Wednesday, January 21, 2009

ARAMAIC WATCH: The manuscript digitization project in Kerala, India, gets some slightly garbled coverage in ExpressBuzz. Excerpt:
[Dr Mar] Aprem, who is the author of the book ‘Teach yourself Aramaic’, said that after the release of Mel Gibson’s film ‘The Passion of Christ’ in 2004 with most of its dialogue in Aramaic, people in different part of the world are showing interest in knowing and learning the language.

The Metropolitan said that a body called Association for the Preservation of St Thomas Christian Heritage with close association of the Oriental Institute of the University of Tobingen, Germany
, the Syriac Institute USA, Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, USA, Central European University, Hungary and the Kerala Centre for Historical Research has been constituted for the purpose.

He is the honorary president of the association.

He said that initial efforts of the association would be to preserve through digitalisation of printed books, manuscripts both in paper and palm leaves, and other locally available documents in Syrian [That should be "Syriac" - JRD].

He said that he himself has a collection of about 250 manuscripts and printed books in Syrian language.
Background here.