In a race against time, a team of elite scholars work together to record the final remnants of a rich linguistic history

Geoffrey Khan had almost given up. A linguist at the University of Cambridge, he was in Tbilisi, Georgia, to find the last speakers of a rare dialect of Aramaic. The first of his three leads, an old man in his 80s or 90s, had a stroke the previous month, and could no longer talk. The second, an elderly woman of nervous disposition, lived by herself with four howling rottweilers who made conversation impossible. The next day he visited the third address, a tall Soviet-style apartment block with dark corridors. A tiny old woman answered the door, and as she served him tea at the kitchen table, her hand started shaking.

“She was exhausted just pouring. I didn’t know if she would survive the interview,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Can I ask you a few questions about your language? You’re one of the final speakers.’ This little frail arm came over the table and grabbed my wrist and she said, ‘Ask me, ask me anything you like.’ I asked her a few questions and said, ‘I don’t want to exhaust you, have you had enough?’ She said no and gripped me tighter, telling me to ask everything I needed to know. More.

See: Times of Israel

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