Cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Chicago, and Detroit are home to large Aramaic-speaking communities; you might also overhear people chatting in an Aramaic dialect while waiting for the London Tube or on a Toronto subway car. And so it goes on and on. These are the gravitational waves of a culture with an ancient history, starting around 1000 BCE, reaching the present. The Jewish and Christian scriptures were canonized in an Aramaic-speaking world and largely shaped by it, affecting the pronunciation
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