Background Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), or Siryōn to its speakers, is the sole surviving represe... more Background Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), or Siryōn to its speakers, is the sole surviving representative of the Western Aramaic languages. Prior to the Syrian civil war (2011-present), it was spoken in three villages in the Rif Dimashq Governorate of the Syrian Arab Republic, Maaloula (Maʿlūla, Arabic Maʿlūlah, al-Qutayfah District), Baxʿa (Arabic Ṣarxah, Yabroud District), and Ġuppaʿōḏ (Arabic Jubbʿadīn, al-Qutayfah District). Regarding the present number of speakers, there is no certain data available. Residents of Maaloula today estimate that there are fewer than three thousand speakers living within two of the villages (Maaloula and Ġuppaʿōḏ). More speakers formerly resided in these two villages, and in the village of Baxʿa, which was destroyed during the war * The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the HSE University in 2024 No. 24-00-019.
The left column of the newly published "Amorite-Akkadian bilinguals" contains words and sentences... more The left column of the newly published "Amorite-Akkadian bilinguals" contains words and sentences in a heretofore unknown Northwest Semitic language, with an Old Babylonian translation. The present study compares the verb morphology of this language with those of Biblical Hebrew and various Aramaic languages.
This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babyloni... more This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babylonian letter OIP 114, 17:8, 29, thereby clarifying its contents. The word in question is shown to be an Aramaic verb form. This interpretation is supported by observations on the orthography and phonology of early Neo-Babylonian. It follows from the study that in eighth-century Neo-Babylonian two glottalized (‘emphatic’) consonants in the same word still underwent dissimilation, as in the second millennium bce (Geers’ law). The paper also demonstrates that, against communis opinio, erstwhile Aramaic fricative interdentals had shifted to stops by the eighth century bce, while the orthography of contemporaneous Aramaic alphabetic texts reflected an earlier stage of language evolution. This conclusion has been reached by means of comparing cuneiform renderings of proto-Semitic interdentals in West Semitic personal names in eighteenth-century bce Old Babylonian texts and in Neo-Babylonian texts...
Nisane Ergün was born in 1933 in Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz). She isa native and fluent speaker of Ṭ... more Nisane Ergün was born in 1933 in Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz). She isa native and fluent speaker of Ṭuroyo, a contemporary form of East-ern Aramaic. Although never formally educated, she is a gifted story-teller. Throughout her entire life, she has been engaged in subsistencefarming and animal husbandry, in much the same manner as herKurdish neighbours and other rural populations throughout northernMesopotamia. Her life story, here related in her own words, is thusan exercise in narrating history ‘from below’. She is an eyewitness tovarious dramatic periods in the recent history of Ṭur Abdin
Modern Western Aramaic is one of the most critically endangered Aramaic languages, and the only e... more Modern Western Aramaic is one of the most critically endangered Aramaic languages, and the only extant member of the Western Aramaic subfamily. Its speakers are among the few who have not migrated away from their original territory, but the Syrian Civil War (2011-present) has accelerated its endangerment and resulted in the abandonment of one of the three villages in which it was previously spoken. Modern Western Aramaic thus provides us with an opportunity to document a language precisely as it succumbs to some of the primary causes of language endangerment, i.e., conflict and migration. The following text, collected in 2020, discusses this community's experience during this conflict from the perspective of one of the few remaining competent speakers. We have contextualized this text with a discussion of the language and its grammar in comparison with the most recent descriptions, all of which were made decades prior to the war, when the language was much less endangered.
Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic, 2021
The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed desc... more The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed description of the history of the Aramaic verbal system. A key event in this history is what Goldenberg used to call 'the morphological revolution', i.e. the shift, within Eastern Aramaic, from the Middle Aramaic 2 verbal systems to those of Modern Aramaic. In the course of this shift, Eastern Aramaic gave up the inherited suffix conjugation 3 (*qatala) and the prefix conjugation (*yaqtulu) and developed a new repertoire of verbal forms, all of whose bases were deverbal adjectives in earlier stages of Aramaic's history
The paper shows that there is a pattern in the distribution of synthetic (šēp šarrim "the king's ... more The paper shows that there is a pattern in the distribution of synthetic (šēp šarrim "the king's foot") vs. analytical (kaspum ša awīlim "the boss's money") genitive constructions in Old Babylonian. The choice depends on the lexical feature of head nouns known as (in)alienability. Old Babylonian kinship and body part terms, as well as some other substantives, are "inalienable", which means they take only the synthetic construction. All other Old Babylonian nouns are "alienable", which means they admit both the synthetic and the analytical construction (kasap tamkārī and kaspum ša tamkārī "the merchants' money"). In the latter case, there is no general rule to predict the choice, yet in certain cases the two constructions display a non-random frequency distribution.
The grammar of the village dialects of Ṭuroyo remains poorly described apart from that of Midən, ... more The grammar of the village dialects of Ṭuroyo remains poorly described apart from that of Midən, and within the documentation there is a dearth of spontaneous conversations. Consequently, much about Ṭuroyo pragmatics and sociolinguistics in general also remains undescribed. We therefore present two short conversations between three residents of Kfarze in Tur Abdin, concerning a significant event in its recent history, together with a translation and a glossary. In addition to their value as oral histories of the Christian-Kurdish relationship in the region, they reveal significant details about the dialect of Kfarze, including 1) the contraction of triphthongs in ii-y verbs; 2) nouns consistently marked with l-when they express the agent of an 'ergative' preterite; and 3) the retention of 'soft' (unaspirated) ḳ in Kurmanji loan vocabulary. The presence of the last feature, and of frequent code-switching between Ṭuroyo and Kurmanji in the spontaneous speech of these villagers, attests to the bilingual situation in Kfarze.
The fable of an insect and a mouse (or some other animal), who marry and embark on a life togethe... more The fable of an insect and a mouse (or some other animal), who marry and embark on a life together, only to end in tragedy, is widely disseminated from the Mediterranean region to India. One version involving a beetle (Ṭuroyo keze, Kurmanji kêz) circulates throughout Anatolia and Iraq. The following Ṭuroyo and Kurmanji version was recorded during the 2020 summer field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Dērqube from a speaker of the Bequsyone dialect. She relates the narrative portions of the fable in Ṭuroyo, but switches to Kurmanji for its versified portions. In addition to the text and a translation, this study includes an interlinear glossing. It also discusses the motifs of the fable according to the standard classification scheme, as well as its relationship to other attested versions collected in various languages including Arabic, Kurmanji, and Turkish.
In Proto-Aramaic, the passive of transitive verbs belonging to all three principal stems-G, D and... more 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.
Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout sou... more Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout southeastern Anatolia. The story belongs to a widely-disseminated tale type, the ‘Bear's Wife’, which concerns a young woman who is abducted by a bear (or other wilderness creature) and is forced to spawn and rear his children before escaping or being rescued. The following Ṭuroyo version was recorded during the 2018 winter field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Ḥaḥ/Anıtlı from a speaker of the dialect of Bequsyone. It represents the first scholarly publication not only of the Ṭuroyo version, but of any version of this folktale. In addition to the folktale and a translation, the study includes a glossary of the vocabulary used within the text, reflecting some Ṭuroyo words that have not been documented elsewhere. The paper also discusses the motifs of the Stērka Zerá folktale according to the standard classification scheme of folk motifs.
Suffix conjugations (SCs) of East and West Semitic may not be traced back to the same verb form i... more Suffix conjugations (SCs) of East and West Semitic may not be traced back to the same verb form in Proto-Semitic. Rather, they evolved separately, by way of a 'common drift' in the two branches of Semitic. This is demonstrated, in particular, by a crass contrast, both in forms and diathetic meanings, between the SCs of East and West Semitic. Due to the scarcity of data, a gapless reconstruction of diachronic paths for neither of the two branches is possible. Only one thing remains certain: both the SC in East Semitic and non-passive forms of the SC in Central Semitic ultimately came about via verbalisation of adjectives, first primary and then deverbal ones.
The ventive is primarily a means of spatial and not “personal ” deixis (with K. passim), but it i... more The ventive is primarily a means of spatial and not “personal ” deixis (with K. passim), but it is different from deictic words of this ~ that, here ~ there type: the latter point to (the location of) the participants of a situation vis-à-vis the speaker, whereas the (+/–) ventive localizes (or, rather, orients) the situation or “fact ” (action, process or state) itself— primarily also vis-à-vis the speaker. That is why the ventive does not agree with personal arguments. Thus, in German the spatial deixis has two elements: dieser/hier vs. jener/dort, while the verb’s spatial orientation includes three gram-memes denoted by verbal prefixes: ‘hither ’ (her-) ~ ‘whither ’ (hin-) ~ Ø. Thus, heraufsteigen ~ hinaufsteigen ~ steigen.
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 gra... more 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.
[The paper provides a list of morphological innovations exclusively shared by Mlaḥsô and Ṭuroyo. ... more [The paper provides a list of morphological innovations exclusively shared by Mlaḥsô and Ṭuroyo. These point to the existence of a proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô, which was not an ancestor of any other modern Aramaic language known to us. A study of the basic lexicon of Mlaḥsô, in comparison with that of Ṭuroyo and NENA, supplies a lexical dimension to the proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô hypothesis. A second goal of the paper is to trace innovations and retentions of Mlaḥsô as compared with proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô.]
Background Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), or Siryōn to its speakers, is the sole surviving represe... more Background Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), or Siryōn to its speakers, is the sole surviving representative of the Western Aramaic languages. Prior to the Syrian civil war (2011-present), it was spoken in three villages in the Rif Dimashq Governorate of the Syrian Arab Republic, Maaloula (Maʿlūla, Arabic Maʿlūlah, al-Qutayfah District), Baxʿa (Arabic Ṣarxah, Yabroud District), and Ġuppaʿōḏ (Arabic Jubbʿadīn, al-Qutayfah District). Regarding the present number of speakers, there is no certain data available. Residents of Maaloula today estimate that there are fewer than three thousand speakers living within two of the villages (Maaloula and Ġuppaʿōḏ). More speakers formerly resided in these two villages, and in the village of Baxʿa, which was destroyed during the war * The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the HSE University in 2024 No. 24-00-019.
The left column of the newly published "Amorite-Akkadian bilinguals" contains words and sentences... more The left column of the newly published "Amorite-Akkadian bilinguals" contains words and sentences in a heretofore unknown Northwest Semitic language, with an Old Babylonian translation. The present study compares the verb morphology of this language with those of Biblical Hebrew and various Aramaic languages.
This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babyloni... more This paper offers an interpretation of an insufficiently understood verb form in the Neo-Babylonian letter OIP 114, 17:8, 29, thereby clarifying its contents. The word in question is shown to be an Aramaic verb form. This interpretation is supported by observations on the orthography and phonology of early Neo-Babylonian. It follows from the study that in eighth-century Neo-Babylonian two glottalized (‘emphatic’) consonants in the same word still underwent dissimilation, as in the second millennium bce (Geers’ law). The paper also demonstrates that, against communis opinio, erstwhile Aramaic fricative interdentals had shifted to stops by the eighth century bce, while the orthography of contemporaneous Aramaic alphabetic texts reflected an earlier stage of language evolution. This conclusion has been reached by means of comparing cuneiform renderings of proto-Semitic interdentals in West Semitic personal names in eighteenth-century bce Old Babylonian texts and in Neo-Babylonian texts...
Nisane Ergün was born in 1933 in Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz). She isa native and fluent speaker of Ṭ... more Nisane Ergün was born in 1933 in Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz). She isa native and fluent speaker of Ṭuroyo, a contemporary form of East-ern Aramaic. Although never formally educated, she is a gifted story-teller. Throughout her entire life, she has been engaged in subsistencefarming and animal husbandry, in much the same manner as herKurdish neighbours and other rural populations throughout northernMesopotamia. Her life story, here related in her own words, is thusan exercise in narrating history ‘from below’. She is an eyewitness tovarious dramatic periods in the recent history of Ṭur Abdin
Modern Western Aramaic is one of the most critically endangered Aramaic languages, and the only e... more Modern Western Aramaic is one of the most critically endangered Aramaic languages, and the only extant member of the Western Aramaic subfamily. Its speakers are among the few who have not migrated away from their original territory, but the Syrian Civil War (2011-present) has accelerated its endangerment and resulted in the abandonment of one of the three villages in which it was previously spoken. Modern Western Aramaic thus provides us with an opportunity to document a language precisely as it succumbs to some of the primary causes of language endangerment, i.e., conflict and migration. The following text, collected in 2020, discusses this community's experience during this conflict from the perspective of one of the few remaining competent speakers. We have contextualized this text with a discussion of the language and its grammar in comparison with the most recent descriptions, all of which were made decades prior to the war, when the language was much less endangered.
Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic, 2021
The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed desc... more The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed description of the history of the Aramaic verbal system. A key event in this history is what Goldenberg used to call 'the morphological revolution', i.e. the shift, within Eastern Aramaic, from the Middle Aramaic 2 verbal systems to those of Modern Aramaic. In the course of this shift, Eastern Aramaic gave up the inherited suffix conjugation 3 (*qatala) and the prefix conjugation (*yaqtulu) and developed a new repertoire of verbal forms, all of whose bases were deverbal adjectives in earlier stages of Aramaic's history
The paper shows that there is a pattern in the distribution of synthetic (šēp šarrim "the king's ... more The paper shows that there is a pattern in the distribution of synthetic (šēp šarrim "the king's foot") vs. analytical (kaspum ša awīlim "the boss's money") genitive constructions in Old Babylonian. The choice depends on the lexical feature of head nouns known as (in)alienability. Old Babylonian kinship and body part terms, as well as some other substantives, are "inalienable", which means they take only the synthetic construction. All other Old Babylonian nouns are "alienable", which means they admit both the synthetic and the analytical construction (kasap tamkārī and kaspum ša tamkārī "the merchants' money"). In the latter case, there is no general rule to predict the choice, yet in certain cases the two constructions display a non-random frequency distribution.
The grammar of the village dialects of Ṭuroyo remains poorly described apart from that of Midən, ... more The grammar of the village dialects of Ṭuroyo remains poorly described apart from that of Midən, and within the documentation there is a dearth of spontaneous conversations. Consequently, much about Ṭuroyo pragmatics and sociolinguistics in general also remains undescribed. We therefore present two short conversations between three residents of Kfarze in Tur Abdin, concerning a significant event in its recent history, together with a translation and a glossary. In addition to their value as oral histories of the Christian-Kurdish relationship in the region, they reveal significant details about the dialect of Kfarze, including 1) the contraction of triphthongs in ii-y verbs; 2) nouns consistently marked with l-when they express the agent of an 'ergative' preterite; and 3) the retention of 'soft' (unaspirated) ḳ in Kurmanji loan vocabulary. The presence of the last feature, and of frequent code-switching between Ṭuroyo and Kurmanji in the spontaneous speech of these villagers, attests to the bilingual situation in Kfarze.
The fable of an insect and a mouse (or some other animal), who marry and embark on a life togethe... more The fable of an insect and a mouse (or some other animal), who marry and embark on a life together, only to end in tragedy, is widely disseminated from the Mediterranean region to India. One version involving a beetle (Ṭuroyo keze, Kurmanji kêz) circulates throughout Anatolia and Iraq. The following Ṭuroyo and Kurmanji version was recorded during the 2020 summer field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Dērqube from a speaker of the Bequsyone dialect. She relates the narrative portions of the fable in Ṭuroyo, but switches to Kurmanji for its versified portions. In addition to the text and a translation, this study includes an interlinear glossing. It also discusses the motifs of the fable according to the standard classification scheme, as well as its relationship to other attested versions collected in various languages including Arabic, Kurmanji, and Turkish.
In Proto-Aramaic, the passive of transitive verbs belonging to all three principal stems-G, D and... more 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.
Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout sou... more Versions of the folktale Zêrka Zêra (in Kurdish)/Stērka Zerá (in Ṭuroyo) circulate throughout southeastern Anatolia. The story belongs to a widely-disseminated tale type, the ‘Bear's Wife’, which concerns a young woman who is abducted by a bear (or other wilderness creature) and is forced to spawn and rear his children before escaping or being rescued. The following Ṭuroyo version was recorded during the 2018 winter field season of the Russian expedition to Ṭur Abdin in the village of Ḥaḥ/Anıtlı from a speaker of the dialect of Bequsyone. It represents the first scholarly publication not only of the Ṭuroyo version, but of any version of this folktale. In addition to the folktale and a translation, the study includes a glossary of the vocabulary used within the text, reflecting some Ṭuroyo words that have not been documented elsewhere. The paper also discusses the motifs of the Stērka Zerá folktale according to the standard classification scheme of folk motifs.
Suffix conjugations (SCs) of East and West Semitic may not be traced back to the same verb form i... more Suffix conjugations (SCs) of East and West Semitic may not be traced back to the same verb form in Proto-Semitic. Rather, they evolved separately, by way of a 'common drift' in the two branches of Semitic. This is demonstrated, in particular, by a crass contrast, both in forms and diathetic meanings, between the SCs of East and West Semitic. Due to the scarcity of data, a gapless reconstruction of diachronic paths for neither of the two branches is possible. Only one thing remains certain: both the SC in East Semitic and non-passive forms of the SC in Central Semitic ultimately came about via verbalisation of adjectives, first primary and then deverbal ones.
The ventive is primarily a means of spatial and not “personal ” deixis (with K. passim), but it i... more The ventive is primarily a means of spatial and not “personal ” deixis (with K. passim), but it is different from deictic words of this ~ that, here ~ there type: the latter point to (the location of) the participants of a situation vis-à-vis the speaker, whereas the (+/–) ventive localizes (or, rather, orients) the situation or “fact ” (action, process or state) itself— primarily also vis-à-vis the speaker. That is why the ventive does not agree with personal arguments. Thus, in German the spatial deixis has two elements: dieser/hier vs. jener/dort, while the verb’s spatial orientation includes three gram-memes denoted by verbal prefixes: ‘hither ’ (her-) ~ ‘whither ’ (hin-) ~ Ø. Thus, heraufsteigen ~ hinaufsteigen ~ steigen.
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 gra... more 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.
[The paper provides a list of morphological innovations exclusively shared by Mlaḥsô and Ṭuroyo. ... more [The paper provides a list of morphological innovations exclusively shared by Mlaḥsô and Ṭuroyo. These point to the existence of a proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô, which was not an ancestor of any other modern Aramaic language known to us. A study of the basic lexicon of Mlaḥsô, in comparison with that of Ṭuroyo and NENA, supplies a lexical dimension to the proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô hypothesis. A second goal of the paper is to trace innovations and retentions of Mlaḥsô as compared with proto-Ṭuroyo/Mlaḥsô.]
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Papers by Sergey Loesov