Darbo vs Aramaic Alphabet

It’s about time that we start using the modern tools in today’s society to preserve and develop the Assyrian/Aramaic language, a language that for many years was forbidden to be taught in our native countries in the Middle East. This has led to stagnation on the development of this historical language. And unfortunately we see fever people speaking and writing Assyrian/Aramaic as time goes. So there is a great need to find methods that in different ways can preserve and develop the language. The idea for the Darbo app came to us a couple of years ago when we saw our children/grandchildren play with various games on tablets and smartphones, such as Memory. The games taught the player pronunciation, spelling of the word and visualized it with a picture. From that day we set it as a goal to develop an app on our native tongue that is simple, raises interest in the language and gives a good vocabulary. We have ideas on how we can develop the current version of the app with more functions, but that requires support. Feel free to give us feedback and suggestion on how we can drive this further. If you would like to contribute/sponsor a future expansion of this application or similar please contact us.

This app can help you get to know the imperial Aramaic alphabet. Scroll through the letters and study their shapes and sounds. Practice tracing each one until you're familiar-- then quiz yourself on the letters! This writing system was adapted by the Arameans from Phonoecian in the 8th Century BC. Note it is written right-to-left, like most other Semitic writing systems. That is why the first letter is listed on the top right and they go right to left, up to down from Alaph to Taw. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertile Crescent. It was also adopted by other peoples as their own alphabet when empires and their subjects underwent linguistic Aramaization during a language shift for governing purposes—a precursor to Arabization centuries later—including among Assyrians who permanently replaced their Akkadian language and its cuneiform script with Aramaic and its script, and among Jews (but not Samaritans), who adopted the Aramaic language as their vernacular and started using the Aramaic alphabet even for writing Hebrew, displacing the former Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. (The modern Hebrew alphabet derives from the Aramaic alphabet, in contrast to the modern Samaritan alphabet, which derives from Paleo-Hebrew). The letters in the Aramaic alphabet all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. The Aramaic alphabet is historically significant since virtually all modern Middle Eastern writing systems can be traced back to it. That is primarily due to the widespread usage of the Aramaic language after it was adopted as both a lingua franca and the official language of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, and their successor, the Achaemenid Empire. We provide transliteration equivalents for each letter in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac scripts (all of which can be used in the quiz).