I'm working on an original translation of the Bible. My goal is to let the words of scripture guide my translation rather than reading a favored theology into the text. As the saying goes, "Where the Bible speaks, we speak, where it is silent, we are silent." In addition to being a formal equivalence, I try to preserve original idioms (with clarification in the footnotes), poetic and metaphorical language, and distinct synonyms (ie. land/ground/dust) where possible.

The text is available under a Creative Commons license. And it is available at a website, and as an ebook, though it is still incomplete.

Please support my translation work:
https://ko-fi.com/wltbible
https://wlt.ct.ws

Excellent article on #DaraHorn's new children's #book and more!

"When are #children ready to encounter a #Jewish #history of persecution and slaughter?

One answer is provided during the seder itself, which often ends with the traditional song “Chad Gadya,” or one little goat in #Aramaic. It’s a “cumulative” song about a baby goat that is eaten by a cat, who’s killed by a dog, who’s beaten with a stick, culminating with the Angel of Death being slain by God. One interpretation is that the goat represents the Jewish people, and the climax of the song signals the redemption of the #Jews. It’s a dark theme smuggled into an upbeat, if macabre, children’s song.

Making light of the #seder’s darker themes is a #Passover tradition all its own, and Horn is on board with it.

“By the time children are old enough to appreciate [the darkness], they own the #story. They’re characters in the story, and they know that about themselves and that this is a story about us,” said Horn."

https://www.timesofisrael.com/dara-horns-gonzo-time-traveling-childrens-passover-book-wants-people-to-love-living-jews/

The seal impression of king Hezekiah of Judah on a clay seal ("bulla") with a winged sun motif and an Egyptian ankh. Bullae were used to seal strings that closed documents, lids, and doors https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/news/king-hezekiah-in-the-bible-royal-seal-of-hezekiah-comes-to-light/ #ancMedToot #archaeology #aramaic #hebrew

**Christian Palestinian Aramaic between Greek and Arabic**

“The corpus consists mostly of translations from Greek, highlighting significant lexical borrowings and idiosyncratic syntax, such as periphrastic verb constructions. The article traces evidence of Arabic substrate influence in pre-Islamic times, including phonological shifts and loanwords, reflecting interactions between Arabic- and Aramaic-speaking Christians.”_

Gzella, H. (2025) 'Christian Palestinian Aramaic between Greek and Arabic,' in Open Book Publishers, pp. 747–770. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0463.27.

#History #Aramaic #Greek #Arabic #Languages #OpenAccess #OA #DOI #Nonfiction #Academia #Book #Ebook #Bookstodon @bookstodon

**Aramaic: Lingua Franca, Koine, or Both?**

_”The study investigates the historical roles of Aramaic as both a lingua franca and a koine, examining its development and usage across various periods. It identifies three main contexts: as the administrative and diplomatic language of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, as the religious and scholarly language of Jewish communities in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and as the liturgical and literary language of Syriac Christianity.”

Healey, J. (2025) 'Aramaic: lingua franca, koine, or both?,' in Open Book Publishers, pp. 771–796. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0463.28.

#History #Aramaic #Language #OpenAccess #OA #Nonfiction #Academia #Book #Ebook #Bookstodon @bookstodon

#Maaloula is a little Syrian village built into the rugged mountainside, located about 50 km northeast of Damascus. It is one of the last places on earth where they still speak #Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus 2000 years ago.

"Our research pioneers an innovative methodology for generating synthetic training data tailored to Old Aramaic letters. Our pipeline synthesizes photo-realistic Aramaic letter datasets, incorporating textural features, lighting, damage, and augmentations to mimic real-world inscription diversity. Despite minimal real examples, we engineer a dataset of 250 000 training and 25 000 validation images covering the 22 letter classes in the Aramaic alphabet."

Aioanei AC, Hunziker-Rodewald RR, Klein KM, Michels DL (2024) Deep Aramaic: Towards a synthetic data paradigm enabling machine learning in epigraphy. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0299297. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299297 #OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #PeerReview #DOI #MachineLearning #NeuralNetworks #Algorithms #Linguistics #Aramaic #Epigraphy #AI #ArtificalIntelligence #Academia #Academic #Academics @linguistics

"This study is the first attempt to apply the masked language modeling approach to corrupted inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic languages, both using the Hebrew alphabet consisting mostly of consonant symbols. In our experiments, we evaluate several transformer-based models, which are fine-tuned on the Biblical texts and tested on three different percentages of randomly masked parts in the testing corpus."

Niv Fono, Harel Moshayof, Eldar Karol, Itai Assraf, and Mark Last. 2024. Embible: Reconstruction of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Texts Using Transformers. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 846–852, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.

https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-eacl.56

#ComputationalLinguistics #Linguistics #Ancient #Hebrew #Aramaic #Language #Languages @linguistics

Petite bouteille à la mer : est-ce que l'un ou l'une d'entre vous connaitrait quelqu'un qui connaitrait quelqu'un qui parlerait #araméen #aramaic ?

What Is Aramaic?

"In fact, the linguistic situation in the Iron Age Levant is quite complex, reflecting a Canaanite–Aramaic continuum with local dialects falling at various points along this spectrum—some bearing mainly Canaanite traits with little connection to Aramaic, and others leaning more toward the Aramaic end."

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-near-eastern-world/what-is-aramaic/