#syriac — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

John McChesney-Young @[email protected] · 2026-05-06 · 15:55 UTC

The Pearlsong – Bibliographia Iranica
https://www.biblioiranica.info/the-pearlsong/
"The Pearlsong is an ancient poem that recounts the story of a Parthian prince sent by his parents on a mission to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a giant serpent...The poem was originally composed in #Syriac translated into Greek, and later paraphrased in Greek again in a homily. These three texts are all published here with a parallel English translation on facing pages..."

#syriac

Iran @[email protected] · 2026-03-27 · 07:38 UTC

https://www.europesays.com/iran/38264/ Flooding in Syria Forces Evacuation of Assyrian Villages #analysis #Arab #assyrian #chaldean #christian #east #Iran #Iraq #Israel #jacobite #Jordan #kurd #Lebanon #maronite #middle #nestorian #News #suryoyo #Syria #syriac #turk #Turkey #Yazidi

#yazidi #turkey #turk #syriac #syria #suryoyo

Conflicts @[email protected] · 2026-03-27 · 06:00 UTC

Flooding in Syria Forces Evacuation of Assyrian Villages

Tel Tamar, Syria — Flooding in Hasakah province has become an urgent test of the response capabilities of…
#Conflict #Conflicts #War #analysis #Arab #assyrian #chaldean #christian #east #Iran #Iraq #Israel #jacobite #jordan #Kurd #Lebanon #Maronite #middle #nestorian #News #suryoyo #Syria #syriac #turk #Turkey #Yazidi
https://www.europesays.com/2875597/

#yazidi #turkey #turk #syriac #syria #suryoyo

John McChesney-Young @[email protected] · 2026-03-11 · 13:36 UTC

Oldest known star map attributed to Hipparchus discovered beneath #Syriac Manuscript
https://syriacpress.com/blog/2026/03/09/oldest-known-star-map-attributed-to-hipparchus-discovered-beneath-syriac-manuscript/

#syriac

FID Nahost @[email protected] · 2026-01-15 · 13:43 UTC

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:

"Grammatica Syriaca" by Adalbertus Merx

[Halis: Orphanotropheum, 1867-1870]

http://dx.doi.org/10.25673/98554

#syriac #grammar

#catchoftheday #openaccess #menadoc #syriac #grammar

Mariam al-Masri @[email protected] · 2025-11-06 · 22:34 UTC

I'm getting desperate so am turning to the Fedi for help. Boosts will be appreciated.

I really need to find a private tutor of East Syriac. I do know Classical Arabic which I've heard helps, but can't find any sources or courses.

@medievodons @histodons #Syriac #Academic #History #Medieval #Medievallanguages #language

#syriac #academic #history #medieval #medievallanguages #language

Benjamin Suchard @[email protected] · 2025-09-10 · 14:57 UTC

CALL and DOT

Two conferences in the last three weeks: my first Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (as a speaker), in Leiden as always, and a day and a half of the 35st Deutscher Orientalistentag, in Erlangen.

Both were a lot of fun. I saw many different talks at CALL, too many to summarize, and mostly too off-topic as well. I was there to ask why we think Cushitic forms a single family within Afroasiatic (see also these blog posts). Despite the purposefully provocative title of my talk, I was not assaulted by any angry mobs of Cushiticists.1 The main question seems to be whether we really should disregard the lexicon when looking at subclassification (and then the next question should be whether the lexicon does show that Cushitic is a clade). It was also really cool to see several talks by young researchers whom I taught as first-years and who have now all finished their MAs and partially started PhD projects: shout-outs to Nina van der Vlugt, Melle Groen, and Jeroen van Ravenhorst. Post your slides online, guys!

Kollegienhaus Erlangen.

At the DOT, I co-chaired a panel on Semitic (in practice: mostly Hebrew) reading traditions together with Harald Samuel. While some of our presenters sadly had to cancel, we still had a great line-up, with exciting findings in every talk:

Chanan Ariel (Tel-Aviv University) proposed a highly original new explanation for the Biblical Hebrew phenomenon of dehiq, where consonants following certain unstressed vowels are geminated. According to Ariel, this is an orthoepic feature and applies to vocalic suffixes that alternate with zero, as well as some cases where the geminated consonant had to be kept apart from a following guttural. Works really well IMHO.

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) provided a thorough discussion of the ketiv-qere phenomenon, presenting an up-to-date linguistic view of its origins and purpose in hopes of spreading more awareness of this to less linguistically inclined Hebrew Bible scholars. One thing that stood out to me is that words that are present in the consonantal text but left unpronounced in the reading tradition (ketiv wela qere) are sometimes translated in targums and other ancient versions.

Jonathan Howard (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented his ongoing PhD research on the “Palestinian” vocalization system of Hebrew and Aramaic and pointed out that so far, there’s really no good evidence that it’s from Palestine. He’s hoping to find some, but it might be more impactful if he doesn’t.

Johan Lundberg (University of Oxford) walked us through the increasing complexity in Syriac punctuation signs, including the development of something that is roughly equivalent to an exclamation mark! Cool fact: in at least one of the few Syriac manuscripts of the entire Bible, the scribe has simply maintained the punctuation of each source text, resulting in several different systems coexisting in the same final work.

Emmanuel Mastey (Tel-Aviv University) presented a nice statistical inquiry into h-final spellings of 2m.sg. perfect verbs in Biblical Hebrew. Besides the very frequent case of נָתַתָּה ‘you gave’, Mastey finds that this spelling is especially common with verbs that have t as their third radical and, less so, with third-weak verbs. He suggests a phonological explanation for both classes; I wonder whether with the III-t roots, it may rather be motivated by the usefulness of distinguishing e.g. שתה ‘you placed’ from שת ‘he placed’.

Isabella Maurizio (University of Lorraine according to the programme, but I think that may be outdated? Sorbonne soon from what she told me) presented her recently completed research on the Second Column of Origen’s Hexapla, the oldest fully vocalized source (in Greek script!) for Biblical Hebrew. Big shock to me: Maurizio dates the Secunda to the 2nd c. BCE-1st c. CE, not the 3rd c. CE!

Marijn van Putten (Leiden University) appeared virtually to frighten the Hebraists with the tricky history of the Qur’anic reading traditions, with examples like one where a certain reader’s Arabic is notably more archaic than that of his teacher’s teacher. Since we barely know anything about who transmitted the Hebrew reading traditions, how much of this stuff are we missing due to a lack of data?

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen) continued the sceptical line by noting some features of Tiberian Hebrew that appear to be really late (quoting me[!] from an informal conversation in which I said that a certain change must have taken place “about two hours before Ben-Asher went to work that morning”). How do we reconcile this with the alleged presence of extremely early, First Temple period features in the reading tradition as well?

Christian Stadel (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) presented on some clearly late and some unquestionably early features of the Samaritan reading tradition and talked about how it relates to the consonantal text of the Samaritan Pentateuch more generally. It reminded me a bit of a presentation I gave on a similar topic several years ago. I only have one semester of Samaritan Hebrew, though—taught by Christian Stadel!—while Stadel is a real expert on the Samaritan languages. So it was reassuring to hear him argue for similar conclusions as well as present a whole lot more interesting data.

Last of all (due to alphabetization, but it worked out alright), I got to present on the project on the construction of the Biblical Aramaic reading tradition that I’ve been doing at Leuven since 2019. I’m not sure the argument I presented is fully sound, so it was great to be able to discuss it with some colleagues afterwards.

The Semitics section continued this morning. In her section keynote, Na’ama Pat-El (University of Texas Austin) presented her SemitiLEX project (recorded talk by another project member, haven’t watched it yet), looking at cognate Semitic lexemes not just in terms of roots, but also looking at morpho-lexical features like gender and pluralization. Unexpected result: building phylogenetic trees based on these data shows Akkadian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic clustering as four or five separate branches, instead of Northwest Semitic clustering together and then being closer to Arabic than to Akkadian.

Maria Rauscher (Université Félix Houphouet-Boigny) presented her ongoing work on a dictionary of Arabic verbal nouns, focusing on the difficult case of k-r-h ‘to dislike’. As we had some extra discussion time for both Pat-El’s and Rauscher’s talks, there was time enough for the audience to draw up battle lines and get into the details of linguistic theory (such as: are morphemes even a thing?).

Stefanie Rudolf (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) presented on two Qur’anic phrases that she suggests are unrecognized borrowings from Ethiosemitic. “The Lord of the East and the West” is attested in an Ethiopian Early Sabaic inscription, while Rudolf proposes the Arabic root f-t-w ‘to judge’ may be borrowed from Ethiosemitic f-t-ḥ. While she acknowledges the phonological difficulty of the last case, maybe we should reckon with the possibility of an unknown (South?) Ethiosemitic language that lost the pharyngeals acting as an intermediary: in the beginning of her talk, she pointed out that early Islamic sources refer to an Abyssinian with a name that is not Ge’ez but pre-Amharic (I think Ababut?), which I found very cool.

Jan Retsö (University of Gothenburg) pulled off the trick of reading out a text with no slides or handout while being perfectly easy to follow and entertaining. After an overview of the scholarship on Semitic–Ancient Egyptian cognates and loanwords, Retsö responded to Alexander Borg’s recent claim that there are lots of specifically Arabic loanwords in Egyptian. Retsö thinks there’s something there but urges for methodological precision.

Mohammad I. Ababneh (University of Halle) presented on some difficulties in Safaitic paleography, including merged letters and ligatures and other weird letter shapes. Nice to see some discussion of former Leiden colleague Chiara Della Puppa’s dissertation!

Finally, Vera Tsukanova (Philipps-Universität Marburg) took a look at the phonological adaptation of Persian loanwords into Arabic from a Semiticist and diachronic perspective. Historical differences in aspiration go a long way in accounting for prima facie unexpected sounds in borrowings.

And now, the conference is kind of on hold for various business meetings, which I took as my cue to leave. In conclusion, I would like to note that I am posting this from a high-speed train, which feels very futuristic. While some discussions in the field stay the same for what seems like forever—Paul Kahle’s lecture at the first DOT in 1922 was referenced multiple times—I take this as a sign that like Deutsche Bahn passengers, no matter the inevitable delays, detours, and frustrations, overall, we are getting somewhere.

Only by a toddler, possibly for unrelated reasons. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amharic #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Bible #Cushitic #EastCushitic #Egyptian #Hebrew #linguistics #Samaritans #Syriac #Ugaritic

#akkadian #amharic #arabic #aramaic #beja #bible

Benjamin Suchard @[email protected] · 2025-06-27 · 12:48 UTC

‘Woman’ in Modern South Arabian, Amorite, and Ugaritic

Some Modern South Arabian languages have a weird-looking word for ‘woman’: Mehri tēθ, Harsusi and Jibbali teθ. The θ makes it look similar to Proto-Semitic *ʔanθ–at-, which underlies Ugaritic a͗θt, Hebrew ʔiššā, Syriac <ʔntt-ʔ> at-o, Akkadian aššat- ‘wife’, etc. The same root also gives Arabic ʔunθ-ay– ‘female’1. But what about that initial t-?

Source

For years, I’ve kind of assumed the Modern South Arabian words also come from something like *ʔanθ–at-, with the first part being lost and *θ-et then metathesizing to *teθ. It’s weird, but it was my best guess. But here’s a new guess I like better.

In late 2022 (paywalled), Andrew George and Manfred Krebernik published what they aptly referred to as “two remarkable vocabularies”, containing what is probably the first known connected text in Amorite, a Northwest Semitic language of the early second millennium BCE. One of the many surprises these texts contain is the word for ‘woman’ (unambiguously written with a Sumerogram in the Akkadian translation), ta-aḫ-ni-šum. Based on comparisons to the Semitic words above and known Amorite/Akkadian spelling conventions, this looks like *taʔnīθ-um, yet another different noun formation from the *ʔ-n-θ root. As I learned from a recent handout byTania Notarius, Ugaritic also attests a form that looks related: ti͗nθt ‘women’, ‘females’, plausibly /tiʔnīθ-āt-u/.

Both of these forms show a t- prefix, part of a pattern that usually forms abstracts—although concrete nouns in this pattern also occur, like Hebrew < Aramaic talmīḏ– ‘student’. And the Amorite, at least, lacks a feminine suffix. So that’s starting to look like our MSAL *teθ. Could this be a full cognate, with *teθ coming from *taʔnīθ-?

That depends on whether we can get rid of the first two radicals, *ʔ and *n. As far as I know, Proto-Semitic *ʔ was regularly lost on the way to Modern South Arabian. So that’s fine. What about *n, is this one of the (surprisingly) many branches of Semitic where it assimilates to following consonants? Let’s check out some likely etyma with *n before a consonant:

PS *ʔanta ‘you (m.sg.)’ > Mehri, Harsusi hēt, Jibbali hɛt (if this is the right etymon)
PS *ʔantum ‘you (m.pl.)’ > Mehri ətēm, Harsusi etōm, Jibbali tum, Soqotri ten
PS *ʕVnz- ‘she-goat’ > Mehri, Harsusi wōz, Jibbali oz, Soqotri o’oz (? but then where did the *ʕ go? [update])

That’s all I’ve got, for now. The plural pronoun looks good, though. Of course, in *taʔnīθ-, the *n isn’t directly before the θ, so why should it assimilate? After assigning the stress to the first *a—a strange, but reliable rule in pre-MSAL—we could imagine something like
*táʔnīθ > *táʔnəθ (vowel reduction) >
*táʔənθ (metathesis) >
*táʔəθθ (assimilation) >
*teθθ (loss of the glottal stop, vowel contraction, MSAL vowel weirdness)
*teθ (degemination—not entirely clear whether this is regular).

Writing it out like that, the non-gemination of the θ (also word-internally, as in the Mehri dual tēθ–i) may also be a problem for assuming a derivation from the *ʔ-n-θ root.2 Still, this is commonly assumed; supporting evidence comes from the plural forms, like Mehri yənīθ, where the n is visible. So, since the t- in *teθ really does look like a prefix, I think Amorite *taʔnīθ- is an exciting form to compare.

And apparently “in the dual, obsolete” (Wiktionary), ‘testicles’. ↩︎
Or maybe it isn’t; none of the other potential examples of *n-assimilation yield geminates. Either way, reflexes of the *n are partially missing in some other languages where it should yield a geminate: Hebrew ʔḗšeṯ ‘wife of’ < *ʔiθ-t-, Akkadian alt- ‘wife’ < *ʔaθ-t-. I assume these are language-internal, ad hoc simplifications of the geminate, maybe triggered by the lack of stress in the frequent construct and pronominally possessed forms or by the creation of a pre-consonantal geminate when the short *-t- form of the feminine suffix was used. Perhaps that’s also what happened in MSAL, something like *teθθ–k ‘your wife’ > *teθ–k, with generalization of the *teθ base. ↩︎

#Akkadian #Amorite #Arabic #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Syriac #Ugaritic

#akkadian #amorite #arabic #hebrew #linguistics #modernsoutharabian

FID Nahost @[email protected] · 2025-04-23 · 10:29 UTC

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc:

"Horae Syriacae Seu Commentationes Et Anecdota Res Vel Litteras Syriacas Spectantia" by Nicholas Patrick Wiseman

[Romae: Bourlié, 1828]

dx.doi.org/10.25673/98944

#Syriac

#catchoftheday #openaccess #menadoc #syriac

Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @[email protected] · 2025-04-15 · 19:13 UTC

**Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library**

“_The results reveal that most manuscripts contain fewer than 20 excerpts, but a small number show much higher levels of excerpting, highlighting the immense intellectual and literary activities implicated in their production._”

Maeir N (2025) Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library. PLOS ONE 20(3): e0320265. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320265.

#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #Culture #Charts #Religion #Taxonomy #Christianity #Analysis #Philology #Syriac #Academia

#openaccess #oa #research #article #culture #charts

John McChesney-Young @[email protected] · 2025-04-09 · 12:51 UTC

Material philology and #Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library | PLOS One
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0320265

#syriac

FID Nahost @[email protected] · 2025-03-19 · 10:11 UTC

On the occasion of tomorrow's #nowruz the New Year and spring festival, which is celebrated mainly in the Persian cultural area, we would like to draw your attention to this #manuscript from 1850.
It contains a Kurdish poem of praise in #Syriac characters.

#CatchOfTheDay
#OpenAccess on
#MENAdoc

https://opendata.uni-halle.de//handle/1981185920/120523

#happynowruz

#nowruz #manuscript #syriac #catchoftheday #openaccess #menadoc

Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @[email protected] · 2025-03-12 · 19:04 UTC

@mariam_al_masri_author @bookstodon

#Syriac is referenced extensively in the chapter.

#syriac