mark on Maundy Thursday as Easter begins this week, actually took place on a Wednesday, a groundbreaking study is to reveal.

̽��ֱ��dramatic claim is the principal conclusion of a new book in which Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, a scientist at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, argues that he has solved what the eminent Biblical scholar, F. F. Bruce, once described as “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”.

Researchers have puzzled for centuries over the precise nature and timing of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples. At the heart of the problem is an apparently fundamental contradiction in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark and Luke all assert that the Last Supper was a meal marking the start of the Jewish festival of Passover. John, by contrast, says that it took place before the Passover began.

Writing in ̽��ֱ��Mystery Of ̽��ֱ��Last Supper, Professor Humphreys proposes a new solution, based on a combination of Biblical, historical and astronomical research. ̽��ֱ��core of his argument is that Jesus used a different calendar to that conventionally accepted by Jews at the time. According to this different system, the Last Supper would have fallen on the Wednesday, and not the Thursday, of what is now called Holy Week.

“Whatever you think about the Bible, the fact is that Jewish people would never mistake the Passover meal for another meal, so for the Gospels to contradict themselves in this regard is really hard to understand,” Professor Humphreys said.

“Many Biblical scholars say that, for this reason, you can’t trust the Gospels at all. But if we use science and the Gospels hand in hand, we can actually prove that there was no contradiction. In addition, this research seems to present a case for finally introducing a fixed date for Easter.”

̽��ֱ��new study is based on earlier research which Professor Humphreys carried out with the Oxford astrophysicist, Graeme Waddington, in 1983. This identified the date of Jesus’ crucifixion as the morning of Friday, April 3^rd, AD 33 – which has since been widely accepted by other scholars as well.

For Professor Humphreys, who only studies the Bible when not pursuing his day-job as a materials scientist, this presented an opportunity to deal with the equally difficult issue of when (and how) Jesus’ Last Supper really took place.

Aside from the basic contradiction posed by three Gospels’ reference to a Passover meal, all four present a logistical problem. If, according to the Holy Week model, the Last Supper was on a Thursday, then for Jesus to have been executed on a Friday morning, a large number of events had to take place overnight: These included his arrest, interrogation, and separate trials before the Jewish court (the Sanhedrin), Pontius Pilate and Herod.

Even for the alleged son of God, squeezing all of this in would have been an ask. In addition, it was against Jewish law for the Sanhedrin to meet at night. Suspiciously, all of the Gospels also omit to mention what happened on the Wednesday of Holy Week.

If Jesus died on April 3^rd, the standard Jewish calendar of AD33 would have placed his crucifixion on the 14^th day of the Jewish month of Nisan. ̽��ֱ��Passover meal, however, falls on the 15^th – which supports John’s account, but not those of the other Gospels.

Humphreys is not the first researcher to suggest that Jesus might, therefore, have been using a different calendar altogether. Most recently, the Pope suggested in 2007 that Jesus used the solar calendar of the Qumran community, which was probably employed by a Jewish sect called the Essenes and is described in the Dead Sea Scrolls. As Humphreys shows, however, when the date of Passover is calculated using this calendar, it would have fallen a week later, after both Jesus’ death and resurrection.

For the first time, Humphreys investigates the possibility that a third calendar was in use. ̽��ֱ��official Jewish calendar at the time of Jesus’ death was that still used by Jews today; a lunar system in which days run from sunset to sunset. This was developed during the Jewish exile in Babylon in the 6^th century BC.

Beforehand, however, the Jews had a different system. This is referred to in the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament, when God instructs Moses and Aaron to start their year at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. Humphreys argues that this system would have been an adaptation of the Egyptian lunar calendar (confusingly one of two systems used by the Egyptians), in which the start of the year was redated to occur in the spring.

There is, he adds, extensive evidence to suggest that this survived as more than a remnant into Jesus’ time. Not all Jews were exiled in Babylon. Those who remained retained the old system of marking the days, and by the 1^st century AD, groups such as the Samaritans, Zealots, some Galileans and some Essenes (who may well have provided Jesus with the accommodation used for the Last Supper), were still abiding by the old system.

Under this, pre-exilic, calendar, Passover always fell earlier and the days were marked from sunrise to sunrise, not sunset to sunset. In AD33, the Passover meal would have occurred on the Wednesday of Holy Week, which presuming Jesus, Matthew, Mark and Luke all used pre-exilic dating, and John does not, resolves both the contradictions in the Gospels and means that the events they describe could have taken place on Thursday, at a more leisurely pace and in accordance with Jewish law.

Jesus also had the motivation to use the earlier dating system developed by Moses. ̽��ֱ��Gospels are littered with examples of him presenting himself as the new Moses. According to Luke, he even said during the Last Supper that he was making a “new covenant” with his disciples – a direct reference to the covenant made between God and the Jewish people through Moses in Exodus.

In many ways, therefore, Humphreys suggests that the Last Supper was a positioning exercise on Jesus’ part, which gave him ample reason to use the pre-exilic calendar. “Jesus was identifying himself explicitly with Moses,” he said. “He was setting himself up as a deliberate parallel. He then died on Nisan 14^th, just as the Passover lambs were being slain according to the official Jewish calendar as well. These are deep, powerful symbolisms – and they can be based on objective, historical evidence.”

̽��ֱ��Mystery of the Last Supper, by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys, is published by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press.

̽��ֱ��Last Supper of Jesus Christ was on the Wednesday, and not the Thursday, before his death, according to a new study which claims to have solved “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”.

If we use science and the Gospels hand in hand, we can prove there was no contradiction about the nature of the Last Supper.

Professor Colin Humphreys.

Wikimedia commons

Leonardo Da Vinci's depiction of the Last Supper

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Watching religiously

bjb42 — Thu, 20 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��report, by the Cambridge Arab Media project and Cambridge ̽��ֱ��'s Centre of Islamic Studies, follows a conference earlier this year and provides an overview of the little-studied but sprawling network of satellite television stations now operating in the region.

Since the 1980s, the number of satellite channels in Middle Eastern countries has burgeoned, from none to almost 500. In turn, the range of religious programmes available to viewers has become far wider than ever before, offering them alternative ideas not just about faith, but society as a whole.

Researchers believe that television is, as a result, becoming an evermore influential means of social engineering in the Middle East. While a handful of the channels in question, such as al-Jazeera, are internationally recognised, the majority address specific, niche audiences and are unknown to the vast majority of Westerners.

̽��ֱ��report compiles the findings and observations of numerous academics, first presented at the Cambridge conference in January. It examines the religious voices and opinions which are emerging, the audiences they attract, and the influence that they may be having on people's identities and views.

̽��ֱ��majority of stations considered are Islamic, but the document also covers Christian and Jewish outlets. In some cases, it finds that they are a force for unity, often in troubled states such as Lebanon, Israel and Iraq. Equally, however, it charts cases where Islamic "televangelism" has become a riposte to longer-standing, mainstream religious broadcasters.

"These channels are often political tools which promote a particular vision of a social and political order," Professor Yasir Suleiman, Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge said. " ̽��ֱ��research covered in the report suggests that the presenters and participants in religious programmes are not simply arguing over the rightness and wrongness of their ideas, but claiming and contesting the authority to speak for Islam itself."

̽��ֱ��review highlights a number of cases where clear efforts are being made, through television, to claim audiences on behalf of a certain religious and political ideal.

This is not a feature of Islamic channels alone. Some Christian broadcasters in the Middle East were found to be using television to preach and defend their faith in the face of perceived marginalisation in the Arab World; not least in the case of al-Hayah, a channel which explicitly tries to convert Muslims to Christianity and has moved studios several times for fear of attack as a result.

As the report also finds, however, the drive to influence viewers is not always an attempt to turn them to political extremism. More commonly, studies in a wide range of countries found that audiences were being encouraged to pursue a more pious and ethically sound lifestyle, although opinion differed widely from station to station as to what that might entail.

Rather than trying to engender direct political change, therefore, many researchers found cases where television programmes were trying to effect a "re-Islamization of society". Analyses of the al-Nas network in Egypt or the Iqra' Channel in Saudi Arabia, for example, did not find that viewers were being encouraged to make political judgements as a result of religious broadcasts, but rather to focus on their individual and ethical behaviour in accordance with Islamic teaching and for the sake of a greater social good.

Perhaps more surprisingly still, in some of the most troubled countries studied, this effort to encourage society to rediscover its religious identity is also used in an attempt to unite it. In Iraq, where there are now multiple Sunni and Shi'ite broadcasters, researchers found neither attempting to win over viewers from the other, but observed: "There was instead a kind of virtual reconciliation where sectarian political sentiments were present but not directly expressed. All channels tended to respect national unity."

Curiously, a similar picture emerges in Israel, where Jewish programming was aimed largely at progressive or secular Jews rather than the right-wing Orthodoxy which tends to dominate national politics. ̽��ֱ��most popular channel, Hidabroot, appeared to convey the message that regardless of audiences' political or religious preferences, all had a common, Jewish identity which deserved respect.

Further work, examining the nature of audience these channels generate and the impact their content is having, is now being planned. "We hope to launch this second phase of the project in the future, but it will need careful planning and project funding," Dr Kahled Hroub, Director of the Arab Media Project said.

̽��ֱ��full report is a joint publication by the Cambridge Arab Media Project and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies. ̽��ֱ��research project behind it was also supported by the International Development Research Centre in Canada. Copies can be downloaded for free from: http://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/Reports

A new survey of the boom in religious broadcasting in the Middle East reveals how the small screen is becoming an increasingly important battlefield in the struggle for people's hearts and minds.

These channels are often political tools which promote a particular vision of a social and political order.

Professor Yasir Suleiman

B.S. Wise from Flickr

Free TV Texture

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Yes

̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��staging of an Olympic Games is both a formidable task and an exciting opportunity, not least because it firmly places the host nation on the world stage. Take the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada – an event that was viewed by some 3.5 billion people, more than half the world’s population. In effect, the event is a chance for the host country to promote itself globally.

Perhaps one Games above all others in the last century was imbued by a particular eagerness to present a national identity afresh to the world and to erase past memories: the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. As events transpired, it is almost exclusively remembered for a very different reason – the murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by the terrorist group Black September. Yet, this tragedy is only part of the story of the Munich Games.

Although some aspects of the 1972 Games have received academic attention, most notably from scholars of terrorism, there has been a major gap in research that uses the Games as a case study to highlight broader historical currents in Germany. As a topic, the Munich Games lies neatly at the intersection between my research interests in Germany and in sports history and so, a few years ago, I set out with historian Dr Kay Schiller from the ̽��ֱ�� of Durham to provide the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics. ̽��ֱ��resulting book, ̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, seeks not only to explain the significance of the event in modern German history, but also to ask why such great store was set on hopes for its success.

Archives and oral histories

With funding from the British Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), I was able to delve into documents, most of which had only recently become available, held in archives around the world.

̽��ֱ��research reached from the federal archives in Koblenz and Berlin to the Bavarian State Archives and the city archive in Munich, from the research libraries at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne to the Amateur Athletics Foundation in Los Angeles, and even to the archive held at the ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois relating to Avery Brundage, the IOC President who controversially decided to continue the Munich Games following the terrorist attack.

Supplementing the investigations was an array of oral history sources gained from interviews of political and societal figures involved with the planning and staging of the Games. These included Hans-Jochen Vogel, the Mayor of Munich at the time, members of the Organizing Committee for the Games, participating athletes, an Israeli survivor of the terrorist attack and the now deceased Markus Wolf, formerly the head of foreign operations at the East German Stasi security service.

Showcasing a modern Germany

Much of the research focused on the years leading up to the ’72 Games. ̽��ֱ��Federal Republic of Germany was at a crossroads in the mid-1960s, still under the shadow of World War II but viewing the future with optimism. In the seven years between being chosen as host and staging the event itself, Germany experienced favourable economic conditions and a belief in technocratic optimism, but was equally marked by national and international debate and dispute.

Against this background, the symbolic potential of the Games did not escape the organisers of the Munich Olympics, who took just one month in 1965 to secure promises of funding from the city of Munich, the Bavarian State and the Federal Government. Hosting the Games was deemed to be of immense importance. As Chancellor Willy Brandt put it succinctly, Munich 1972 was to serve as a ‘showcase of modern Germany’, a chance to replace memories of the Third Reich with images of a thriving and prosperous Federal Republic, an opportunity to present an optimistic Germany to the world through its ‘Happy Games’ – its official motto.

In the end, the hopes were shattered by the horrific terrorist attack in the early hours of 5 September. As on 11 September 2001, the world had been caught off-guard and unawares, and the Munich organisers, from the chief committee members down to the hundreds of stadium hostesses who had welcomed the international community to Germany, saw the life seep out of their Games overnight. Years of effort now left a dubious legacy and, more immediately, the Federal Republic was plunged into months of diplomatic firefighting with Israel and the Arab world.

Into the melting pot

It’s impossible to write such a book without combining perspectives of political, social, cultural and urban history. As a result, ̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany is really about a nation’s handling of a melting pot of issues: Germany’s urban, regional and national identity; intergenerational conflict and social transformation; ideologies of the past; political and diplomatic disputes; architectural visions and ceremonial imaginations; terrorism and security; East and West Germany; and Israeli–Arab relations.

At the same time, however, it’s a book about sport or, more accurately, about sport’s slippery nature as a phenomenon that is both apolitical and deeply rooted in political discourse. To take one example: even for an event that claimed its legitimacy through an Olympic tradition reaching back to antiquity, it was impossible to make a complete break with the political past – ‘Hitler’s Games’ of 1936 loomed large over the ’72 Games.

A question of sport

Until this research project, apart from the extensively studied inaugural Athens Games of 1896 and the Nazi-influenced Berlin Games of 1936, there had been virtually no attempt within sports historiography to write comprehensively about the impact of individual Games on their respective host nations. Remarkably, there has also been no general account of the modern history of European sport from a comparative and international perspective. This is the case despite sport being such a central cultural feature of European life, both as a participant activity and as a spectator entertainment.

To remedy this situation, an AHRC-funded Network entitled Sport in Modern Europe has begun the first comprehensive historical analysis in this area. ̽��ֱ��overarching aim of the research network, which is led by Cambridge, together with academic partners at the ̽��ֱ�� of Brighton and De Montfort ̽��ֱ��, is to establish the central themes for the writing of a history of modern European sport. At a series of three international workshops, colleagues from around the world have been looking both comparatively and chronologically at sport, encompassing the elite diffusion of British sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as its modern-day democratisation, and exploring the problems associated with defining a distinctive European model of sport.

For me, moving from an in-depth analysis of the Munich Games to a broader outlook on European sport has been an enrichingtour d’horizon– and the work is only just beginning.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Chris Young (cjy1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of German and Dutch, or visit the Sport in Modern Europe Network.

A new analysis of the Munich Games of 1972 places the event at the very centre of modern German history, as Dr Chris Young explains.

Public conflicts arose over political ideology, culture and the legacy of the German past, and foreign policy shifts impacted in intricate ways on East–West German relations.

Alexandra Young

1972 Munich Olympic Stadium

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Yes

Endangered dialects of Aramaic

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Over 6000 languages are currently spoken worldwide but many are in danger of dying out. Some dialects are lost through political upheavals, scattering populations whose children grow up speaking the language of their new home; for others, social tensions persuade communities to lose one dialect in favour of another. Unlike the loss of biodiversity, this type of endangerment goes largely unnoticed and yet the loss of linguistic diversity, and the history and knowledge that languages embody, is equally as lamentable.

There is now a great urgency in the task of systematically documenting one group of dialects, whose roots lie in the ancient Semitic language of Aramaic, before their imminent demise. Since October 2004, Geoffrey Khan, Professor of Semitic Philology in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, has been directing a research team in an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded project that is preserving this knowledge in an entirely new way.

Ancient roots

Aramaic has survived into modern times as the spoken vernacular language in various areas of the Middle East. Neo-Aramaic, as it is known, consists of a very diverse range of dialects that today differ considerably from earlier literary forms of Aramaic. In many cases, the dialects exhibit types of linguistic forms that are unique within Semitic.

̽��ֱ��group of dialects spoken in south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and the adjacent region of the former Soviet Union, known as North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), exhibits particular diversity, comprising over 100 dialects spoken by Christians and Jews. Remarkably, those spoken by Christians are in all cases different from those spoken by Jews, even when the two communities have lived side by side for centuries.

Vulnerable voices

̽��ֱ��NENA group of dialects are particularly vulnerable because of the great upheavals that have been suffered in the 20th century by the Jewish and Christian Aramaic-speaking communities in the region.

Jewish communities left the region in a mass exodus in the 1950s and now live, for the most part, in Israel. As for the Christian communities, a large proportion have been displaced in the past century: in south-eastern Turkey, for instance, virtually all the village communities were destroyed in the First World War and the survivors forced to flee their villages; and in northern Iraq, many of the Christian villages have been lost more recently through political disturbances in the region.

These catastrophes, together with a policy of Arabicisation by an Iraqi government intolerant of linguistic minorities, have driven a large number of Aramaic-speaking Christians out of the Middle East to make a new life in other countries. ̽��ֱ��diaspora have settled throughout the world, particularly in North America, Australia and western Europe. Such upheavals have brought the majority of the NENA dialects to the verge of extinction.

Tracing the last surviving speakers

To arrive at a systematic description of the surviving NENA dialects, much of the data have to be gathered in field-trips and it has become a major task to locate informants for many of the dialects. This applies all the more so to the most endangered dialects of the group, some of which have only a few surviving speakers, all of whom are advanced in age. For example, after a long hunt, Professor Khan finally managed to locate the final speaker of one dialect in Auckland, New Zealand. He was a man in his 90s who had originally come from a small village in northern Iraq. Similarly, the remaining half-dozen speakers of another dialect have been found, this time in a village in Armenia to which their ancestors had migrated from eastern Turkey at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the case of some of the NENA dialects, the surviving speakers remember the dialect of their parents imperfectly. Vocabulary relating to material culture is particularly prone to disappear quickly after the displacement of the communities from their rural villages in the Middle East. ̽��ֱ��physical deterioration of the speakers can also be a problem; elderly speakers often lack enough teeth to pronounce some words properly, especially those with dental consonants.

Having found surviving speakers, the process of describing an undocumented spoken language consists of more than simply recording an individual’s speech. There is an analytical dimension in which a linguist must use various means of questioning to tease out the complete structure of the language. Some cases turn out to be more arduous than others: one informant had great difficulty with the plural imperative of the verb ‘to open’ (i.e. the order ‘open!’ addressed to a group of people), insisting that this was not possible, since more than one person is not needed to open a window or door.

̽��ֱ��most successful means of working with informants has proved to be through informal, friendly relationships, without any payment of fees. On one occasion, however, an informant was clearly conscious of the financial value of his knowledge and insisted on charging $2 for every grammatical form. Owing to the complex nature of his dialect’s verbal system, it became clear that the description of this particular dialect would be beyond the means of the available research funding!

Linguistic fingerprinting

In most cases, the speakers have no knowledge of the migration history of their ancestors. ̽��ֱ��grammatical structure of the dialects, however, is a ‘linguistic genome’ and one fascinating aspect of this project has been the finding that dialects sometimes contain evidence of population movements. In Azerbaijan, for instance, the Turkish language had an impact on the verbal system of the Aramaic dialects of the region. This influence can still be seen today in Aramaic dialects that are spoken a long way from Azerbaijan, as far as the Mosul plain in Iraq.

Preserving for future generations

A key and innovative element to this project has been the NENA database (NENAD), a tool developed by an IT team to accommodate and process the diversity of the dialects in the NENA group. ̽��ֱ��web-based resource allows efficient retrieval of linguistic data and audio recordings for individual dialects, of which over 70 have now been documented. Comparative displays of data from all the dialects in the database can be created, and a ‘smart’ version of the traditional dialect atlas displays the distribution of grammatical features across the dialect area.

Of course, linguists in most cases cannot keep endangered languages alive, given that the risk to the language is often rooted in social and political issues, but they can create records that are detailed and sophisticated enough to allow analytical study by future researchers over decades to come. By preserving the world’s rich history of linguistic diversity, we can enhance our collective understanding of human language and the peoples that have spoken them.

For more information, please contact the author Professor Geoffrey Khan (gk101@cam.ac.uk)

at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies or visit the NENAD website (https://nena.ames.cam.ac.uk/index-new.php).

Current estimates suggest that a language dies every two weeks. Here, Geoffrey Khan describes the documentation of a group of dialects before they are lost forever.

There is now a great urgency in the task of systematically documenting one group of dialects, whose roots lie in the ancient Semitic language of Aramaic, before their imminent demise.

Sanol Demir from Flickr

River Dicle from Hasankeyf

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Yes