Sergey Loesov

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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.]

[The study aims at establishing the Turoyo exponents for the two-hundred word Swadesh list and providing their etymologies. It is based on a searchable corpus of Turoyo and fieldwork. Special attention has been paid to intra-Turoyo dialectal differences in the basic lexicon. The etymological results are, roughly, as follows: 72 per cent of words have Aramaic etymology, 13 per cent are Arabisms, and 8 per cent are Kurdisms.]

This study addresses the words unique to the extant Neo-Assyrian corpus. All of them are listed in the paper, with etymological and philological notes wherever feasible or appropriate. Two foci of the inquiry are innovations in the basic lexicon of Neo-Assyrian and productive rules of word-formation in this language.

In this paper we are trying to combine interests of authors and collaborators into one non-mutually exclusive concept and logic flow aiming to create a framework for searching of a migration of words from one cluster to another; this enables us to define a semantic shift well before it become obvious. We show how introduced graph-logic model can be applied for analysis of migration of the meaning of sentences indicating, quite often, a paradigm shifts. Using Artificial Intelligence as an example we illustrate development of AI from philosophy of mind to science, science fiction and technology, including games in science, technology, and further education. Several examples how proposed model with supportive searching framework applied in mentioned areas detecting evolving processes are presented.

Turoyo is the most archaic among modern Eastern Aramaic languages (with the exception of Neo-Mandaic), hence its importance for the history of Aramaic. Numerous features of Turoyo verbal morphology are easily traceable back to Classical Syriac proto-forms in so far as formal shapes are concerned. For this reason, the cases in which certain Turoyo forms do not stand in direct continuity with the assumed Syriac proto-forms promise new results in the reconstruction of the Middle Aramaic ancestor of Turoyo.

The note deals with future-time readings of the Perfect in Turoyo, an Eastern Ar-amaic language of south-eastern Turkey. The Perfect of Turoyo is a tense-aspect form whose etymology is not trivial for PERFECT (in the sense of linguistic typology) and whose meaning has not yet been described closely enough.