Course Spotlight: MELANG 101/501 "Elementary Classical Hebrew I" and MELANG 425 "Aramaic I"

Welcome to the Department of Middle East Studies! Can you please introduce yourself and your academic background?

My name is Chris Mezger and I am about to finish my PhD from Yale University, where I have specialized in the history of languages, especially language contact, in the Middle East during the first millennium CE. My dissertation focuses on the shift from Aramaic to Arabic as the dominant spoken language of the Middle East in the wake of the Islamic conquests, ca 600-1000 CE, but one reason I love studying the historical Middle East is because it was so linguistically diverse and there are so many examples of language communities living in close proximity to one another.

This fall, you’ll be teaching MELANG 101/501 “Elementary Classical Hebrew I” and MELANG 425 “Aramaic I”. Can you tell us more about these courses?

These are both introductory language courses designed primarily to equip students with the tools to read historical texts, including manuscripts, in their original languages. For Hebrew, the target is the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, a corpus that has, of course, been translated a million times but still rewards close study in the original. For Aramaic, the target of this course is the enormous and understudied corpus of Syriac Aramaic, the language of a major branch of eastern Christianity; however, learning Syriac creates a platform from which to go on and study any of the many other Aramaic dialects, from Biblical Aramaic to Jewish Babylonian Aramaic to modern Neo-Aramaic dialects, to name only a few.

Can you explain how your research interests relate to these courses?

Historical texts from the Middle East tend to belong to a religious group, probably because religions create the only institutions durable enough to preserve texts across many centuries. Therefore, while my research focuses on language communities and language contact, the sources I use are mostly filtered through the lenses of religious groups: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, and others. The Hebrew Bible and Syriac Christian literature are both excellent examples of corpora that can shed light on language history, but only if we account for the fact that they were composed as religious literature.

What materials or literature are you most excited to engage in with your students?

For Hebrew, I am excited for my students to discover and ponder how the original Hebrew versions of Biblical stories are often quite different from the translated and adapted versions they might already be familiar with. For Aramaic, I am excited to introduce students to Syriac Christianity, an ancient yet vibrant branch of Christianity that is hardly known about in this part of the world but is also indispensable for studying the history of the Middle East.

For any students who are interested in taking your courses but may be hesitant to explore a new subject, why do you think they should enroll? What will they gain from these courses?

There is no way to gain a better understanding of one’s own culture or language than to engage with other ones, especially from a very distant time or place (or both!) Studying ancient Middle Eastern languages like Hebrew and Syriac has the double advantage of engaging with a foreign culture, but students may find familiar aspects too. This might be reading a famous Biblical story in the original, or it might be learning about the conquests of the Roman Empire from the point of view of the conquered. The combination of new and familiar makes for a fruitful learning experience, and both courses easily lead into further study in many different directions.

Is there anything else students should know about these courses or your teaching style?

I treat ancient languages like living languages to learn, not codes to decipher. We won’t learn how to hold a conversation in Hebrew or Syriac, but we will learn about the sounds of the languages and how to pronounce them out loud. In my experience, this makes ancient languages come alive, so they’re more fun to learn, easier to remember, and more meaningful to engage with.