Sung in Aramaic

[TheLightWithin]

Our Father Sung in Aramaic - the Language spoken by Jesus Christ

This sounds lovely.

Was it ever common in Christendom - or lets say in Western Christendom - to have regular parishioners learn to sing or pray in Aramaic?
I suppose it may be or always have been the norm in Middle Eastern Christianity.
I don't know if anybody here knows about whether it was ever common in Western churches.

 

[Thomas]

Was it ever common? I very much doubt it.

Koine Greek would have been the lingua franca in the Eastern Mediterranean, while Latin in the West, Aramaic would have been regarded as a local dialect rather than a liturgical language, I would have thought. It survived in Syria, from whhere it emerged, but was displaced by Arabic in the wake of the spread of Islam.

The same goes for Coptic, a development of Egyptian dialect, which derived from Demotic Egyptian, from 7th century BCE to 5th CE.

 

[TheLightWithin]

he same goes for Coptic, a development of Egyptian dialect, which derived from Demotic Egyptian, from 7th century BCE to 5th CE.

I attended a Coptic Orthodox service once. I remember they had screens with the words for prayers up, in English, Arabic, and Coptic.
Or at least, Greek letters that I surmised were Coptic.

 

[Adrian Mole]

I suppose it may be or always have been the norm in Middle Eastern Christianity.

For sure - most of 'Eastern Christendom' (Syria, E. Turkey, Arabia, and even India) would most likely have used translations of the NT into Syriac (which, when spoken, is a dialect of Aramaic, though the written script is more like 'proto'-Arabic). The oldest extant MSS of the NT Peshitta date from the 5th Century but some argue that versions of some Epistles/Gospels existed as early as the late 1st Century. (The OT Peshitta seems to have first appeared in the 2nd Century.)

But I would have to agree with Thomas on the uses of Aramaic in the West. I think St Paul and others would have found few in Asia Minor, Greece, or Rome who could understand Aramaic, so Greek quickly became the norm, followed by Latin (by the 5th Century, the Vulgate was the standard text, IIRC).