unfoldingWord® Aramaic Grammar¶

Introduction¶

The unfoldingWord® Aramaic Grammar (UAG) is a Biblical Aramaic reference grammar based on the morphology codes that appear in the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (OSHB). It enables the global Church to gain understanding of the Aramaic grammar of the Old Testament.

Rationale¶

The rationale behind creating the first version of the UAG was to provide an openly licensed and up to date reference grammar for direct use with the OSHB. Such a grammar may be used in software to provide students and translators of Scripture with up to date and accurate descriptions of Aramaic grammar on an as needed basis. Because the articles are directly patterned after the morphological categories of the OSHB, it is easy for software to link directly to them.

Methodology¶

In 2017-2018, a team of scholars and technicians worked together to create and revise each of the articles in the unfoldingWord® Hebrew Grammar (UHG) over the course of a year and a half. The creation process included individuals drafting glossary and article entries for each grammatical topic and then a series of peer reviews of each. Several meetings were held to help standardize the format of the articles and to discuss difficult issues as they arose. The UAG is an adaptation of the UHG using the same format but with the content tailored for Aramaic instead of Hebrew.

The differentiation between the glossary entries and the articles is similar to the approach of many Wikipedia articles. The glossary entry is a one or two sentence summary of the grammatical topic, while the article goes into much more detail and includes several examples. This has the effect of being useful in a pop up or tooltip in software applications, which may provide immediate access to the glossary in the pop up and then link to the full article.

A unique design goal was to make the language of the grammar as simple and understandable so that the resource can more easily be translated into the Gateway Languages of the world. This should also have the effect of rendering the grammar accessible to people of varied educational backgrounds and varied proficiency in the English language.

The work was completed using an online content creation and translation platform, the Door43 Content Service. Because of this, all the work is under revision control, you can go back and see the commit history if you’d like (it totals over 2700 commits at the time of writing).

Future¶

We plan to extend the UAG, in conjunction with the unfoldingWord® Hebrew Bible, to cover higher level syntactic and semantic information. Rather than replacing the existing form-centric morphology of the OSHB, we would add another parsing layer on top of it that focuses on the function of the words and phrases. This will generate a new list of categories that will need explanations in the UAG. Some examples of new categories are discourse markers, specific uses of imperfect forms, context sensitive gender identification and the like.

A further extension may be to take the raw material from this work and augment and format it to be useful as a teaching grammar. Again, the idea here would be to provide a resource that could easily be translated and adapted into other Gateway Languages.

If either of these ideas intrigue you, let us know at https://www.unfoldingword.org/contact/, we’d love to have your involvement!

Downloads¶

The latest version of the UAG may be downloaded in the following formats:

PDF is not currently offered due to complications with mixing RTL and LTR text.

Contributors¶

This resource was designed by unfoldingWord and built by the Door43 World Missions Community. At least the following people were instrumental in the creation of the UHG:

Joel D. Ruark (M.A.Th. Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; Th.M., Ph.D. Old Testament, Stellenbosch University)
Perry Oakes (BA Biblical Studies, Taylor University; MA Theology, Fuller Seminary; MA Linguistics, University of Texas at Arlington; PhD Old Testament, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary)
Jesse Griffin (BA Biblical Studies, Liberty University; MA Biblical Languages, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary)
Aaron M. Valdizan (M.Div., Th.M., Ph.D. Candidate Old Testament, The Master’s Seminary)
Johan de Joode

License¶

unfoldingWord® Aramaic Grammar

This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

unfoldingWord® is a registered trademark of unfoldingWord. Use of the unfoldingWord name or logo requires the written permission of unfoldingWord. Under the terms of the CC BY-SA license, you may copy and redistribute this unmodified work as long as you keep the unfoldingWord® trademark intact. If you modify a copy or translate this work, thereby creating a derivative work, you must remove the unfoldingWord® trademark.

On the derivative work, you must indicate what changes you have made and attribute the work as follows: “The original work by unfoldingWord is available from unfoldingword.org/uhg)”. You must also make your derivative work available under the same license (CC BY-SA).

If you would like to notify unfoldingWord regarding your translation of this work, please contact us at unfoldingword.org/contact/.