Aramaic

Aramaic is a language or group of languages belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, which also includes the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. The Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. During its approximately 3,100 years of written history, Aramaic has served variously as a language of administration of empires, as a language of divine worship and religious study, and as the spoken tongue of a number of Semitic peoples from the Near East. (Source: Wikipedia)

Transliterate Square Script To Imperial Aramaic

Unicode recently included a separate code block for encoding characters in Imperial Aramaic. Traditionally documents written in Imperial Aramaic are taught and shared using square script. Here is a small function for converting a string written in square script to its Imperial Aramaic version.

Usage:

Import the function:

In [1]: from cltk.corpus.aramaic.transliterate import square_to_imperial

Take a string written in square script:

In [2]: mystring = "פדי בר דג[נ]מלך לאחא בר חפיו נתנת לך"

Convert it to Imperial Aramaic by passing it to our function

In [3]: square_to_imperial(mystring)
Out[3]: "𐡐𐡃𐡉 𐡁𐡓 𐡃𐡂[𐡍]𐡌𐡋𐡊 𐡋𐡀𐡇𐡀 𐡁𐡓 𐡇𐡐𐡉𐡅 𐡍𐡕𐡍𐡕 𐡋𐡊"