Aramaic in Its Historical and Linguistic Setting.

• Author: Sabar, Yona
• Position: Book review

Aramaic in Its Historical and Linguistic Setting. Edited by HOLGER GZFLLA and MARGARETH L. FOLMER. Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Main?, Veroffentlichungen der Orientalischen Kommission, vol. 50. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008. Pp. vii + 388. [member of]58.

This fine volume includes most of the papers given at a conference at Oegstgeest, Holland, August 24-27, 2006. The conference and the volume are remarkable in bringing together not only scholars of the various classical periods of Aramaic (Old, Middle, Late, etc.), but also in particularly including four or five studies of Neo-Aramaic (out of twenty studies), a very welcome trend. Until very recently, Neo-Aramaic was considered too esoteric to be included in a conference or volume dedicated to "Aramaic" per se. In their epilogue, the editors elaborate a good point which I quote in full: "A more dynamic approach, which also takes into account contact-induced change in all areas of language and the gradual emergence of new linguistic varieties, may be able to resolve some of the persisting difficulties of arranging the many 'Aramaics' existent at any given stage into a coherent system. Perhaps they will, sometime in the future, help identify the roots of some Neo-Aramaic varieties in the 1st millennium a.d. or even earlier. The fact that such questions are implicitly reflected or explicitly addressed in a number of contributions indicates the interest they receive" (p. 376).

This approach is already well reflected in the article by Otto Jastrow, "Old Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic: Some Reflections on Language History." It deals with some grammatical aspects of living Neo-Aramaic dialects that can clarify diachronically or shed some light on the older stages of the language. Examples are given in phonology, e.g., the issue of old BGDKPT (t > t > t > t) and the velar fricatives *x and *g (h > x > h), and their various reflections in several Neo-Aramaic dialects, suggesting a "circular linguistic evolution," or a "linguistic perpetuum mobile." In morphology, Jastrow deals with the history of the definite article in Aramaic. Here too, the old postpositional article, which eventually loses its definiteness in Middle Aramaic, is reintroduced in Neo-Aramaic by a prefix (kalba '(the) dog' > u-kalba 'the dog'). One can add other examples, such as old doubling, which tends to disappear in Neo-Aramaic, e.g., qattala > qatala 'murderer'; but there is new doubling, e.g., sama > simma...