The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> needless excitement at Maggie's

needless excitement at Maggie's
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Thursday, November 21 2013, 16:07:20 (UTC)
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Government's move expected to help save Assyrian language

With the opening of private Assyrian schools in Turkey, Assyrian children will have the chance to keep their mother tongue from becoming extinct.


UNESCO listed Assyrian as one of the "definitely endangered languages" of the world. It is one of the oldest languages in the Middle East and a dialect of ancient Aramaic.

...."Assyrian/Akkadian" is not a dialect of Aramaic. Aramaic is an entirely different language...if the two were at all similar modern day assyrians would have been able to read the cuneiform tablets dug up 200 years ago.

...besides that, this business of having to save whatever it is we speak is a tempest in a teapot. The language is well protected in university libraries and on discs...non-assyrians study and speak it so it isn't going anywhere.

..the language was alive and well in Iraq until western Christianity came knocking again...in fact it is in the "free" West where there's a Christian under every rock that the language is dying out of use...and that's because assyrian families can't interest their children in it...no one wants to bother with a dead language you can't use for anything except gossip.

...when America was building itself it knew that all immigrants must come to identify as Americans first and foremost, if not exclusively...the idea of the American government running separate schools for Italian and German and Dutch and French and German immigrants, all in their own languages would have been an idiotic idea...a nation needs to be a nation, not a tower of babbling....if immigrants stay immersed in their own languages and customs they won't know or understand the mainstream and will thus marginalize themselves...which is EXACTLY the purpose of all this SAVE OUR LANGUAGE bullshit.

It's another way of keeping our assyrians from assimilating, from blending in, from losing their own identity, from getting along and, heavens forbid, from intermarrying or even making friends with MUSLIMS...it's a sort of verbal ghetto we want to live in keeping us "pure". Do you think assyrian parents want that for their children in America...or Europe? No, there they want them to integrate as fast as they can so they can get ahead and reap the benefits they came there for. Do they want the same in Iraq? In Turkey? No again. The LAST thing we want is for our children to get ahead and succeed in those Muslim countries because it means MIXING and making friends or at least acquaintances and that could lead to friendships and UNDERSTANDING and all sorts of evils.

We want to remain separate and apart as much as we can as a way of forcing our children to stay away from Muslims...sure, they have to learn the national language, but at all costs they must see themselves as not-Arabs or Turks...they must constantly remain the "other"...in order to keep "our ways" pure.

That's all this is about...assyrian families dump the language soon enough when they move to western Christian countries.

If I were the government of Turkey I would outlaw any language but the native tongue for all school instruction...this tribal division has kept those nations in turmoil AND been a great advantage whenever some Christian wanted to divide the people there. Iraq learned the hard way that citizens of a country MUST see themselves as citizens first and ethnic groups second...way second...Americans are proud of their ethnic derivation but they are MOST proud of being Americans first and foremost....Turkey must aspire to the same.



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