NEO-ARAMAIC DIALECT STUDIES THE NEO-ARAMAIC DIALECT OF SAT (HAKKÂRI (original) (raw)
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The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Sat (Hakkâri, Turkey)
2008
Sat (s t), today called kiyaka, was a large Assyrian village situated in a valley at the foot of the Sat Da mountain range in the Ottoman province of Hakkâri, just two kilometres North of the present Iraqi border, nine kilometres SouthEast of the large Kurdish village of Oramar (now officially called Da lıca) and roughly twenty kilometres SouthEast of the district of Jilu. 2 My informants recounted that in its heyday on the eve of the First World War Sat was a conglomerate of seven neighbourhoods, formerly contiguous small villages, each with its own church. 3 There is no mention of a Neo-Aramaic dialect unique to the village of Sat in any known source, and scarcely anything about the Assyrians who lived there (the satnaye). 4 The latter were peasants living in a state of serf-1 Notes on transcription: Stress is penultimate unless indicated otherwise. Emphatic words are indicated by a preceding superscript plus sign, e.g. + wana 'ewe'. Apart from the short vowel phoneme , the phonemes i, e, a, o and u are generally short in closed syllables and open unstressed final ones, and long otherwise, as in ybešlutun [ybešlu:tun] 'you (pl.) cook', šodrile [šodri:le] 'he sent them', qaroya [qa:ro:ya] 'cock', xe [xe:] 'one', ktu [ktu:] 'write (sg.)!', mini [mi:ni] 'who?' A few cases of long vowels in closed syllables are indicated by a macron, e.g. št n 'drink (pl.)!' In historical forms, however, long vowels are always indicated by a macron. 2 For the geography of the area of Sat and Sat Da together with photographs see Dickson (1910: 360, 371-75). 3 The churches of Sat were called Mar Mari, Mar Giwargis, Marta, Mat Maryam, Mar Lazar, Mar Adday and Mat Laqalayta. 4 The first mention of the Christians of Sat known to me goes back to 1610, in which time Sat was a bishopric of the Ancient Church of the East; see Wilmshurst
Neo-Aramaic Studies: A Survey of Recent Publications
"Reviews of: Fassberg, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Challa Häberl, The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr Khan, The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Qaraqosh Khan, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Sulemaniyya Khan, The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Barwar Khan, Neo-Aramaic Dialect Studies Khan, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Urmi Mutzafi, The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Betanure Poizat, Manuel de soureth Rees, Lishan Didan, Targum Didan Talay, Neuaramäische Texte in den Dialekten der Khabur-Assyrer Talay, Die neuaramäischen Dialekte der Khabur-Assyrer"
Aramaic still survives as a spoken language among some Christian and Jewish communities in the Middle East. The dialects can be divided into various groups. The most diverse group is that known as North Eastern Neo-Aramaic. Dialects of this group are spoken by Christian and Jewish communities. Many of these communities, however, have now been displaced and the younger generations no longer speak the dialects. The description of these dialects is of immense importance for Semitic philology. The dialects exhibit linguistic developments that are not only interesting in their own right but also present illuminating parallels to developments in earlier Semitic.
This chapter introduces various local forms of Aramaic in the Graeco-Roman Near East which had become written prestige languages some time after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire. It covers Qumran, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Eastern Mesopotamian and Arsacid Aramaic, since they all exhibit a consid.erable influence from the Achaemenid chancellery language and share a common cultural frømework. By assessing the shared retentions and innovations, it becomes possible to outline principles of a føirly complex dialectøl \andscape characterized by diversity, close contact and extensive multilingualism. In this environment, Aramaic was used for a number of different purposes: in the Western and Eastern peripheries, that is, North Arabia and Parthia, it seems to have been confined