NIVEDITA MENON (ed.): Gender and politics in India. (Themes in Politics.) xi, 539 pp. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001 (hardback edition, 1999). Rs. 575 (2024)

This study is the first wide-scope morpho-syntactic comparative study of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects to date. Given the historical depth of Aramaic (almost 3 millennia) and the geographic span of the modern dialects, coming in contact with various Iranian, Turkic and Semitic languages, these dialects provide an almost pristine "laboratory" setting for examining language change from areal, typological and historical perspectives. While the study has a very wide coverage of dialects, including also contact languages (and especially Kurdish dialects), it focuses on a specific grammatical domain, namely attributive constructions, giving a theoretically motivated and empirically grounded account of their variation, distribution and development. The results will be enlightening not only to Semitists seeking to learn about this fascinating modern Semitic language group, but also for typologists and general linguists interested in the dynamics of noun phrase morphosyntax.

This thesis examines the passive and the middle voice in Imperial Aramaic, a variety of Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language, that has been attested for around 3000 years. Imperial Aramaic is in the process of developing from a voice system that distinguishes between active, passive and middle/reflexive/reciprocal voice to one that has different morphological categories for active, medio-passive, reflexive and reciprocal. On the one hand, this transformation of the voice system is apparent in the temporary diversity of morphosyntactic marking of the passive voice in Imperial Aramaic: While the internal passives are gradually disappearing, the t-stems and the impersonal construction increasingly denote passive voice. Combined with morphological restrictions of the stems and verbal forms, this results in complex morphosyntactic patterns used to denote the passive. On the other hand, the profound changes within the voice system result in the extremely high ambiguity of expression of the t-stems, which basically came to denote non-active voice in general. Thus, in Imperial Aramaic a situation presents where one function, the passive voice, is expressed by a number of different morphosyntactic forms, whereas one form, the t-stems, denotes a plurality of functions.

Bēl Lišāni: papers in Akkadian Linguistics presented to John Huehnergard on the occasion of his retirement (Eisenbrauns Press)

The paper studies the expression of tense and voice in an Akkadian variety, Neo-Assyrian. The grammatical reading of a given verb form results from the interaction of the lexical meaning of the verb in question with the grammatical semantics of the morphological form used. Starting from this observation, the authors single out five verbal classes of Neo-Assyrian, related to the values of dynamicity and transitivity.

Orientalia, 2002

The dialect spoken and written by the Jews of Babylonia from the third century CE onwards is known as “Jewish Babylonian Aramaic”. This is the first comprehensive description of this dialect since Levias’ “Grammar of Babylonian Aramaic” of 1930. The current book offers a thorough reexamination of the grammar on the basis of a large corpus in its manuscript witnesses. It not only synthesizes the results of recent scholarship but introduces original insights on many important questions. The book is designed to appeal to readers of all backgrounds, including those with no prior background in Babylonian Aramaic or the Babylonian Talmud. The discussion frequently makes reference to parallels in other Semitic languages and in other Aramaic dialects, as well as to a variety of topics in linguistics . The book is structured as a textbook: it introduces topics in an order determined by pedagogical considerations, and offers vocabulary notes and translation exercises at the end. At the same time, the book can be used as a reference grammar.

Bibel und Babel 4. Proceedings of the 53 Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Vol. I Part 1., 2010

JSS, 2022

In Proto-Aramaic, the passive of transitive verbs belonging to all three principal stems-G, D and C-was formed internally. Some verbs of the G-and D-stems also possessed detransitive derivatives. Transitive verbs of the G-, D-and C-stems lost their internal passives early on, and the passives of G-and D-verbs were encoded by their respective t-stems. Against this general Aramaic picture, in Imperial Aramaic the passive forms of the G-stem were in complementary distribution: the passive Past was encoded by the internal passive of the Suffix Conjugation (Gp SC), while the passive non-Past was rendered by the Gt participle and the Gt Prefix Conjugation. Gp SC stopped being used with Imperial Aramaic once it was replaced, as a written language, by vernacular-based literary varieties. The Ct-stem, non-existent in Imperial Aramaic, must have first emerged among spoken varieties of Aramaic in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and only within I-w and II-w/y roots. Within the Imperial Aramaic corpus, both the rare Gt SC passive forms and Ct-stem forms reflect the influence of spoken Aramaic varieties in the diglossic situation. In Syriac, the Ct-stem of sound roots is unattested during its golden age. The Ct-forms of sound roots appeared in original Syriac texts only after the Arab conquest, and these also come from spoken Aramaic varieties.

This paper focuses on the grammaticalization of adnominal demonstratives towards simple determiners in Neo-Aramaic, a dialectal cluster belonging to the Semitic family. Scholars still do not agree about the presence of a definite article in NA and in Aramaic dialectology the systems of demonstratives and determiners have not yet received sufficient attention from a comparative point of view. New grammaticalized items seem not to act like traditional determiners since they encode, besides definiteness, a related though not totally overlapping feature: specificity.

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2002

exadmin.matita.net

This paper focuses on contemporary linguistic developments in Neo-Aramaic. Modern Assyrian, although widely used as an oral medium in a variety of domains belonging to everyday life, and in modern and traditional literature (both as an oral and a written medium), is lagging behind in the expression of many modern concepts (such as in technology, politics, etc.). The lexical and phraseological problems faced by the community are evident in the analysis of political documents from contemporary Iraq – especially when their Arabic and/or English versions are compared.In the enrichment of modern Assyrian, resort is made to the usual mechanisms of:a. the adaptation of existing Syriac material in order to satisfy modern needs: ܒܹܐܡܵܐ (Bēmā) ‘pulpit, lectern’ (itself from Greek βη̃μα) - Assyrian ‘forum’; the use of this term in the name of an Iraq-based political organization bears witness to the metaphorical shift;b. the creation of a new word out of existing stems with the addition of morphological machinery: ܡܸܬܗܵܘܝܵܢܬܵܐ (meṯhaunatā) ‘appreciated’ from Syriac maṯhē with the suffix -an; also the formation of compounds out of existing words: ܒܲܤܵܡܬܵܐ ܕܪܹܫܵܐ (basamtā d-rišā) ‘solace’ (from basamtā, “cure” and rišā, “head”);c. the calquing of a new word or phraseological unit, in which the single elements are part and parcel of the language, but the result is utterly new:ܙܵܘܥܵܐ (zūwʿā) ‘movement’ (in the socio-political sense) is obviously calqued from Arabic حركة (haraka), English movement, etc.;d. borrowing, i.e., the simple adaptation of a loanword: ܡܲܕܘܼܥܹܐ (Madūʻā)‘issue’ from Arabic مَوْضوع.The result is a new, “artificial” literary and, in perspective, national Assyrian language, on the model of Heinz Kloss’ (1967) concept of “Ausbau language.”

Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires, 2022

In a recent article (2021), Helmut Freydank and Doris Prechel addressed an important aspect of the Middle Assyrian corpus, i.e., the verbal form ittannū. Traditionally this finite form is analysed as a perfect from nadānu (Ass. tadānu) 'to give' with the change *ittadn- > *ittann- as follows the GAG § 102l and is found in the main studies on this Middle Assyrian verb: Saporetti (1967); Mayer (1971, 93‒94); de Ridder (2018, 422‒23 §§ 604‒6). Freydank and Prechel, carefully analysing the various forms, suggested that the available attestations are better regarded as deriving from enû 'to change', used in the Gt or Gtn-stem with meaning to 'to exchange'.