Tashīl al-ṣarf wa-l-naḥw in the 18th-century Syriac and Arabic grammars: the cases of Josephus Simonius Assemani and Ğirmānūs Farḥāt (original) (raw)

On December 31, 1707, Josephus Simonius Assemani (d. 1768) completed the composition of his Turoṣ mamlo suryoyo, an innovative Syriac grammar seeming to introduce, among other interesting peculiarities, a new, simplified orthographic system: «novis(que) litteris vocalibus loco punctorum in corpore, ad faciliorem syriacae linguae lectionem, animata». However, Assemani’s orthographic system is also found in a manuscript written two months earlier by the Maronite Ğibrāʼīl Ḥawwā (d. 1752), Rituale per le Cerimonie della Messa scritte in Lingua Siriaca colla Rubricella Carsciunica, who further employed his system in the edition of his Liber Psalmorum Davidis idiomate Syro dated 1737. The question that naturally emerges is to whom to attribute the paternity of this innovative orthographic system. In the same year (1707), the Maronite Ğirmānūs Farḥāt (d. 1732) successfully produced one of the most simplified and well-organised grammars of the Arabic language, the Baḥṯ al-maṭālib wa-ḥaṯṯ al-ṭālib. This paper proposes to investigate both the aims of and the ways of perceiving grammatical simplification expressed by the two Maronite authors in their Syriac and Arabic grammar books respectively.