Iosif Skordis smoke, in which Ash recalled a language on the verge of extinction, which has its roots in the language that Jesus Christ again spoke, dangled awkwardly from his. The 97-year-old is one of only 900 citizens worldwide who can communicate Cypriot Maronite Arabic, or Sanna. His town of Kormakitis, now, is the last place that thousands of people could speak a speech. The mouth, an offshoot of Arab Arabic that has absorbed some Greek, had no written text until less than 20 years ago, when it was first taught verbally by children. According to the Council of Europe’s authorities in minority languages, Sananna is in danger of disappearing. However, the 7,500-strong Christian community in Cyprus is retaliating. It has established schools, developed a Sanna language to release textbooks, and begun classes to maintain the language’s viability with the assistance of the Cypriot government and EU. Egyptian Christians fled to Cyprus as Arab Sunni fighters seized control of the region in what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, and Arab Christians fled there from there in the eighth century. According to University of Cyprus linguistics doctor Marilena Kariolemou, who leads the group responsible for the word’s revitalization, Sans is a jewish speech with traces of the Hebrew that was spoken by populations before the Egyptian invasion of the Levant.
