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Recent studies in Neo-Aramaic dialects1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
Extract
Since the beginnings of Neo-Aramaic studies in the second half of the last century, with the work of pioneers such as Stoddard (1855), Sachau (1865) and Noldeke (1868) in East-Neo-Syriac, Prym and Socin (1883) in West-Neo-Syriac (Tur ‘Abdln) and Parisot (1898–9) in West-Aramaic of Ma'lūla and related dialects, research in the field of Neo-Aramaic dialectology has never known such an intensive upsurge as there has been in the second half of this century. Although harsh religious persecution by the Muslims and other unendurable hardships, particularly in this century, exterminated a large proportion of the speakers of these dialects or drove them from their original sites to Russia, America, various European countries and even Australia, where their idioms are likely to die within the next few generations, the interest in their more or less modest remnants is increasing. It is as if Aramaists had finally responded to an earnest last-moment appeal and understood the need to save this linguistic heritage before it disappears totally. However, it is symptomatic that researchers trying to record a dying dialect in situ (Krotkoff, Aradhin in Iraqi Kurdistan 1959, published 1982; Jastrow, Hertevin in East Turkey 1970, published 1988) were unable to find more than a single reliable informant on the dialects of the villages of their respective research
- Type
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- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 214 - 223
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- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1990
References
2 See my bibliography in Macuch, R. and Panoussi, E., Neusyrische Chrestomathie (1974), xxv ffGoogle Scholar.
3 Macuch, R., Gesprochenes Aramúisch und aramdische Schriftsprachen, in F., Altheim and Stiehl, R. (ed.), Christentum am Roten Meer (1971), 537–557Google Scholar.
4 Yonan, Gabriele, ‘Tendenzen zur Wiederbelebung des klassischen Syrisch als Umgangssprache der Assyrer’, in Egartho (Der Brief), Zeitschrift des Zentralverbandes der Assyrischen Vereinigung in Deutschland, 3, 1980Google Scholar.
5 Mar Toma Audo, in the pref003 of his Grāmāṭīqī d-lišāna swādāya ‘Grammar of the vernacular language’ (Urmi, 1905) already criticized the exaggerated misuse of this verb following Persian and Turkish patterns in the dialect of UrmiGoogle Scholar; shortened German translation in Macuch, R., Geschichte der spāt-und neusyrischen Literatur (1976), 87Google Scholar.
6 According to the title of a book of Malek, Yusuf; cf. also Rondot, P., Les Chrétiens d'orient, 152 if.;Google ScholarMacuch, R., Geschichte der spôt- und neusyrischen Literatur, 230 ffGoogle Scholar., and the recent richly documented book of Yonan, G., Ein vergessener Holocaust. Die Vernichtung der christlichen Assyrer in der Türkei (Göttingen und Wien, Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, 1989)Google Scholar; see also her earlier book, Assyrer Heute (1978) with a detailed bibliography on the subject.
7 Ceretali, Konstantin, Materialy po aramejskoj dialektologii, Tom I. Urmijskij dialekt (Tbilisi, 1965)Google Scholar.
8 Jastrow, O., book under review, pp. xvii f. Only on the dialect of Txuma, is there published work, a monograph, by Jacobi, Heidi, Grammatik des thwnischen Neuôramdisch (Nordostsyrien) (Wiesbaden, 1973)Google Scholar. Texts in this dialect were recorded in the seventies in Hassake (Syria) by Gabriele Yonan; it is to be hoped they will be publishedGoogle Scholar.
9 Macuch, R., Geschichte, 275Google Scholar.
10 cf. an interesting observation by Sabar, Yona (Neo-Aramaic Newsletter, 3, 1987, 20)Google Scholar: ‘All of the Jewish families [of both the Christian and the Moslem sections of the village of ‘Aradin] were in close contact with the Jews of ‘Amadiya...Interestingly, the Neo-Aramaic dialect of the one Jewish family from the Christian ‘Aradin... is quite different from that of the Jews of the Moslem’ Aradin, and from that of the Christians as described in Krotkoff s book.’ Similarly, Simon Hopkins (ibid., 9 f.): ‘In most (all?) cases where Jews and Christians lived together in the same town/village and both spoke Neo-Aramaic, their dialects differed to a greater or lesser degree. In the west, e.g. in Zaxo, these differences seem to have been fairly small... Confessional differences of a more significant nature occurred a little further east in Arādhin, where the few Jews of the village spoke a dialect by no means identical with the Christian speech described by G. Krotkoff (personal communication from Y. Sabar). When we reach Iran the cleavage becomes so deep that mutual intelligibility is seriously impaired.’ Hopkins even proposed considering a reclassification of Neo- Syriac dialects according to the use of the preterite zīl ‘he went’ of southern dialects as opposed to zille of the northern dialects of Iranian Azerbaijan. Curiously enough, in Sanandaj the Jews speak a zīl- and the Christians a zille-dialect. The proposal is worth consideration, since this use ‘is accompanied by a whole array of additional phenomena distinguishing the two groups of speakers.’
11 Bibliotheca Orientalis, xxxiv, 1977, col. 100Google Scholar.
12 In the table of the consonantal system (p. 3) there are some minor inconsistencies, although according to the point of articulation all consonants are properly classified. The voiced occlusives b, d, g are indicated unsatisfactorily as ‘affricates’, although in 1.2.5 (p. 8) only č and ǧ are correctly treated as ‘affricates’. In the series of fricatives, z and ž (as well as of two laryngeals in brackets) the indication ‘voiced’ has been omitted, although no specific new technical term was invented for them. Similarly, the emphatics, ṭ and ṣ, are included without indication of their specific phonetic character.
13 This strange phonetic phenomenon owed to foreign influence was already known to Nöldeke (ZDMG, 36, 1882, 670). But as it is merely combinatory, earlier dialectologists already neglected to indicate it, and naturally it could not be indicated in dictionaries in Syriac script (Maclean, etc.,), see my remark in OLZ, 57, 1962, col. 119, n. 1.
14 Brockelmann, Lexicon Syriacum, 575aGoogle Scholar.
15 See Macuch, R. and Panoussi, E., Neusyrische Chrestomathie, p. xxv (nos. 4 and 13)Google Scholar.
16 See Macuch, R., Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic (HCMM), 12 (š serving for č, ğ and ž)Google Scholar.
17 Macuch, R., HCMM, p. 20 with n. 29Google Scholar.
18 cf. phonetic transcription in Macuch and Panoussi, op. cit., pp. xx b f.
19 The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Persian Azerbaijan, op. cit., 2.12.21, pp. 54 f.
20 These may now be comfortably compared with my grammatical sketch and glossary in Macuch, R., Neumandāische Chrestomathie mit Einführung, grammatischer Skizze, kommentierler Übersetzung und Glossar (Porta Linguarum Orientalium, xvm, 1989)Google Scholar.
21 In this connexion, it is still more surprising that the Mandaeans use the Kurdish particle of totality gi/eš- ‘all, whole, complete’ (Macuch, Neumandüische Chrestomathie, glossary, 210) unknown in northern Neo-Aramaic dialects, cf. Macuch, Zur Geschichte und Literatur der Mandôer (1976), 108 ff.
22 It is worth mentioning that the editor dedicated the first volume of the series, The Hebrew language tradition of the Baghdadi community (1977), to the memory of an outstanding linguist and dialectologist, Irene Garbell (1901-66), who shortly before her death crowned her research with a standard work, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Persian Azerbaijan, cited aboveGoogle Scholar.
23 The following forms are simple transliterations of the vocalized words in Hebrew script without aiming at exact and detailed phonetic transcription.
24 See e.g. Pennacchietti's, F. A. glossary in Testi Neo-Aramaici dell'lran settenlrionale raccolti da Enrico Cerulli con glossario di Fabrizio A. Pennacchietli (Napoli, 1971)Google Scholar; in spite of his use of the Latin alphabet with its sequence of letters Pennacchietti did not exclude verbal roots from the general glossary but included them in bold type in square brackets at the head of each verbal entry