Neo-Aramaic Dialect Studies: : Proceedings of a Workshop on Neo-Aramaic held in Cambridge 2005

212 Pages·2016·1 MB·English

N -A D S
eo rAmAic iAlect tuDieS
Neo-ArAmAic StuDieS
1
SerieS eDitor
Geoffrey Khan
Neo-Aramaic Dialect Studies
e
DiteD by
G K
eoffrey hAN

GorGiAS PreSS
2008
First Gorgias Press Edition, 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Gorgias Press LLC
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the
prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC.
Published in the United States of America by Gorgias Press LLC, New Jersey
ISBN 978-1-59333-423-9
ISSN 1935-4428
GorGiAS PreSS
180 Centennial Ave., Suite A, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA
www.gorgiaspress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neo-Aramaic dialect studies / edited by Geoffrey Khan.
p. cm. -- (Neo-Aramaic studies ; 1)
Includes index.
1. Syriac language, Modern--Grammar--Congresses. 2. Syriac language, Mod-
ern--Dialects--Congresses. I. Khan, Geoffrey.
PJ5802.N46 2008
492’.3--dc22
2008009194

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standards.
Printed in the United States of America
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE...........................................................................................................v
NORTH-EASTERN NEO-ARAMAIC AND THE MIDDLEARAMAICDIALECTS
Samuel Ethan Fox..................................................................................1
THENEO-ARAMAICDIALECT OF SAT(HAKKÂRI,TURKEY)........................................
Hezy Mutzafi........................................................................................19
THE NEO-ARAMAICDIALECTS OF THE TIYARIASSYRIANS IN SYRIA:WITHSPECIAL
ATTENTION TO THEIR PHONOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS..................................
Shabo Talay.........................................................................................39
THEJEWISHNEO-ARAMAICDIALECT OF (cid:236)ALLA.......................................................
Steven E. Fassberg...............................................................................65
SOME FEATURES OF THE VERBAL SYSTEM OF THE NEO-ARAMAIC DIALECT OF
KARAMLESH................................................................................................
Roberta Borghero.................................................................................75
SOME NOTABLEFEATURES IN NORTH-EASTERNNEO-ARAMAICDIALECTS OF IRAQ.......
Eleanor Coghill....................................................................................91
REMARKS ON THE FUNCTION OF THE PRETERITE AND THE PERFECT IN NORTH-
EASTERNNEO-ARAMAIC...............................................................................
GeoffreyKhan....................................................................................105
BETWEENNOUNS AND VERBS IN NEO-ARAMAIC......................................................
Olga Kapeliuk....................................................................................131
IV TABLE OF CONTENTS
SYNTACTIC FOCUS MARKING IN JEWISHZAKHO........................................................
Eran Cohen.........................................................................................149
THEBEGADKEPHAT IN WESTERNNEO-ARAMAIC......................................................
Werner Arnold....................................................................................171
THEFIVESCROLLS INJEWISHNEO-ARAMAICDIALECTS............................................
Yona Sabar..........................................................................................177
INDEX...........................................................................................................197
PREFACE
This volume brings together a wide range of articles relating to Neo-
Aramaic. The majority are based on papers given at a workshop on Neo-
Aramaic that was held in July 2005 at the University of Cambridge with the
support of the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC).
Most articles are concerned with the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic
(NENA) dialects. This is the most extensive and diverse group of Neo-
Aramaic, which includes dialects spoken by Christian and Jewish communi-
ties originating in northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and Iran. A large
number of these NENA dialects are now highly endangered and there is a
great urgency in the task of documenting them. This is because of the great
upheavals that were suffered by the Christian and Jewish Aramaic-speaking
communities in the region during the twentieth century. Since the First
World War a large proportion of the Christian communities have been dis-
placed from their original places of residence. Virtually all the village com-
munities of south-eastern Turkey were destroyed and the survivors were
forced to flee their villages. Many of the Christian villages in northern Iraq
have been destroyed in more recent times due to political disturbances in
the region. These catastrophes have driven a large proportion of Aramaic
speaking Christians out of the Middle East and forced them to make a new
life in other countries. They have settled throughout the world, the largest
centres of settlement being in North America, Australia and Western Europe.
The Jewish communities all left the region in a mass exodus in the 1950s
and now live, for the most part, in Israel.
Many of the articles in this volume make important contributions to
the documentation of endangered dialects. These include sketches of several
hitherto undescribed dialects, which present data gathered from Christian
and Jewish Aramaic-speaking informants. Some articles are of a more ana-
lytical nature, examining especially issues of syntactic structure and func-
tion, based on oral texts recorded on fieldtrips or on literary texts. The ques-
VI PREFACE
tion of ‘contact-induced’ linguistic change is addressed by some authors,
which is a fascinating aspect of Neo-Aramaic.
The volume also includes a contribution on Western Neo-Aramaic, de-
scribing a development of historical phonology that contrasts with what is
found in NENA. The final article presents an analysis of the use of language
in NENA Bible translations, which in many cases preserve archaic linguistic
features.
The study of the Neo-Aramaic dialects is important in many respects.
These dialects are the last surviving vernacular vestiges of Aramaic, which is
a language with one of the longest attested histories, the earliest texts being
being datable to around 1,000 BCE. The modern vernaculars, however, are
not direct descendants of the earlier literary forms of the language and con-
tain many aspects of linguistic structure that could not have developed di-
rectly from these. The spoken dialects also contain items of vocabulary that
are not found in the literary forms of the language. A particularly interesting
feature of Neo-Aramaic is the way in which numerous linguistic develop-
ments of earlier Semitic undergo a new cycle. This often helps us interpret
the diachronic evolution of ancient Semitic, in that some developments that
are only hypothesized as having taken place in a proto-form of the ancient
languages can be observed directly in the historical evolution of the Neo-
Aramaic dialects.
It is hoped that this volume will give a stimulus to future work in this
important field.
Geoffrey Khan
Cambridge, February 2008
NORTH-EASTERN NEO-ARAMAIC AND THE
MIDDLE ARAMAIC DIALECTS
SAMUEL ETHAN FOX
The relationship of the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects to their
Middle Aramaic predecessors has never been clearly defined. Stoddard
(1856: 108–11), writing at the beginning of western study of the modern
languages, sees the modern verbal forms as direct descendents of those of
Syriac. It was Nöldeke (1868: xxxv–xxxvii) who first stated that the modern
dialects could not descend from Syriac, pointing out that some modern
forms more closely resemble Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (JBA), the lan-
guage of the Babylonian Talmud, than they do Syriac. Nöldeke specifically
refers to the passive participles of the Class II verbs, those which correspond
to earlier pa(cid:1825)(cid:1825)el and (cid:1829)aph(cid:1825)el, certain demonstrative pronouns, the pa(cid:1825)(cid:1825)el in-
finitive, and the possessive suffixes, but also mentions some “Kleinigkeiten,”
without specifying what they might be. In fact, in his first glance at the
question of the relationship of NENA to the Middle Aramaic (MA) dialects,
Nöldeke immediately noted most of the data which I shall discuss in this
paper.
In the introduction to his comparative grammar of the modern dialects,
Maclean (1895: xv) specifically denies that they originate in classical Syriac.
He once again mentions the infinitive of the Class II verbs, the past partici-
ple, and several other forms which cannot be derived from the Syriac. How-
ever, Maclean does not suggest that NENA is closer to JBA than to Syriac.
Brockelmann (1908: 20) in the catalog of Semitic languages with which he
begins his comparative grammar, simply calls the modern dialects “Osta-
ramäisch” without suggesting a special relationship with any particular form
of Middle Aramaic. To which form of MA, then, does NENA have the closest
affinities? Is it, by and large, closest to Syriac, to JBA, or perhaps even to
Mandaic? Certainly it is not a direct continuation of any of these languages,
2 SAMUEL ETHANFOX
but perhaps if we catalog the chief points of departure from the various
forms of MA which are native developments and not clearly due to influence
of other languages, we shall find it closest to one of them.
This project sounds fairly simple, but it faces some important difficul-
ties. The foremost of these difficulties have to do with the uneven and im-
perfect documentation of the Middle Aramaic dialects. First of all, Syriac is a
fairly uniform standardized literary language. This uniformity conceals
whatever variation may have been present in the spoken language. On the
other hand, Syriac does have two separate traditional systems of vowel no-
tation and pronunciation.
Our information on the pronunciation of JBA is much less clear. Most
JBA texts are unpointed and so leave much of the pronunciation uncertain.
Our best insights into the vocalization of JBA come from the traditional
Yemenite pronunciation of the Talmud, which was studied extensively by
Morag (1988, 2001). Of course, we cannot be certain that the Yemenite tra-
dition preserves the original pronunciation accurately. JBA is not as stan-
dardized a language as Syriac, and so a substantial amount of variation can
be observed.
Mandaic has a traditional system of vocalization which provides a
great deal of insight into its pronunciation. However, the relationship of this
vocalization to the traditional pronunciation of the classical language is
hardly straightforward. As with JBA, our picture of the original pronuncia-
tion of Mandaic depends on the faithful transmission of a tradition of pro-
nunciation over more than a millennium.
Another difficulty is inherent in the project. The attested MA dialects
are only points in a continuum of otherwise lost varieties of the language.
The dialects spoken 1700 years ago may well have been as varied as those
of present-day Aramaic, which are startling in their diversity. Boyarin
(1981) discusses the position of Syriac among the MA dialects, concluding
that it occupies an intermediate position between eastern and western dia-
lects, and suggesting that a wave-theory model is more appropriate for ex-
plaining the relations of the various forms of MA than is the Stammbaum.
The influences of other languages on NENA are well-known and strik-
ing, and have occupied much of the attention of scholars in the field. How-
ever, within NENA itself there is a great deal of influence of one dialect on
another, complicated greatly by the geographical shifts of speech communi-
ties over time.
In general, the dialect geography of NENA seems much more amenable
to description in terms of wave theory than as a family tree. Innovations,
particularly in phonology, are found in geographically contiguous areas