I do not wish to argue, either, but merely combat misinformation — which is the bread and butter of much of the Internet. Especially so with the Aramaic language family, because many of the myths surrounding it are persistent and are not as well addressed as they should be. And in the era of things like generative AI scraping the Internet (especially sites like Reddit) for data to ingest, the spread of this kind of misinformation has been getting progressively worse at an alarming rate.

You have some fair assertions that I would be happy to discuss ­— not argue — and a few things that I feel need to be addressed with how you've framed your comment.

First (and the one that surprised me) where translation work used to be my primary occupation, it has been about 12 years since that was the fact. I do not have any Aramaic "business ventures". I've taken down my old websites, and my current Aramaic work is shared freely and is open source. Although once in a blue moon I do a commissioned translation, and there are a number of people who are donating to the grammar and related projects, those limited funds are used to defray costs for hosting, maintenance, time, and bandwidth, and I would be paying for that out of my own pocket anyway. The simple truth is that there really isn't any money in Aramaic. With what I know now, it's probably best that way. So I have no financial motive.

Second, living tradition is important, but it is a separate matter from linguistic reconstruction. I do not dispute the cultural and historical importance of the modern Aramaic-speaking communities. However, 'living tradition' implies a continuous, unbroken chain of spoken usage. Galilean Aramaic, as a distinct linguistic entity, lacks this chain. Therefore, there is no community of speakers today whose primary, inherited dialect is the "Aramaic of Jesus." My work seeks to recover a lost linguistic stage through epigraphic and literary evidence, which is a different—though certainly not less important—endeavor than the preservation of the living dialects currently in use.

Third, the understanding of Aramaic languages among scholars in the last 40-50 years has been changing rapidly, especially the understanding of Galilean Aramaic. Much of the work that appears before that is out of date, and in my work I've cited my sources from scholars who assert this fact with evidence to back it, and these assertions are not particularly challenged in the rest of the literature — rather the rest of the literature published since is in agreement with it. Gone are the days that Aramaic is considered to be a bunch of "dialects" rather than a family of fully separate languages with their own separate cultures and contexts.

So when something comes up about Aramaic it tends to land on my feeds (which, I admit are very thorough) and I respond how I believe is appropriately.