This work is a detailed documentation of the Neo-Aramaic dialect spoken by Assyrian Christians in the region of Urmi (northwestern-Iran). It consists of four volumes. Volumes 1 and 2 are descriptions of the grammar of the dialect, including the phonology, morphology and syntax. Volume 3 contains a study of the lexicon, consisting of a series of lists of words in various lexical fields and a full dictionary with etymologies. Volume 4 contains transcriptions and translations of oral texts, including folktales and descriptions of culture and history. The Urmi dialect is the most important dialect among the Assyrian Christian communities, since it forms the basis of a widely-used literary form of Neo-Aramaic.

This is the first book-length study of the Neo-Aramaic dialect spoken by the people of Jilu, one of the smaller Nestorian tribes of the Hakkari mountaints in South-Eastern Turkey. Like the other Nestorian tribes, the people of Jilu were forced to leave their homeland in 1915, and have ever since lived in exil. The study is based on research conducted with two elderly Jilu speakers living in Chicago. The Neo-Aramaic dialect of Jilu, which is now heading towards extinction, possesses a number of unique linguistic features. The book contains an introduction of Jilu and its people, a grammatical description, a long text with an English translation, a glossary, and a bibliography.

Ranging from cuneiform to shorthand, from archaic Greek to modern Chinese, from Old Persian to modern Cherokee, this is the only available work in English to cover all of the world's writing systems from ancient times to the present. Describing scores of scripts in use now or in the past around the world, this unusually comprehensive reference offers a detailed exploration of the history and typology of writing systems. More than eighty articles by scholars from over a dozen countries explain and document how a vast array of writing systems work--how alphabets, ideograms, pictographs, and hieroglyphics convey meaning in graphic form. The work is organized in thirteen parts, each dealing with a particular group of writing systems defined historically, geographically, or conceptually. Arranged according to the chronological development of writing systems and their historical relationships within geographical areas, the scripts are divided into the following sections: the ancient Near East, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Additional parts address the ongoing process of decipherment of ancient writing systems; the adaptation of traditional scripts to new languages; new scripts invented in modern times; and graphic symbols for numerical, music, and movement notation. Each part begins with an introductory article providing the social and cultural context in which the group of writing systems was developed. Articles on individual scripts detail the historical origin of the writing system, its structure (with tables showing the forms of the written symbols), and its relationship to the phonology of the corresponding spoken language. Each writing system is illustrated by a passage of text, and accompanied by a romanized version, a phonetic transcription, and a modern English translation. A bibliography suggesting further reading concludes each entry. Matched by no other work in English, The World's Writing Systems is the only comprehensive resource covering every major writing system. Unparalleled in its scope and unique in its coverage of the way scripts relate to the languages they represent, this is a resource that anyone with an interest in language will want to own, and one that should be a part of every library's reference collection.

The alignment splits in the Neo-Aramaic languages display a considerable degree of diversity, especially in terms of agreement. While earlier studies have generally oversimplified the actual state of affairs, Paul M. Noorlander offers a meticulous and clear account of nearly all microvariation documented so far, addressing all relevant morphosyntactic phenomena. By means of fully glossed and translated examples, the author shows that this vast variation in morphological alignment, including ergativity, is unexpected from a functional typological perspective. He argues the alignment splits are rather the outcome of several construction-specific processes such as internal system harmonization and grammaticalization, as well as language contact.

Being direct descendants of the Aramaic spoken by the Jews in antiquity, the still spoken Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects of Kurdistan deserve special and vivid interest. Geoffrey Khan’s A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic is a unique record of one of these dialects, now on the verge of extinction. This volume, the result of extensive fieldwork, contains a description of the dialect spoken by the Jews from the region of Arbel (Iraqi Kurdistan), together with a transcription of recorded texts and a glossary. The grammar consists of sections on phonology, morphology and syntax, preceded by an introductory chapter examining the position of this dialect in relation to the other known Neo-Aramaic dialects. The transcribed texts record folktales and accounts of customs, traditions and experiences of the Jews of Kurdistan.

The detailed study of a rare Neo-Aramaic variety from north-eastern Iraq offered by Lidia Napiorkowska in A Grammar of the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw is a contribution to the documentation of the endangered world of spoken Aramaic. The comparative and contact-sensitive approach of the monograph situates the dialect of Diyana-Zariwaw in a wider context of Semitic languages on the one hand, and of the local varieties of Iraqi Kurdistan on the other. Next to a systematic account of phonology and morphology, the book covers a range of syntactic features and is accompanied by a corpus of translated texts and a glossary, arranged according to the Aramaic, as well as English entries.

The Semitic Languages presents a unique, comprehensive survey of individual languages or language clusters from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms. The Semitic family occupies a position of great historical and linguistic significance: the spoken and written languages of the Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arabs spread throughout Asia and northern and central Africa; the Old Semitic civilizations in turn contributed significantly to European culture; and modern Hebrew, modern literary Arabic, Amharic, and Tigrinya have become their nations' official languages. The book is divided into three parts and each chapter presents a self-contained article, written by a recognized expert in the field. * I. General Issues: providing an introduction to the grammatical traditions, subgrouping and writing systems of this language family. * II. Old Semitic Languages * III. Modern Semitic Languages Parts II and III contain structured chapters, which enable the reader to access and compare information easily. These individual descriptions of each language or cluster include phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and dialects. Suggestions are made for the most useful sources of further reading and the work is comprehensively indexed.

Aus dem Inhalt: Schriftenverzeichnis Otto Jastrow F. Abu-Haidar, Negation in Iraqi Arabic J. Aguade, Ein marokkanischer Text zum "schlafenden Kind" A. A. Ambros, Eine statistische Exploration in der Geschichte der arabischen Lexik W. Arnold, Neue Lieder aus Ma'lu-la P. Behnstedt, M. Benabbou, Zu den arabischen Dialekten der Gegend von Ta-za (Nordmarokko) L. Bettini, Notes sur la derivation verbale dans les dialectes bedouins de la Jezireh syrienne K. Beyer, Neue Inschriften aus Hatra H. Bobzin, Theodor Noldekes Biographische Blatter aus dem Jahr 1917 F. Corriente, The Berber Adstratum of Andalusi Arabic W. Diem, Nichtsubordinatives modales ?an yaf'ala. Ein Beitrag zur Syntax der nachklassischen arabischen Schriftsprache W. Fischer, Unterordnende und nebenordnende Verbalkomposita in den neuarabischen Dialekten und im Schriftarabischen Weitere Beitrage von: S. E. Fox, A. Geva-Kleinberger, G. Goldenberg, H. Grotzfeld, M.-R. Hayoun, W. Heinrichs, C. Holes, S. Hopkins, B. Ingham, B. Isaksson/A. Lahdo, R. de Jong, O. Kapeliuk, A. S. Kaye, K. Kessler, G. Khan u.v.a.