Grammar of Modern Syriac Language as Spoken in Urmia, Persia, and Kurdistan
The spectrum of Neo-Aramaic languages and dialects, spoken in an arch of language-islets that stretch from south-western Syria to south-western Iran, exhibits rich lexical repositories inherited from early layers of the Aramaic language. Within this wealthy lexical legacy, some genuine Aramaic lexical items are not attested in any of the literary Aramaic sources, hence it is only by virtue of these modern lexical manifestations that the existence of the ancient Aramaic antecedents of these words can be inferred or reconstructed. Such historical lacunae concern also meanings that must be of considerable antiquity, yet these meanings, pertaining to well-known Aramaic words, have no evidence in literary Aramaic, having surfaced only in the modern era. This article discusses ten selected cases of pre-modern Aramaic words and meanings that were discovered by etymological and comparative examination of their modern reflexes in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), Western Neo-Aramaic and Ṭuroyo.
This study presents a synchronic description of genitive constructions in a dialect of the Aramaic language, known as Syriac. It is a multi-faceted study which considers different aspects of genitive constructions from traditional and contemporary perspectives, before culminating into a reinterpretation under contemporary frameworks. Specifically, the first component relates to Syriac’s nominal inflection paradigm, which reveals interesting processes of syntactic change that helps to explain how definiteness and genitive case is expressed in genitive constructions. This is consolidated by empirical evidence from an ancient manuscript titled, The Chronicles of Joshua the Stylite (Wright, 1882), which forms the basis for a distributional analysis of definiteness and genitive case features. The final component is an account of Syriac’s three basic genitive constructions within a generative framework, and specifically, under Abney’s (1984) DP and Ritter’s (1991) N-to-D movement hypotheses.
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