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=> Re: Okay....I'll play along.....

Re: Okay....I'll play along.....
Posted by Taoro (Guest) - Friday, May 24 2013, 17:42:24 (UTC)
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you have to make up your mind sometimes all you want is my oppinion and sometimes you want the experts i told you to read (wich you probably did a long time ago) Prof Geoffrey Khan and efrem yildiz but you wanted me to bring them to you,



REMARKS ON THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF THE
MODERN ASSYRIAN LANGUAGE
Geoffrey Khan
University of Cambridge
The spoken language of the Assyrian Christians has
sometimes been
considered to be a descendant of Syriac, the classi
cal written language of the
Christians of the Middle East. For this reason it h
as been referred to by some
scholars as ‘neo-Syriac’. In this paper I should li
ke to present evidence that
demonstrates that the modern spoken language of the
Assyrians, although
clearly related to Syriac, does not have such a dir
ect linguistic relationship
with it.
The first point that should be made is that modern
Assyrian exists in
numerous dialects, which differ from one area to an
other, or indeed from one
village to another. In the present study all the di
alects spoken by Assyrian
communities residing, or originally residing, East
of the Tigris will be
considered as belonging to the same dialect group.
Classical written Syriac, a form of Aramaic, is a s
ingle language that is
uniform in its structure. It is unlikely that the l
arge diversity of spoken
dialects of the modern Assyrian language could all
be the direct descendants
of this one earlier language. Syriac remained remar
kably uniform throughout
its history, despite the fact that it was used by C
hristian communities across a
wide geographical area in the Near East and over a
long chronological
period. The writers of Syriac clearly spoke a large
variety of vernacular
dialects and indeed languages, though all this dive
rsity is concealed by the
literary language. It is the nature of literary lan
guages that they serve as a
uniform system of written communication that can be
used by a wide range
of communities that are unified culturally, religio
usly or politically. Literary
languages are usually based on the spoken language
of one particular region,
in the case of Syriac this is thought to have been
that of Edessa.
The traditional pronunciation of Syriac reflects li
nguistic developments that
are not represented in the written orthographic tra
dition of the language,
such as the elision of final vowels in certain cont
exts, e.g.
(
) ‘my
judgement’,


(
) ‘they killed’. This is likely to be due to the fa
ct that




2
the reading tradition is a closer representation of
the vernacular than the
orthographic tradition. Moreover, the reading tradi
tion of Syriac exhibits
regional differences, in that the western tradition
of the Jacobite church is
distinct from that of the eastern tradition of the
Church of the East. These
pronunciation traditions exhibit features that are
distinctive of the modern
western and eastern spoken dialects respectively, s
o they are likely to have
had their origin in the regional vernaculars of the
first millennium. One of
the distinctive features, for example, is the pronu
nciation of an original long
vowel. In the western Jacobite tradition this was
pronounced as a mid
rounded vowel
whereas the eastern tradition preserved the unroun
ded
quality
. Likewise the western vernacular dialects spoken t
oday in Syria
have the rounded vowel
whereas most of the modern eastern dialects,
spoken East of the Tigris, have the unrounded vowel

However, these
differences in pronunciation traditions of Syriac,
although apparently having
their roots in the regional spoken dialects, came t
o be associated with the
denomination of the church that a community belonge
d to, irrespective of the
local vernacular. Examples of this can be found in
the way that literary Syriac
is pronounced in the Christian communities of moder
n Iraq. All surviving
vernacular dialects in Iraq have the unrounded

vowel as a reflex of an
original long *
. Some villages on the Mosul plain joined the Jacob
ite church
around the 7
th
century, such as Qaraqosh. In Qaraqosh today the S
yriac that
is used in the liturgy is recited with the western
type pronunciation with
o
for
original long *
, whereas the reflex of this vowel is unrounded

in the local
spoken Assyrian dialect.
Certain features of the grammatical structure of mo
dern Assyrian that
differ from what is found in literary Syriac can be
traced back many
centuries. In several dialects spoken today, for ex
ample, verbal forms have a
prefixed particle with the form

or variants of this, such as

and
, e.g.
Urmi

‘we pull’. This particle does not exist in literary
Syriac. It is
not, however, a recent development in the spoken di
alects. The scholar Bar
Hebraeus, writing in the 13
th
century, reports the occurrence of this particle
(with the form

) in the speech of Eastern Christians (Moberg 1922:
205;
1907: 30; Heinrichs 2002 :249). It can be equated w
ith the particle
which
is attested in texts datable to the first millenniu
m A.D. in Jewish Babylonian
Aramaic and Mandaic, which are Aramaic dialects rel
ated to Syriac
Evidence for the existence of a spoken language tha
t differs from literary
Syriac but exhibits distinctive features of modern
Assyrian can be found in
other medieval texts. One source is an Arabic
t 
work that was
composed in Spain in the early eleventh century,
t st
by Ibn
Baklarish. In this work the Arabic names of medicin
al elements are listed
together with the corresponding terms in a variety
of other languages in






3
Arabic transcription, including what the author des
ignates as
s
,
which one would assume would be ‘Syriac’. What is f
ascinating, however, is
that many of these words in
s
are not at all classical Syriac, but
correspond to the form that one finds in the modern
spoken Assyrian
dialects.
1
In the following extract, for example, the word fo
r ‘woman’ in
s
is said to be
t
, which is a lexical hallmark of the Assyrian
dialects spoken east of the Tigris:
Ibn Baklarish,
t st
(MS Arcadia library 11
th
century):
 ا
... :
 ف ا
...
  
‘The milk of women: ‘Women’ in
s
is
t
’
In a number of words in Ibn Baklarish’s text an ori
ginal final long
is
represented in the transcription by
t !
, which reflects the shortening
of the vowel. The shortening of final vowels is a f
eature of the spoken
Assyrian vernaculars. It is conditioned by the inci
dence of stress on the
penultimate rather than on the final syllable. The
source of this set of words,
therefore, can be identified as spoken vernacular r
ather than the literary
Syriac language, e.g.
ُ
(‘mare’ =
Syriac:


s!st
, Modern Assyrian
sst
). Note also the shortening of the original long me
dial

vowel in a
closed syllable that is reflected in the transcript
ion
َُ َـَـ
(‘she ass’ =Syriac:

"t
). This also is a feature of the modern spoken dial
ects, in which
the word has the form
t
. The
#
vowel after the
in the
transcription may reflect the further raising and a
ttenuation of this vowel
that is attested in several dialects (
$t % t
).
The explanation for the appearance of such features
of the spoken
dialects in this text must be that the author Ibn B
aklarish or at least the
author of one of his sources gathered these vernacu
lar forms by ‘fieldwork’
during the Middle Ages among the Christian communit
ies east of the Tigris,
or from speakers originating in that region.
In Modern Assyrian the past verb is inflected by a
series of suffixes that
contain the preposition
, e.g.

‘he pulled’,

‘I pulled’,

‘he
arose’,

‘I arose’. In literary Syriac, by contrast, the pas
t is normally
expressed by a different form of verb, which has a
different set of suffixes,
e.g.


,

;

,

. The use of inflectional endings with the preposit
ion
on past verbs is already attested in Aramaic docum
ents from the
Achaemenid period datable to the 5
th
century B.C., e.g.
1
See G. Khan, ‘Remarks on the transcriptions of Sy
riac Words in
Kit
ā
b
al-Musta`
ī
n
ī
of Ibn Baklarish (According to the Arcadian Library
MS)’ in C.
Burnett (ed.),
Proceedings of the Ibn Baklarish Symposium
, London, 2007.












4

& ' t( 
šmy‘ ly
) * ) t"tt &) ts"
‘And here now thus
I have heard
, that the officers who are in Lower Egypt
are active in the revolt’ (Driver 1954, VII:3-4)
This verbal form is in origin a passive constructio
n consisting of a passive
participle and an agentive phrase (
+t (s  (  
=
+ (, ( t
).
More examples of this passive type construction are
occasionally found in
later forms of Aramaic datable to the first millenn
ium A.D. such as Mandaic
(Nöldeke 1875 §263, Macuch 1965 §287d) and Babyloni
an Talmudic
Aramaic (Schlesinger 1928 §30). The construction is
sporadically attested
also in Syriac (Nöldeke 1898 §279, Muraoka 1987 §69
), e.g.
   
!
‘Have you read the books?’ (Nöldeke §279). In all t
hese types of Aramaic,
however, the past is far more frequently expressed
by the active verbal form
. The passive type forms are likely to be reflectio
ns of the contemporary
spoken vernacular that have infiltrated the standar
d literary language.
It has generally been assumed that the passive type
of past verbal form
with the inflectional suffixes containing the presp
osition

entered Aramaic
in the Achaemenid period under the influence of Old
Persian, which contain
similar passive constructions.
2
However, there are some features of the
examples of this construction surviving in Syriac t
hat suggest that it
developed with a life of its own in the spoken lang
uage. In Old Persian and
later Iranian languages, for example, the passive t
ype construction is
restricted to transitive verbs. In spoken Modern As
syrian, however, it has
been extended also to past intransitive expressions
, e.g.

‘He arose’. In
such cases it is not appropriate to refer to it as
a passive in the proper sense
of the word. This is attested already in classical
Syriac texts, e.g.
" #
‘He
arose’ (Nöldeke 1898, §279). Such an example should
be regarded as the
occurrence of a spoken vernacular form ‘by mistake’
in the literary language.
It reflects the existence at an earlier period of t
his vernacular feature, which
is generally disguised by the literary language.
2
For details see G. Khan (2004).

5
Another indication of the early roots of the modern
spoken dialects and their
independence from Syriac is the fact that they have
preserved some words
from antiquity that are not found in the classical
literary Syriac language.
These include words from Akkadian, which are for th
e most part connected
with agriculture. These include the word

‘rice paddy field’, which is
used in the dialect of numerous modern Assyrian vil
lages. This is a direct
descendent of the Akkadian work
.
3

Several other such cases can be
found in the dialect of Qaraqosh. In that dialect,
for example, the word
$
denotes a storeroom (for grain) in the roof of a h
ouse. It is
reasonably certain that this is a descendant of the
Akkkadian term
t -
‘barn, storehouse’.
4
Another possible example in this dialect is
.
‘pile of
straw (usually barley)’, which could well be relate
d to Akkadian
-.
‘pile
of harvest produce (especially straw).’
5
Some grammatical features that are found in the mod
ern Assyrian dialects are
typologically more archaic than the corresponding f
eatures in classical Syriac.
In the dialect of Qaraqosh, for example, the infini
tive of all verbal stems does
not have an initial
, by contrast with Syriac infinitives, which have
acquired this prefix by analogy with the participle
s:
6
Qaraqosh
Syriac
PaKKel present (participle)
$
$%&

PaKKel infinitive
/o$
%&
'


LAphKel present (participle)
$
$%&

LAphKel infinitive
/o$
%&
'

In sum, the evidence adduced above demonstrates tha
t the dialects of Modern
Assyrian are unlikely to be direct descendants of t
he literary Syriac language,
although they are undoubtedly related to it. Rather
they existed side-by-side
with it for centuries. Some of the features of the
modern spoken dialects that
3
See Krotkoff (1985: 124-126).
4
CAD
vol. 6, p.141;
AH
, vol. 1, p.334.
5
Salonen (1968: 274),
AH
, vol. 2, p.943.
6
See Khan (2002: 12)








6
differ from literary Syriac can be shown to have em
erged at a much earlier
period by the fact that they occasionally surface i
n written texts by a process
of linguistic interference. Some features of morpho
logy, moreover, are
typologically more archaic than the corresponding f
eatures in Syriac.
Likewise, some lexical items of the modern dialects
are not attested in Syriac
but have roots that can be traced to antiquity in t
he Akkadian language.
REFERENCES
AH = W. Von Soden,
0 s(s 1&2t(
CAD =
3( 0ss 4to o5 t( 6t +sttt o
5 7(o
Driver, G.R., 1954,
0 4ots o5 t( 85t( 7t 9 7
, Oxford.
G. Khan, ‘Remarks on the transcriptions of Syriac W
ords in
t st:
of Ibn Baklarish (According to the Arcadian Library
MS)’ in C. Burnett
(ed.),
;os o5 t( + 9 s( <*os
, London, 2007.
Heinrichs, W., 2002, ‘Peculiarities of the verbal s
ystem of Senāya within the
framework of North Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA)’,
=<*( o( t
 (t >s(? & ,st( s@A BC 9
t> ) <tst
8sts(5t 5D 6tto Esto& ) BC Fts
, Wiesbaden, pp.238-268.
Khan, G., 2002,
3( Go0 4t o5 Hos(
, Leiden.
Khan, G., 2004, ‘Aramaic and the impact of language
s in contact with it
through the ages’, in P. Bádenas de la Peña
t 
(eds.),
Is 
7ottoJ K 3stoo Ksto?
Madrid, pp. 87-108.
Krotkoff (1985: 124-126).
Krotkoff, G., 1985, ‘Studies in Neo-Aramaic Lexicol
ogy’, in A. Kort and S.
Morschauser,
9  Lt <ts ;st to < +&
,
Winona Lake,

pp.123-134.
Macuch, R., 1965,
1oo o5 7ss  o 
, Berlin.
Moberg, A. (ed.), 1922,
I I, s <*s I F F 
FMo 9(s
, Lund.
Moberg, A., 1907, 1913,
9(  <t( 4 2ss Ft s
9(>s
. Erster Teil, 1913, Leipzig: Harrasowitz; Zweiter
Teil, 1907,
Leipzig.
Muraoka, T., 1987,
7ss < 5o 1sts
, Wiesbaden.
Nöldeke, Th., 1875,
>s( Ft
, Halle.
Nöldeke, Th., 1898,
)5sst ss( Ft
, 2
nd
edition, Leipzig.

7
Salonen, A., 1968,
0t so*ot ( <s(0 s(

H K Is(  ts((t(
Nts(
, Annales
Academiae Sientariarum Fennicae B/149, Helsinki.
Schlesinger, M., 1928,
<t)(  0>s( <*( s 9os(
3
3s
, Leipzig.









"Another indication of the early roots of the modern
spoken dialects and their
independence from Syriac is the fact that they have
preserved some words
from antiquity that are not found in the classical
literary Syriac language.
These include words from Akkadian, which are for th
e most part connected
with agriculture."
what did saggs say about the assyrians turning christian and farmers "The destruction of the Assyrian empire did not wipe out its population. They were predominantly peasant farmers, and since Assyria contains some of the best wheat land in the Near East, descendants of the Assyrian peasants would, as opportunity permitted, build new villages over the old cities and carry on with agricultural life, remembering traditions of the former cities. After seven or eight centuries and various vicissitudes, these people became Christians."



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