Limba prusaca (sau prusiana) veche este o limba indo-europeana din ramura baltica, care astazi este moarta. A fost vorbita de locuitorii regiunii care ulterior s-a numit Prusia Rasaritean?, si în partile de est ale Pomeraliei, in Polesia, Voievodatul Podlasia.

Limba prusaca veche a fost indeaproape legata de celelalte limbi slavice de vest moarte, anume lb. curoniana ?i lb. jatviana (suduviana). Ceva mai indepartat este inrudita si cu limbile baltice de est, lituaniana si letona.

Numarul mare de colonisti germani, si refugiati religiosi din alte tari (Polonia, Lituania, Franta, Scotia, Anglia, Austria etc.) in timpul reformei protestante au contribuit la decaderea limbii, prusacii adoptand tot mai mult limbile noilor veniti, in special limba germana.

Multi vorbitori se pare ca au murit in foametele si in epidemiile de ciuma bubonica care au ravasit tinuturile rurale ale Prusiei Rasaritene intre 1709-1711.

Dialectul regional al limbii germane de jos vorbite in Prusia, anume limba prusaca de jos, a prezervat unele cuvinte din prusaca veche, precum kurp (de la prusaca veche kurpi) pentru pantof (contrastând cu Schuh, în limba germana).

Prusaca veche a inceput sa fie scris? cu alfabetul latin cam din sec. 13.

Limba cnaanica, adica “ceha evreiasca”, în ceha: lešon kenaan) este denumirea graiului vorbit in evul mediu de catre populatia evreiasca din Cehia, Moravia, dar probabil si din Luzacia si actuala Polonie. In limba ebraica exista mai multe denumiri ale acestui grai printre care cea mai corecta pare a fi denumirea “ceha evreiasca”. Conform Ji?inei Šedinová, specialista in cultura si literatura evreilor din Cehia, termenul leson kenaan desemneaza chiar limba ceha.

Desi în mod curent intâlnim afirmatii conform carora “leson kenaan” ar fi o limba de sine statatoare, singura sursa a cunoasterii graiului vorbit de evreii cehi in evul mediu sunt glosele care apar in texte religioase (bunaoara in Or zarua de Yitzhak ben Moshe sau Arugat ha-bosem de Avraham ben Azriel). Aceste glose sunt scrise cu alfabetul ebraic, dar limba lor nu difera de ceha medievala.

Prin urmare, nu dispunem de surse suficiente pentru a ajunge la concluzia ca in evul mediu evreii cehi aveau un grai deosebit. Situatia din Cehia difera in mod considerabil de cea din Occitania, unde existenta unei limbi evreiesti de sine statatoare este un fapt indiscutabil. Limba suadit (sau limba iudeo-provensala) prezenta deosebiri fata de dialectul provensal al populatiei crestine din regiunea respectiva; printre altele evreii din Provence pronuntau altfel unele sunete, mai ales unele consoane. Pe baza gloselor evreiesti din Cehia putem afirma ca situatia din aceasta tara semana mai degraba cu cea din Spania sau din Germania, unde graiul întrebuintat de populatia evreiasca nu se deosebea in mod frapant de limba mediului crestin. Graiul vorbit de evreii din Renania nici pe departe nu prezenta, fata de limba germana de atunci, marile diferente pe care idisul de astazi le prezinta fata de germana (acelasi lucru este valabil si in cazul limbilor spaniola ?i ladino).

In alta ordine de idei, in evul mediu cuvantul ebraic Kenaan (????) se referea nu numai la Cehia, ci la tot teritoriul locuit atunci de slavii de vest – actuala Polonie, Luzacia si regiunile situate la vest de Luzacia, pana la raul Elba. Deci zona de raspandire a unei limbi evreiesti bazate pe ceha sau pe o alta limba vest-slava medievala nu poate fi delimitata cu siguranta.

In Cehia fenomenul limbii “leson kenaan” este practic necunoscut, iar în paginile Wikipediei cehe a avut loc o discutie daca o limba evreiasca bazata pe ceha medievala a existat intr-adevar si daca merita ca Wikipedia ceha sa-i consacre un articol.

sursa: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limba_cnaanic%C4%83

Saint Patrick’s Day (Irish: Lá Fhéile Pádraig) is a religious holiday celebrated internationally on 17 March. It is commemorates Saint Patrick (c. AD 387–461), the most commonly recognised of the patron saints of Ireland, and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland.^[2] It is observed by the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion (especially the Church of Ireland),^[3] the Eastern Orthodox Church and Lutheran Church. Saint Patrick’s Day was made an official feast day in the early 17th century, and has gradually become a celebration of Irish culture in general.^[4]

The day is generally characterised by the attendance of church services,^[5][6] wearing of green attire (especially shamrocks),^[7] and the lifting of Lenten restrictions on eating and drinking alcohol,^[8][9][10] which is often proscribed during the rest of the season.^{[11][12][13][14]}

Saint Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in the Republic of Ireland,^[15] Northern Ireland,^[16] Newfoundland and Labrador and in Montserrat. It is also widely celebrated by the Irish diaspora, especially in places such as the Great Britain, Canada, the United States, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, among others.

Saint Patrick

Little is known of Patrick’s early life, though it is known that he was born in Roman Britain in the 4th century, into a wealthy Romano-British family. His father and grandfather were deacons in the Church. At the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken captive to Ireland as a slave.^[17] It is believed he was held somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, possibly Mayo, but the exact location is unknown. According to his Confession, he was told by God in a dream to flee from captivity to the coast, where he would board a ship and return to Britain. Upon returning, he quickly joined the Church in Auxerre in Gaul and studied to be a priest.^{[citation needed]}

In 432, he again said that he was called back to Ireland, though as a bishop, to Christianise the Irish from their native polytheism. Irish folklore tells that one of his teaching methods included using the shamrock to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to the Irish people. After nearly thirty years of evangelism, he died on 17 March 461, and according to tradition, was buried at Downpatrick. Although there were other more successful missions to Ireland from Rome, Patrick endured as the principal champion of Irish Christianity and is held in esteem in the Irish Church.

Wearing of the green

Originally, the colour associated with Saint Patrick was blue. Over the years the colour green and its association with Saint Patrick’s day grew.^[18] Green ribbons and shamrocks were worn in celebration of St Patrick’s Day as early as the 17th century.^[19] He is said to have used the shamrock, a three-leaved plant, to explain the Holy Trinity to the pagan Irish, and the wearing and display of shamrocks and shamrock-inspired designs have become a ubiquitous feature of the day.^[20][21] In the 1798 rebellion, in hopes of making a political statement, Irish soldiers wore full green uniforms on 17 March in hopes of catching public attention.^[18] The phrase “the wearing of the green”, meaning to wear a shamrock on one’s clothing, derives from a song of the same name.

sursa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick%27s_Day

Hittite (natively nešili “[in the language] of Neša“) is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records from the 16th (Anitta text) down to the 13th century BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC.

Already in the Late Bronze Age, Hittite was losing ground in competition with its close relative Luwian. It appears that in the 13th century BC Luwian was the most widely spoken language in the Hittite capital Hattusa ^[1] After the collapse of the Hittite Empire as a part of the more general Bronze Age collapse Luwian emerged in the Early Iron Age as the main language of the so-called Neo-Hittite states in southwestern Anatolia and northern Syria.

Hittite is the earliest attested Indo-European language, but was only rediscovered more than a century after the Proto-Indo-European hypothesis had been formulated. Because of marked differences in its structure and phonology, some linguists, most notably Edgar H. Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill, argued that it should be classified as a sister language to the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language, formulating the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. Other linguists, however, continue to accept the traditional 19th century view of the primacy of Proto-Indo-European and interpret the unusual features of Hittite as mainly due to later innovations. Still others claim Hittite, as well as its Anatolian cousins, split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage, thereby preserving archaisms that were later lost in the other Indo-European languages.

“Hittite” is a modern name, chosen after the identification of the Hatti kingdom with the Hittites mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

In multi-lingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in the Hittite language are preceded by the adverb nesili (or nasili, nisili), “in the [speech] of Neša (Kaneš)”, an important city before the rise of the Empire. In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, “in the [speech] of the people of Kaneš”.

Although the Hittite empire was composed of people from many diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the Hittite language was used in most of their secular written texts. In spite of various arguments over the appropriateness of the term, Hittite remains the most current term by convention, although some authors make a point of using Nesite.

Decipherment

The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of the Hittite language was made by Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in 1902 in a book devoted to two letters between the king of Egypt and a Hittite ruler, found at El-Amarna in Egypt. Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely on the basis of the morphology. Although he had no bilingual texts, he was able to give a partial interpretation to the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomatic correspondence of the period. His argument was not generally accepted, partly because the morphological similarities he observed between Hittite and Indo-European can be found outside of Indo-European, and partly because the interpretation of the letters was justifiably regarded as uncertain.

Knudtzon was shown definitively to have been correct when a large quantity of tablets written in the familiar Akkadian cuneiform script but in an unknown language was discovered by Hugo Winckler at the modern village of Bo?azköy, the former site of Hattusas, the capital of the Hittite Empire. Based on a study of this extensive material, Bed?ich Hrozný succeeded in analyzing the language. He presented his argument that the language is Indo-European in a paper published in 1915 (Hrozný 1915), which was soon followed by a grammar of the language (Hrozný 1917). Hrozný’s argument for the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite was thoroughly modern, though poorly substantiated. He focused on the striking similarities in idiosyncratic aspects of the morphology, unlikely to occur independently by chance and unlikely to be borrowed. These included the r/n alternation (see rhotacism) in some noun stems and vocalic ablaut, both seen in the alternation in the word for water between nominative singular, wadar and genitive singular, wedenas. He also presented a set of regular sound correspondences. After a brief initial delay due to the disruption caused by the First World War, Hrozný’s decipherment, tentative grammatical analysis, and demonstration of the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite were rapidly accepted and more broadly substantiated by contemporary scholars such as Edgar H. Sturtevant who authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy and a glossary. The most up-to-date grammar of the Hittite language is currently Hoffner and Melchert 2008.

sursa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language

Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus. All others, including Burgundian and Vandalic, are known, if at all, only from proper names that survived in historical accounts, and from loan-words in other languages such as Spanish and French.

As a Germanic language, Gothic is a part of the Indo-European language family. It is the earliest attested Germanic language but lacks any modern descendants. The oldest documents in Gothic date back to the 4th century. The language was in decline by the mid-6th century, due, in part, to the military defeat of the Goths at the hands of the Franks, the elimination of the Goths in Italy, and geographic isolation (in Spain the Gothic language lost its last and probably already declining function as a church language when the Visigoths converted to Catholicism in 589).^[1] The language survived as a domestic language in the Iberian peninsula (modern Spain and Portugal) as late as the 8th century, and Frankish author Walafrid Strabo wrote that it was still spoken in the lower Danube area and in isolated mountain regions in Crimea in the early 9th century (see Crimean Gothic). Gothic-seeming terms found in later (post-9th century) manuscripts may not belong to the same language.

The existence of such early attested corpora makes it a language of considerable interest in comparative linguistics.

History and evidence

There are only a few surviving documents in Gothic, but not enough to completely reconstruct the language. This is especially true considering that most Gothic corpora are translations or glosses of other languages (namely, Greek), so that foreign linguistic elements most certainly influenced the texts.

• The largest body of surviving documentation consists of codices written and commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas (also known as Wulfila, 311-382), who was the leader of a community of Visigothic Christians in the Roman province of Moesia (modern Bulgaria/Romania). He commissioned a translation of the Greek Bible into the Gothic language, of which roughly three-quarters of the New Testament and some fragments of the Old Testament have survived.

• Codex Argenteus (Uppsala) (and the Speyer fragment): 188 leaves.

The best preserved Gothic manuscript, the Codex Argenteus, dates from the 6th century and was preserved and transmitted by northern Ostrogoths in modern Italy. It contains a large part of the four Gospels. Since it is a translation from Greek, the language of the Codex Argenteus is replete with borrowed Greek words and Greek usages. The syntax in particular is often copied directly from the Greek.

• Codex Ambrosianus (Milan) (and the Codex Taurinensis): Five parts, totaling 193 leaves.

The Codex Ambrosianus contains scattered passages from the New Testament (including parts of the Gospels and the Epistles), of the Old Testament (Nehemiah), and some commentaries known as Skeireins. It is therefore likely that the text had been somewhat modified by copyists.

• Codex Gissensis (Gießen): 1 leaf, fragments of Luke 23-24. It was found in Egypt in 1907, but destroyed by water damage in 1945.
• Codex Carolinus: (Wolfenbüttel): 4 leaves, fragments of Romans 11-15.
• Codex Vaticanus Latinus 5750: 3 leaves, pages 57/58, 59/60 and 61/62 of the Skeireins.

• A scattering of old documents: alphabets, calendars, glosses found in a number of manuscripts and a few runic inscriptions (between 3 and 13) that are known to be or suspected to be Gothic. Some scholars believe that these inscriptions are not at all Gothic (see Braune/Ebbinghaus “Gotische Grammatik” Tübingen 1981)
• A small dictionary of more than eighty words, and a song without translation, compiled by the Fleming Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg ambassador to the court of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul from 1555 to 1562, who was curious to find out about the language and by arrangement met two speakers of Crimean Gothic and listed the terms in his compilation Turkish Letters. These terms are from nearly a millennium later and are therefore not representative of the language of Ulfilas. See Crimean Gothic.

There have been unsubstantiated reports of the discovery of other parts of Ulfilas’ bible. Heinrich May in 1968 claimed to have found in England 12 leaves of a palimpsest containing parts of the Gospel of Matthew. The claim was never substantiated.

Only fragments of the Gothic translation of the Bible have been preserved. The translation was apparently done in the Balkans region by people in close contact with Greek Christian culture. It appears that the Gothic Bible was used by the Visigoths in Iberia until circa 700 AD, and perhaps for a time in Italy, the Balkans and what is now Ukraine. In exterminating Arianism, many texts in Gothic were probably expunged and overwritten as palimpsests, or collected and burned. Apart from Biblical texts, the only substantial Gothic document which still exists, and the only lengthy text known to have been composed originally in the Gothic language, is the “Skeireins“, a few pages of commentary on the Gospel of John.

There are very few references to the Gothic language in secondary sources after about 800. In De incrementis ecclesiae Christianae (840/2), Walafrid Strabo, who lived in Swabia, speaks of a group of monks, who reported that “even now certain peoples in Scythia (Dobrudja), especially around Tomis” spoke a sermo Theotiscus (Germanic language), which was the language of the Gothic translation of the Bible, and used such a liturgy.^[2] He also refers to the use of Ulfilas’ bible in a region probably around Lake Constance^{[citation needed]}. In the former case, the language spoken by the monks was probably an incipient Crimean Gothic.

In evaluating medieval texts that mention the Goths, it must be noted that many writers used the word Goths to mean any Germanic people in eastern Europe (such as the Varangians), many of whom certainly did not use the Gothic language as known from the Gothic Bible. Some writers even referred to some Slavic-speaking people,like Croats, as Goths.

The relationship between the language of the Crimean Goths and Ulfilas’ Gothic is less clear. The few fragments of their language from the 16th century show significant differences from the language of the Gothic Bible, although some of the glosses, such as ada for “egg”, imply a common heritage, and Gothic mena (“moon”), compared to Crimean Gothic mine, clearly indicates that Crimean Gothic was East Germanic.

Generally, the Gothic language refers to the language of Ulfilas, but the attestations themselves are largely from the 6th century – long after Ulfilas had died. The above list is not exhaustive, and a more extensive list is available on the website of the Wulfila Project.

sursa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_language

Limba aramaica este o limba aproape moarta, vorbita în special în Antichitate. Câteva capitole din cartile lui Ezra (4:8 – 6:18; 7:12-26) si Daniel (2:4 – 7:28), un verset din cartea lui Ieremia (10:11) si un cuvânt din Geneza (31:47) sunt scrise în aramaica si nu în vechea ebraica, ca de altfel si Gamara, o parte din Talmud. Aramaica se înrude?te cu ebraica a?a cum spaniola se aseaman? cu portugheza. Diferen?ele dintre aramaic? si ebraica sunt mai mari decât acelea dintre dialecte; de aceea cele doua sunt privite ca doua limbi distincte.

Raspândirea aramaicii

Locul de bastina al aramaicii a fost Mesopotamia. Triburile de aramei, caldeii, au locuit fie la sud de Babilon, în jurul orasului Ur, fie in Mesopotamia Superioara între râul Chebar (Khabur) si marea cotitura a Eufratului care are zona Haran în centru. Probabil datorita faptului ca Avram, Isac si Iacov au avut legaturi cu Haranul, Moise spune ca Iacov a fost “arameu” (Deuteronom 26:5). De acolo din nordul Mesopotamiei aramaica s-a raspândit catre sud, pe teritoriul întregii Siria de azi. Când cetatile siriene, a caror populatie vorbea aramaica, au fost distruse de asirieni în secolul VIII i.Hr., populatia lor a fost mutata în diferite parti ale imperiului asirian. Acest fapt a determinat raspândirea rapida a aramaicii, care era tot atât de usor de învatat ca si cele mai multe dintre celelalte limbi ale vechiului orient apropiat. În final, aramaica a devenit lingua franca, o limba internationala a unei lumi civilizate, si limba oficiala mai întâi pentru imperiul neo-babilonian si apoi si pentru Imperiul Persan.La momentul actual,limba aramaica mai este vorbita în viata de zi cu zi în mici comunitati din Orientul Mijlociu (în Siria-satul Ma’aloulah,precum si în Liban,Iraq sau Cipru-crestinii maroniti);de asemenea are o mai larga raspandire ca limba liturgic?aîn aceleasi zone.

Sectiunile aramaice ale Bibliei

Motivul pentru care unele parti ale Bibliei au fost scrise în aramaica a fost faptul ca aramaica a devenit o limba internationala în timpul imperiului babilonian si persan. Oficialii care au trait printre babilonienii vorbitori de aramaica, precum Daniel, sau si cei care lucrau pentru persi, precum Ezra, au folosit aramaica în vorbire si scriere la fel ca si limba lor materna, ebraica. Cartea lui Daniel reflecta foarte clar abilitatile lingvistice ale autorului ei. Descrierea experientei pe care Daniel a avut-o in legatura cu visul lui Nabucadnetar a fost scrisa în prima parte in ebraica, însa când ajunge la momentul în care prezinta discursul înteleptilor care vorbeau “aramaica” în fata împaratului (Daniel 2:4), el schimba – probabil fara sa-si dea seama – limbajul cu cel al acestor oameni si continua sa scrie astfel câteva capitole pâna se întoarce din nou la limba ebraica. A fost un timp când aceste portiuni aramaice ale cartilor lui Daniel si Ezra au fost considerate o dovada a scrierii târzii a acestor carti. Însa deoarece numeroase documente aramaice din timpul lui Daniel si al lui Ezra au fost descoperite în aproape toate locurile vechiului orient apropiat, s-a putut demonstra ca nu era ceva nepotrivit pentru acesti oameni sa introduca în cartile lor documente aramaice, asa cum a facut-o Ezra, sau sa relateze evenimente istorice în aramaica, aaa cum au facut-o atât Daniel cât si Ezra. Aramaica a fost si limba folosita de Hristos. Ca urmare a captivitatii babiloniene, în ultimele secole ale epocii pre-crestine, iudeii au adoptat aramaica în locul limbii ebraice.

sursa: http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limba_aramaic%C4%83

The Punic language or Carthagian language is an extinct Semitic language formerly spoken in the Mediterranean region of North Africa and several Mediterranean islands, by people of the Punic culture.

Punic is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language spoken in the oversea Phoenician empire in North Africa, including Carthage, and the Mediterranean. It is known from inscriptions and personal name evidence. The play Poenulus by Plautus contains a few lines in spoken Punic, which have been subject to some research because, unlike inscriptions, they largely preserve the vowels.

Augustine of Hippo is generally considered the last major ancient writer to have some knowledge of Punic, and is considered “our primary source on the survival of [late] Punic”. According to him, the Punic language was still spoken in his region (Northern Africa) in the 5th century AD, centuries after the fall of Carthage, and there were still people who called themselves “chanani” (Canaanite, i.e: Carthaginian) at that time. Writing around AD 401, he says:

Quae lingua si improbatur abs te, nega Punicis libris, ut a viris doctissimis proditur, multa sapienter esse mandata memoriae. Poeniteat te certe ibi natum, ubi huius linguae cunabula recalent.

And if the Punic language is rejected by you, you virtually deny what has been admitted by most learned men, that many things have been wisely preserved from oblivion in books written in the Punic tongue. Nay, you ought even to be ashamed of having been born in the country in which the cradle of this language is still warm. (Ep. xvii)

The idea that Punic exerted an influence on the modern Maltese language was first raised in 1565. This theory has been mostly discredited; mainstream theories hold Maltese to be derived from Siculo-Arabic, with a large number of loanwords from Italian. Punic was indeed spoken on the island of Malta at some point in its history, as evidenced by the Cippi of Melqart, integral to the decipherment of Punic after its extinction, and other inscriptions found on the islands.

sursa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_language