Iranian Loanwords in Syriac.

• Author: Reymond, Eric D.
• Position: Book review

Iranian Loanwords in Syriac. Beitrage zur Iranistik, vol. 28. By CLAUDIA A. CIANCAGLINI. Wiesbaden: DR. LUDWIG REICHERT VERLAG, 2008. Pp. xlvii + 315. $116. [Distributed in North America by David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Conn.]

In addition to its prefatory material that includes its bibliography (pp. xxiii-xlvii), this book contains two parts. The first part spans slightly less than a hundred pages and includes twelve different sub-sections that, among other things, introduce Syriac (pp. 1-10) and offer a detailed treatment of Syriac phonology and the manner in which Iranian (especially Middle Persian) phonemes are represented in this Semitic phonological system (pp. 62-91). Another section describes the long history of the interaction between Iranian and Aramaic languages, the influence of the former on the latter having taken place especially during either the 'Achaemenid era; the time of the Parthian and Sasanian empires; the period after the Arab conquest" (p. 10). As a consequence of this long history, the first part also includes a discussion of morphological borrowings from Old Persian into Imperial Aramaic and from Middle Persian into Syriac (pp. 28-37 and 48-58, respectively).

These sections will be of interest not only to the scholar who specializes in Syriac or Iranian languages, but also to those who study Imperial Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, since the author collects in one place the various morphological and syntactic borrowings that have influenced Aramaic since the Persian era, including such things as the qtyl l- construction. In addition to this construction, the author addresses the typically Syriac phenomenon whereby de-nominative verbs are created through the combination of a lexeme and the verb 'bd "to do, make." The author cites Sebastian Brock's opinion that this construction derives ultimately from Coptic (p. 50). She disagrees with Brock's assessment and proposes that this construction is first attested in Imperial Aramaic, which has it from Old Persian, and that the construction becomes more frequent and regular in Syriac through the influence of Middle Persian. The identification of Old Persian as the origin of the construction in Imperial Aramaic is not universally accepted, as the author notes; Driver suggests its Semitic origin. The author's argument is complicated by the admission that "the construction is an unmarked one: it appears in many old and modern languages of the...