Syriac (Aramaic) vs. Ethiopic! Comparing two ancient Semitic languages with the Lord's Prayer 

Good Day Professor, do you teach these languages?

@@Milz031 Yes, I teach several semitic languages: these days I'm teaching Biblical Aramaic, Syriac, Akkadian, and Hebrew. Ge'ez (Classical Ethiopic) is taught at our institution by another faculty member.

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Is this done online?

@@Milz031 Yes. Send an email to professorwingert@gmail.com if you'd like to be put on a mailing list when these are offered.

One thing you should have to consider is that the Geez bible is written in poetic form. I think poetic way of expressing and writing things was the norm back then.

Never was colinised mybe ark covernant there

Indeed

No it’s not. It’s just a blatant eyesore for liars. The truth is right in front of them and it’s hard to digest

Wherever we may visit, if we have the good fortune of meeting nice people, that place becomes endearing.

​@@Nobody-yq9fkthats why your name is nobody

Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for all the kind and productive comments.

Glad you enjoyed it!

I agree. Good choice for the exposition.

You did really good job. I am an Ethiopian but don’t understand Geez because no one speaks except few people in Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The language is not in daily use anymore. It is dead . But today’s Amharic and Tigregna have a lot of similarities . As a result, I can understand some but not quite right.

Raba basima iloukh Fyodor!

Yes. It certain makes sense geographically. Ancient Aksum and South Arabia shared a common writing system as well at one point.

yes thats true but I always thought south Arabian was completely independent of arabic and I also heard that arabic originated in the north near jordan and syrian desert so I assumed it would be more similar to aramaic but great video! @@ProfessorMichaelWingert

​@@WorldXl_Correct. Also, Coptic Christians should marry into Habesha Christians.

​@@EriPagesThat's irreleveant

@@ionictheist349 What makes you ionic?

This is some A+ feedback! Thanks Richard.

What??? Ge'ez is the father of all languages. Over 5000 years old

@@Bete_amhara972Years ago, I have heard even a Habesha professor asserting on a local Amharic radio years ago saying Ge'ez was the first language on earth, but real linguists and historians would laugh at you. The bible, for example, before it appeared in Ge'ez, it was witten in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek(ጽርእ). We Habesha, have a lot of crap in our mind pseudo-historians fed us.

❤

Can you give name city speck Aramaic

It is possible because some of the Elephantine Papyri were written in Assyrian because Assyrians had ruled Egypt. From my understanding, Christianity entered modern Ethiopia by way of Egyptian Copts who also would have spoken Greek. So it is likely that older Assyrian speakers may have preceded Greeks upon defeat by Persians who would later be defeated by Greeks. So Axum's Ge'ez may have been a combination of an extension of Cushitic languages and a wave of Assyrians who were living in Upper Egypt before Persian and Greek conquests who migrated south of Sudan.

Your words are too kind! Many thanks to you for watching.

The word Middle East was created in 1902 to draw a distinction from Africa (for varying reasons) but prior to 1902, Israel was shown to be in Northeast Africa. All of biblical Israel’s allies were in North East Africa as well. This is easily searchable history.

@fantahunish yes and Ge'ez comes from the South Arabian script Sabaean (present-day yemen)

Ethiopia is half black half Arab ppl

That's amazing! Thanks so much for sharing!

It was a lot of fun. Thanks for your comments.

Thank you!

Thank you. It was an experiment for the month of August. I may do something similar in a subsequent month after the semester settles a little.

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Thanks for the reply. I am a native speaker of Arabic from the country of Sudan if you need any help with Arabic or the Sudanese dialect of Arabic I'm here to help. 😊

Selam wa fikir!

Aksum was not a middle east kingdom

Ethiopia or habesha are half blk half Arab , Axum has conquered middle east

Arabs never conquered Aksum. In fact, it was the Aksumites that are known for have conquered the Peninsula in the 3rd and 6th centuries.

@@rebbybam230half black and half Arab where are you getting this from

That's a fantastic observation. I'd like to learn Tigrinya someday. It was offered at UCLA when I was there but I did not have the opportunity to study it, unfortunately.

@@ProfessorMichaelWingertevery thing started in Africa yall hate to admit it😡

@@ProfessorMichaelWingertthe original Assyrian were dark skin people with straight hair they were shemetic afro Asians all the sons of Nok were dark the 4 th race not of Nok/ Noah were a fallen species that mated with the indigenous people u pale demons love to take away credit that don’t belong to y’all all the Afro asian languages started in Cush Africa and pale people not of the hue/ colored man species yall kidnapped and robbed and stole identity of Cushite black civilizations tribal groups: Atlantaneans, akkadians, Sumerian, Syrians/ Elamite Indian,Hebrew, Amharic…. the French louvre museum has the original paintings of who the original peoples look like so stop ✋ with your lies u cultural and identity thieves😡😡😡😡

Culture vultures😡

@@MichelleBrown-vi5zo Africa will save the world, Michelle. Classical Ethiopic is one of the most fascinating languages. How did you enjoy the video?

That's a very good idea.

there’s a Semitic conlang disxord server if ur interested. Not very active but I go there to compare my lang and get inspiration from others.

@@birdbill888sounds great, do you have a link?

If you haven't already, you can view me geeking out on the topic of conlangs with U Penn professor Dr. Tim Hogue. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wq19RsTh6MA.html

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert I saw that one, that's why I brought up conlangs. It's actually fun to learn about conlangs, especially the ones designed to be as close to a natural language as possible. You learn a lot about how languages change over time. As for my transcriptions of the movie Aramaic from Passion of The Christ, I doubt their accuracy. They don't even have time stamps, and they're writing with English orthography. It's only about ten lines or so anyway.

A blessed people indeed!

ARAmaic not AMAraic

Thank you!

It is empowering to learn all these related languages, isn't it? I hope to learn Tigrinya once day.

The Ge'ez language, ge'ez speakers or by their name Agazi people are actually a branch of Aramaic people who came Syria, and even later after the establishment of christianity in Axum, there were many Syrian/Assyrian preist, monks...etc played high role in interpreting, translating and writing biblical documents. for instance 3 of the nine saints who are credited for spreading myphesite Orthodox doctrine in Axum were Assyrians and they wrote many of the newtestment books which are used in Ethiopia today.

And if we said : nothing in more closed to aramaic than arabic ? Aramaic is closer to arabic than ge'ez, but for sure, the 3 of them are closed. Linguisticly, the arabic is the most refined semitic language, and well preserved till today, so I use it as basis for my etymologic researches.

Example, translation from syriac toward arabic at 27:22 بلى اِفْصِ لنحن مِن بَسٍّ Finally, the only difference is the particle B for Bala (but).

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert 27:22 Im (from) Kulu (all) Iquy (Evil). Don't know how to pretend ge'ez is closest to aramaic. And adhinene seems to mean "to extract, pull out" rather than to save. Doing etymologic reseaches, I had identified the meaning of each semitic phone. Evil in ge'ez, iquy I need to know if the first letter "i" is a prefix to root QY: if the prefix "i" is privative, so iquy means weakness. The phone Q is about a position, and Q+Y means firm, to not move, to remain in the same position (the faith). And 24:30, no doubt Sibha is the arabic سبح which means not glory, but floating above, we say Subhan Allah in arabic, translated by Glory, but it's not what say the semit word. Glory is related to the etyma (archaic semitic root) JL, the act of spread, like in Evangelos, Injyl in arabic, or found in Galilea, or Gyl in hebrew (wave) or Golgotha, this place for the roman spectacle, to be seen by all.. And A'lam doesn't mean Futur or Ever, but "the world", and more accuratly, what a mind can grap of the realm. The futur in hebrew it's Olam ha-ba, the Ba means to engage in, to enter in, the World to come. The B is the archetyp of the Acces, in all languages. Religious had changed the meaning of the root and words, due to their belief and philosophy. By the way, I wrote a morphosemantical analysis on Yehoshua' and Yashua' : they don't mean "savior", nor they are the same word, but both are related to Time, Joshua' is the fullfillment of a promise root WShA' et Jesus is root ShWA' it's an infinitive, means the HOUR, terrible one in jewsih tradition, Judgment day. So I believe science, not rabbinism, nor christianism and how they twisted the meaning of God's words. And this is silly here : my comment disappear, so agian my answer to Ephrem bellow : you don't know what you are talking about. It's linguistic, I don't care of your christian obsession and vanity blinding your intelligence. Bravo ! Matthew text is not a religious book ? Really ridicuous your com. I had prove linguisticly how closed is the ethoipian to arabic, but your are enclosed in your blind faith, not language.

Good question. Evidently it is related to "feeling out" or "trying out." It is connected to another English word, "attempt." Now whether that original Latin word is related to temperature, that's the real question.

Hebrew has חיל

Arabic has the same word حيل means power or strength e.g شد حيلك OR هو ما عنده حيل

You have wrong impression of what the word "hablan" means. "Ablan" in amharic means feed us, literally, hand feed us. But, the Syriac and Ge'ez hablan and habene stand for another word which is provide us or give us. In Tigrinya it would be habena. The root word, hab, to mean give or provide is the same in all three languages.

lahma is actually related to lam(cow) not maad

I've always been told that Tigrinya is closer to Syriac and Arabic. Thank you kindly for the contribution.

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Indeed! Tigrinya is more Geez than Amharic in which Amharic has got a lot of other loaned words from other Ethiopian kushitic languages. For your knowledge there is another language more related to Arabic and Geez called Tigre.

That’s the same thing in Amharic snq means food supply

Hard to say as arabic speaker but I think a little bit wider

That's a good question. It is a language family, but it is a more tight-knit language family than something like Indo-European, of which Germanic is a sub-category. In many ways, Semitic languages share more parity with something like Germanic. That might be an interesting study to undertake. Thanks for the suggestion.

You are absolutely right. That was an obvious oversight on my part. That term is prevalent in Genesis 22. Thanks for posting!

In tigrinya adHena means safe us or protect us

Adenen= save us

Yes! We also use it in the United States during the Tewahedo Kidase.

yes Tigrinya and Amharic are from Ge'ez; Tigrinya more closely sounds like Ge'ez

​@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Eritreans are also original ethiopians ,

​@@ProfessorMichaelWingert the original ethiopians are tigrayans Eritrea and ethiopia and Amharic ppl or known as the habesha ppl are the original Ethiopians which later adopted other ethnicities and tribes and included to make current ethiopians The ancient ones or the habesha ethiopians in today's Eritrea and ethiopia are half black half Arab mixed

@@rebbybam230who is fake Ethiopian? LOL!!!

So much simplistic, crude , vicious, ignorant thinking, by a man of such high esteem. because of his big orafice

Keep the languages alive! They are a blessing to the world.

From the Aramaic root SNQ, to be in need or lacking something.

So Absana عبسنا may mean our unsatisfaction which is common large sin as not being satisfied with god destiny and plan

Also, I have theory about the sentence which was translated to “ Do not bring us to the test” I think maybe the more accurate meaning is “ Do not curse us if we forget” in Aramaic and “Don’t reproach us if we forget” in Ethiopic. This is as the word تلعن taalan means to curse, تعاتبنا tabine is to blame us in Arabic. Also source word NSY means to forget and forgetness is a common “human like sin” as in Quranic verse “Rabbana la tu'akhizna in-nasina aw akh-ta'na.”

Thanks for the note Petar. I may have addressed the topic in one of the Aramaic in the New Testament videos, but it seems to come up frequently (I should probably upload a talk on this specific topic!). I'm not sure that I buy that these dialects are "quite" different (I guess it depends on what is meant by "quite"). The problem really rests in what the literary evidence leaves us vs. what we know of dialect geography and dialect trends. Without a doubt, we should expect every village to have its own unique dialect. Without going into too much depth, I wouldn't say that these were different enough to be meaningful. Syriac is the literary dialect as produced in Edessa. The Galilean style is much more limited in its textual production, and what the specific spoken conventions were in relation to their written forms is a little tricky when it comes to pinning it down. In my opinion, the Eastern/Western classification isn't really helpful beyond a few forms and word choice. Edessa is in the Northwest anyhow, even though it is located on the Eastern side of the Euphrates river (which runs Northwest to Southeast).

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Thank you for the response.

Amharic is far from Ge'ez. go find your roots in the Gala Languages. Amharic is far from being semetic.

I would say it is closer to tigrigna but yes Amharic and tigrigna defended from geez

​@@adamfuzum3310thanks for letting the whole world know that your an idiot.

​@adamfuzum3310 Amharic did indeed come Ge'ez. Tigrinya existed alongside Ge'ez and is just as old.

@@adamfuzum3310 tinish siriat binor ezih enkuan. Betam newur new

How would you distinguish the English words "flesh" and "meat"?

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert flesh is the comestible part of a living body ( may it be muscle , fat , wheat , barley , fish ...) . meat is the noble part of animal flesh ( nowadays muscle ) . لحم comes in a sense of fused parts together , in modern days it means meat and also means fuse metal parts together but originaly it means flesh , look in the holy Quran for examples . in hebrew we say ملحمة for war battles it comes from two point of view : 1 : the fusion of efforts and hearts and minds in both sides of a battle and 2: because a lot of flesh is lost wheter it be muscle or fat . i hope i explained my point of view in a clear way . sorry for my english professor , and thanks again for your efforts .

Tigrigna speakers nowadays pronounce Ge'ez just like Amharic. And not having "semitic sounds" isn't a characteristic of South Semitic, the sounds you're talking about(ዓ/ሓ) still exist in Argobba(the closest language to Amharic). You're forgetting that all modern Ethio-Semitic langauges including Tigrigna and Tigre have lost three phonemes that existed in Ge'ez(ሠ፣ኀ፤ፀ)

Lisane Tigrinya is oddly redundant lol; "language of lanuage of tigre"

@@Yallah-2023 ​ @Yallah-2023 False information. Also they did''t lose the sounds of the three fidels. ኀ was pronounced as ኸ, ሠ was most likely pronounced as ሸ etc... the sounds are still there but with different letters whereas in amharic there are no such sounds as ሐ/ኀ they just pronounce it as ሀ let alone the ዐ sound. Linguists know nowadays that Amharic is a way distant relative of Ge'ez while Tigrinya and Tigre have a relation with ge'ez similar to what Italic languages in the times of Rome had to Latin. Don't claim history that's not yours. Also to your point with Argobba having these sounds. It came with the Islamization of them, similar sounds can be found in harari. The reason the Tigrinya speakers pronounce it like Amharic is because of the influence the Amharas had in the church.

​@@Yallah-2023qwanqwa Habasa is in reality the proper and traditional designation for the Tegrena language. Tegrena is a Amharic word.

The ena in Tegrena means "language of" so Tegrena means language of the Tigre.

It's also the same word in amharic.

well actually it was written in both directions in Dm't

The title is perfect. Languages like amharic, tigrinya, geez and other african semetic languages are categorised under Ethiopic (that's the name the scholars gave it to the category) so he is correct!

Languages that share a root, shared words, structures. Linguists

@@lm7338 how is it Shared through History,Religion or Culture?? My idea that people will gave an outside group credit for an idea or innovation they had Nothing to do with... There is Never an Equal partnership!!! Multi Ethnic and Multi Culture is a fraudulent concept !!!

Egzie-biher (እግዚአብሔር) means Ruler of nations

@@Yoseph-tr5bx Biher comes from the word nature (Bihier). Egzie comes from the word maker (Eg-ze). Like ze-geye

@@dddwww1948 Biher can have 2 meanings either nation or land in this context the first seems more plausible also am not sure egzie means maker isn't 'ገበረ' the correct word? There is actually a wikipedia page for this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igziabeher

@@Yoseph-tr5bx ገበረ means deed, do, doing . ገበረ, ግበር, ይገብር። if you stress the letter በ, then it would change the meaning to tax payer. ገበረ, he paid tax. ገበሬ, tax payer.

@@dddwww1948 that is true but anyways I feel ruler of nations makes more sense in a direct manner and as far as I know is the consensus among most people.

Ge'ez is a wonderful language.

lmao, are you out of your mind, where do you get that from ?

I am also Ethiopian but thats not true at all. I would say that its age is half of that.

Ancient European names can be difficult, can't they? Axum was even thought of as India at different times in history!

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Which in itself would be strange because I don't believe any scripts of Axum were in India. They used Sabaean so ovelap with Southern Arabia but I don't know of any direct connection with India except for statements by classic Greek writers that Ethiopian expanded from the Canaries to India but not necessarily tied specifically to Axum but possibly earlier with Dm.t and Pwenet (Punt).

There was no country called Abyssinia, Abyssinia is an exonym not an old name for Ethiopia it is a geographic expression of an area. The fact that people think the name changed is very bizarre.

@@BF-bb5us Ethiopia is an exonym for the geographic region of Upper Egypt and Sudan. It's a Greek exonym. At this time, modern Ethiopia was not Ethiopia. Parts of it were Pwenet (Punt) at the oldest and later Dmt then Axum before Abyssinia. It didn't become the new Ethiopia until the 1930s CE. Ethiopia was all over the map in European usage before that point even designating the Sahel, West Africa, and Southern Africa as Ethiopia but Ethiopia is still a Greek exonym.

@@kemetnubiakamp no it was never called Abyssinia. It was only called such by outsiders

I will let his bishop know and see what he says.

​@ProfessorMichaelWingert not necessarily wrong just amharic speaker. Tigringa speaker might have a more range of sounds close to most Semitic languages

@@ProfessorMichaelWingertYOU TRYNA BE FUNNY😂

Proof

@@ionictheist349 arabic written scripts are found only 500BC and they break off from Hebrew line. Geez writtings and the order of their writting completely different from arabic is found atleast 1500 years ago. There are other unstudied scripts which linguists believe are much older. We dont stem our language from Phoenician writting that went to Etruscan. We are kur own find and breed.

@@tigraiembeba4447 the one ur talking about is the more modern one. The one he mentioned in the video was southern arabic script which is from yemen, its also where the sabean writing system was derived from. And from the sabean the geez writing system was derived. Their is actually a proof for this. There is a southern arabic script in yemen which is more than 3000 yrs old. And also check out the temple of Yeha from the tigray region in northern Ethiopia, there are sabean script writings that are found there.

@@ionictheist349 that is just the thing I am saying to you. Geez traces back to Sabean. You can read Sabean if you read Geez. Arabic has absolutely nothing to do with Sabean. That area Tigrai, Eritrea and Yemen has long been our domains. Arabic came much later and itself is derived from Nabataean which drives from Etruscan. They follow the a b c d arrangement from Phoenician script. Sabean which is precursor to Geez and is almost the exact replica of Geez doesn't. Sabean doesn't root itself in whatever kind of arabic script. As Arabic came way later to our area though it could have been influenced by Sabean.

hmane.harvard.edu/publications/introduction-classical-ethiopic-geez

Offensive to who? Eritreans that dislike anything with the word Ethiopia?

​@@amdetsion3256 Eritrean was one part of Ethiopia , soon Eritrea must be annexed by any means.

Since it is Ethiopian language , so why not. If you are Eritrean, it is matter of time to come back her mother land

Ethiopic and Ge'ez are used interchangeably

U can't even pronounce ge"ez alphabet correctly lol

@@MikeJr-lu1oe what made you think I don't ? Since your comment is personal

Could you say more on that, Teddy?

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert The "neo Aramaic" is the classical version of Aramaic. It is not the same Aramaic which used to be spoken during the time of Jesus. If you are making a comparison, I highly suggest to look in to ancient manuscript obtained from Syrian monasteries. There are some Syrian monasteries which have preserved the original Aramaic as it used to be.

Where do you place Tigrinya in that assessment?

Yes, Amara'ic is much much older language, infact it is rather directly tied to Arama'ic @ProfessorMichaelWingert

@@user-cb3dc4yf2fThat assessment should lead you to some major conclusions. What does that tell you about Amhara and Tigre people if there language is Semitic? It means that… they are… Semites.

@Nobody-yq9fk Just because it's a trend to say something, it doesn't mean it is a fact. By the way, do you know the meaning of the word "Semitic or Semait"? I mean the intrinsic meaning.

@@user-cb3dc4yf2f yes. It means that you trace your paternal ancestors to Shem, the son of Noah.

Calm down. Ge'ez has been called Ethiopic for centuries now.

Ethiopic and Ge'ez are (were) used interchangeably

Why you are a.gry when ethiopian name is mentioned you child

??

@@ionictheist349 act like you don't know, go take an Ethiopian DNA test, you'll quickly understand

@@ZeFodao-qv5gy where are u from

Correction: Ethiopia≠arabic

@@hailehaile8229 አረብኛ ካልሆነ ታዲያ ምንድነው? መሳቅ እፈልጋለሁ

lol... I'm like half his size. He could swallow me whole.

@@ProfessorMichaelWingert Hahaha, you're a good sport! Also, excellent video. I look forward to watching more.

@@RabinaHud Thank you for the support and the kind words!