Recent content by Carlo

This sort of mentality didn't start with ISIS (recall how the National Museum was looted back in 2003 after Baghdad was liberated). Many Iraqis simply don't care.

I think reviving Classical Syriac as a common spoken/literary dialect is a much better option. :)

Five years old is not too young to be speaking it (especially if he's replying in English). It's okay if he speaks to his cousins in English (as children always learn to speak like their peers, not their parents), but you should only ever speak to him in Assyrian and vice versa. Try encouraging...

What's the difference between khzelee [m/f] and khizyin [m]/khzeethan [f] (or kthiwlee [m/f] vs. ktheewin [m]/kthiwtan [f], etc.)? Are there any meaning/usage differences between the two? Feedback from different dialects would be appreciated. :)

I just finished watching the movie "The Sentinel" that came out a few years ago. At about 8 minutes and 15 seconds into it, the screen starts to go into one of those rapid seizure-inducing clips with random scribbles in a whole bunch of different languages about assassinating presidents and...

How do you guys say "sit" and "write" (as commands) and the name "Jacob?" Are they too/ktoo and Ya`qo or toov/ktoov and Ya`qov or something else entirely?

Instructions on typing: http://www.muhammadanism.org/Unicode/WindowsXP.htm (for Windows XP users. It should be the same or similar for Windows Vista/7, as of this posting I do not think you can type Assyrian on a Mac.) Overview of all the Syriac Unicode entities (all possible characters)...

Below is a list of free online grammars and dictionaries for both the classical and modern dialect(s) in a wide variety of formats. If you have a link to one that is currently not listed below (or an alternate link to one already listed below, as links often suddenly stop working), please feel...

I thought this thread might be useful to some people, so here it is. We use the word "eeth" (ܐܝܬ) to mean "there is/are," e.g. eeth bayta (ܐܝܬ ܒܝܬܐ), "there is a house" eeth bate (ܐܝܬ ܒ̈ܬܐ), "there are houses" You can negate that by using the word "leeth" or "layt" (ܠܝܬ), which is...

Assyrian marks possession through suffixes instead of adjectives/determiners ("my," "your," "his", "our", etc.). The endings are a little different in the modern and classical languages. There are essentially two sets of endings (for the two possible vowels a noun can end in: -A and -e) in the...

Gender is basically used in referring to individual words (e.g. "he" vs. "she"). There are essentially four types: masculine = "he" feminine = "she" neuter = "it" common = "he/she" English has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, and grammatical gender goes with biological...

Like English, there are some Assyrian words that have silent letters in them. Also like English, the only way to know them is usually just by seeing/memorizing them. The good thing is that Assyrian has much less of these words than English, so most words are spelled phonetically (the way they're...

Assyrian, like Arabic and Hebrew, derives most of its words from "roots." The roots usually consist of three letters (sometimes four) from the alphabet and have a basic meaning. Since the alphabet is composed entirely of consonants, you're looking at a three-consonant root. Vowels aren't letters...

Learning the alphabet isn't hard. There are five year olds that learn an alphabet all the time. Are you smarter than a five year old? Of course you are. It's not like memorizing Chinese characters where each word has its own symbol. It's a 22-letter alphabet (that's four less than the alphabet...