Western Neo Aramaic Vocabulary

Western Neo-Aramaic is the last surviving branch of the Western Aramaic language, once the primary spoken language of Syria and the Levant. Other branches of Western Aramaic, including Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Palmyrene Aramaic, and Nabatean Aramaic, are now extinct. Hidden in the Qalamun Mountains and shielded by layers of snow and fog, the village of Jubaadin has kept this language alive for thousands of years. With a population of about four to five thousand, Jubaadin is the largest of three Syrian villages that speak Western Neo-Aramaic. Years of war and decades of exposure to other languages have placed the language at a great risk of extinction. This book explores the Western Neo-Aramaic language as spoken in the village. It includes a detailed analysis of Western Neo-Aramaic grammar and many texts and poems written by native speakers. The final section of the book is a thorough etymological dictionary of the Western Neo-Aramaic vocabulary.

The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

Western Neo-Aramaic is the last surviving branch of the Western Aramaic language, once the primary spoken language of Syria and the Levant. Other branches of Western Aramaic, including Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Palmyrene Aramaic, and Nabatean Aramaic, are now extinct. Hidden in the Qalamun Mountains and shielded by layers of snow and fog, the village of Jubaadin has kept this language alive for thousands of years. With a population of about four to five thousand, Jubaadin is the largest of three Syrian villages that speak Western Neo-Aramaic. Years of war and decades of exposure to other languages have placed the language at a great risk of extinction. This book explores the Western Neo-Aramaic language as spoken in the village. It includes a detailed analysis of Western Neo-Aramaic grammar and many texts and poems written by native speakers. The final section of the book is a thorough etymological dictionary of the Western Neo-Aramaic vocabulary.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

The present volume of proceedings offers cutting-edge research on the Hebrew language in the late Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Fourteen specialists of ancient Hebrew illuminate various aspects of the language, from phonology through grammar and syntax to semantics and interpretation.

The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).