The Morphosyntax of Embedded Clauses in Western Neo-Aramaic: Arabic Influence or Retention from Older Aramaic?

The article asks whether the morphosyntax of embedded direct object clauses and purpose clauses in Western Neo-Aramaic reflects retention from older stages of Aramaic, or innovation under the influence of contact Arabic. To this end, direct object clauses and purpose clauses are analysed in Western Neo-Aramaic, in older stages of Aramaic, namely, Old, Official, Biblical and Qumran Aramaic, as well as Syriac, the three Western Late Aramaic dialects (CPA, JPA, SA), and in contemporaneous Syrian Arabic. The analysis considers the embedded verb form, the formal means of linking the embedded clause to the matrix clause, and the co-referentiality of the matrix and embedded subjects, and relates these features to tense-aspect-mood. The article compares the constructions in the various sources of Aramaic and Syrian Arabic and finds features that Western Neo-Aramaic has retained from Late Aramaic, which differ from Syrian Arabic, despite the well documented influence of the latter.

The Morphology of Adjectives in the Neo-Aramaic Dialects of ʿAqra

The present article presents a synchronic description of the morphology of adjectives in the highly endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects of ʿAqra in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It discusses the morphology of adjectives in these dialects as used in the sixties of the last century. In particular, the article highlights adjectival patterns, inflectional features, and the adaptation of loanwords from Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish. The article contributes to the description of the grammar of some 150 North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects in the Kurdistan region that are gradually falling into disuse, due to internal disputes, wars, economic crises, and globalisation.

Linguistic Dating of the Book of Qohelet: A New Angle

This paper proposes a new linguistic method for dating the Book of Qohelet. While linguistic methods employed in previous studies of Qohelet led to the conclusion that it is a post-exilic book, they could not yield a more accurate dating. The methodology proposed here identifies calques in Qohelet that reflect Aramaic phrases of uneven distribution—i.e., phrases that occur only in the Aramaic dialects of a specific period. Two Aramaic calques serve as test cases: בשל אשר and כצל אשר. Tracing the inner-Aramaic development and distribution of their Aramaic equivalents, I conclude that these phrases evolved in Aramaic in the Hellenistic period, thus excluding a Persian-period dating of the relevant calques. The paper then briefly refers to the implications of these findings for the contextualization and interpretation of the Book of Qohelet.

Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and Language Contact

The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects form one of the surviving branches of the Aramaic language family. Extremely diverse, they are or were spoken by Christian and Jewish minorities originating in Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. They have been in intense contact with other languages of the region, most notably Kurdish, but also Arabic, Turkic languages and Persian. As a result, they show a great deal of contact influence, not only in lexicon and phonology but also in morphology and syntax. The precise forms of the borrowings, as well as their behavior, usually reflect the local dialects of the donor language, showing how important fine-grained dialectal data is in a study of language contact. While some of the languages in contact, namely Kurdish, Turkish and Persian, are structurally very different to NENA, structural congruence or compatibility plays at best a fluctuating role in facilitating borrowings.

Uccellacci e uccellini

The topic of this article are terms for animals in the Old Aramaic inscriptions. The corpus is quite rich (ca. 50 terms), including both terms for particular mammals reconstructed for Proto-Semitic, and terms that are rarely attested in other Semitic languages. Two peculiar Aramaic forms are already evidenced in Old Aramaic: the word for “cow” created through morphological rather than semantic opposition to the word “bull”, and the word for “serpent” derived from the verb “to live”. The attestation of some terms in Old Aramaic that do not occur in later Aramaic dialects is possibly due, at least in some cases, to external influences (for example, Akkadian in the inscription of Sfiré). Other terms are known later in a slightly different form, maybe due to tabooisation processes. However, the stability of the lexicon in general is quite remarkable. As is usual in ethnobiological classification, the most common taxa by far are generic species.