Syriac language

Syriac
ܠܫܢܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ leššānā Suryāyā
Spoken in: Roman Syria
Language extinction: marginalized by Arabic from the 8th century, evolved into Neo-Aramaic vernaculars around 1200 AD (conventional date).
Language family: Afro-Asiatic
 Semitic
  West Semitic
   Central Semitic
    Northwest Semitic
     Aramaic
      Eastern Aramaic[1]
       Syriac 
Writing system: Syriac abjad
Language codes
ISO 639-1: None
ISO 639-2: syc (classical)
ISO 639-3: syc – Syriac (classical)
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
An eleventh-century Syriac manuscript.

Syriac (ܠܫܢܐ ܣܘܪܝܝܐ leššānā Suryāyā) is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th centuries,[2] the classical language of Edessa, preserved in a large body of Syriac literature.

It became the vehicle of Christianity and culture, spreading throughout Asia as far as Malabar and Eastern China and was the medium of communication and cultural dissemination for Arabs and, to a lesser extent, Persians. Primarily a Christian medium of expression, Syriac had a fundamental cultural and literary influence on the development of Arabic which replaced it towards the end of the eighth century. Syriac remains the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity.

Contents

Classification

Syriac is a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, the Semitic language sub-family, the West Semitic language branch, and the Aramaic language group.

Syriac is written in the Syriac alphabet.

Geographic distribution

Syriac was originally a local Aramaic dialect in northern Mesopotamia. Before Arabic became the dominant language, Syriac was a major language among Christian communities in the Middle East, Central Asia and Kerala.

History

The history of Syriac can be divided into three distinct periods:

Origins

Syriac began as an unwritten spoken dialect of Old Aramaic in northern Mesopotamia. The first evidence we have of such dialects is their influence on the written Imperial Aramaic from the fifth century BC. After the conquests of Syria and Mesopotamia by Alexander the Great, Syriac and other Aramaic dialects became written languages in a reaction to Hellenism. Old Syriac orthography is drawn from Arsacid Aramaic. In 132 BC, the kingdom of Osroene was founded in Edessa with Syriac as its official language. Syriac-speakers still look to Edessa as the cradle of their language. There are about eighty extant Old Syriac inscriptions, dated to the first three centuries AD (the earliest example of Syriac, rather than Imperial Aramaic, is in an inscription dated to AD 6, and the earliest parchment is a deed of sale dated to AD 243). All of these early examples of the language are non-Christian. As an official language, Old Syriac was given a relatively coherent form, style and grammar that is lacking in other Old Eastern Aramaic dialects.

Literary Syriac

Further information: Syriac literature

In the third century, churches in Edessa began to use Syriac as the language of worship. There is evidence that the adoption of Syriac, the language of the people, was to effect mission. Much literary effort was put into the production of an authoritative translation of the Bible into Syriac (ܦܫܝܛܬܐ the Pšîṭtâ or Peshitta). At the same time, Ephrem the Syrian was producing the most treasured collection of poetry and theology in the Syriac language.

The sixth beatitude (Matthew 5:8) from an East Syriac Peshitta.
Ṭûḇayhôn l'aylên daḏkên b-lebbhôn: d-hennôn neḥzôn l'allāhâ.
'Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.'

In 489, many Syriac-speaking Christians living in the Roman Empire fled to Persia to escape persecution and growing animosity with Greek-speaking Christians. The dubbing of the Persian church as 'Nestorian' heretics by the West led to a bitter division in the Syriac-speaking world. Thus, Syriac developed distinctive western and eastern varieties. Although remaining a single language with a high level of comprehension between the varieties, the two employ distinctive variations in pronunciation and writing system, and, to a lesser degree, in vocabulary.

Western Middle Syriac is the official language of the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, the Maronite Church, the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, the Malankara Syrian Orthodox Church, the Mar Thoma Church and the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church.

Eastern Middle Syriac is the liturgical language of the Assyrian Church of the East (including the Chaldean Syrian Church), the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Syro-Malabar Church.

Syriac literature is by far the most prodigious of the various Aramaic languages. Its corpus covers poetry, prose, theology, liturgy, hymnody, history, philosophy, science, medicine and natural history. Much of this wealth remains unavailable in critical editions or modern translation.

From the seventh century onwards, Syriac gave way to Arabic as the spoken language of the region. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century led to the rapid decline of the language. In many places, even in liturgy, it was replaced by Arabic. Revivals of Syriac in recent times have led to some success with the creation of newspapers in literary Syriac (ܟܬܒܢܝܐ Kthābānāyā), and the translation of many Arabic and western books into Syriac. Among the Syriac churches of Kerala, Malayalam often replaces Syriac. Literary Syriac is often used as a spoken language by clerics who do not speak the vernacular dialects.

Grammar

Syriac words, as with those in other Semitic languages, are built out of triliteral roots, permutations of three Syriac consonants. For example, the root ܫܩܠ, ŠQL, has the basic meaning of taking, and so we have the following words that can be formed from this root:

Nouns

Most Syriac nouns are built from triliteral roots. Nouns carry grammatical gender (masculine or feminine), they can be either singular or plural in number (a very few can be dual) and can exist in one of three grammatical states. These states correspond, in part, to the role of grammatical cases in some other languages.

However, very quickly in the development of Classical Syriac, the emphatic state became the ordinary form of the noun, and the absolute and construct states were relegated to certain stock phrases (for example, ܒܪ ܐܢܫܐ/ܒܪܢܫܐ, bar nāšâ, "man", literally "son of man").

In Old and early Classical Syriac, most genitive noun relationships are built using the construct state. Thus, ܫܩܠܝ̈ ܡܠܟܘܬܐ, šeqlay malkûṯâ, means "the taxes of the kingdom". Quickly, the construct relationship was abandoned and replaced by the use of the relative particle ܕ, d-. Thus, the same noun phrase becomes ܫܩ̈ܠܐ ܕܡܠܟܘܬܐ, šeqlē d-malkûṯâ, where both nouns are in the emphatic state. Very closely related nouns can be drawn into a closer grammatical relationship by the addition of a pronominal suffix. Thus, the phrase can be written as ܫܩܠܝ̈ܗ ܕܡܠܟܘܬܐ, šeqlêh d-malkûṯâ. In this case, both nouns continue to be in the emphatic state, but the first has the suffix that makes it literally read "her taxes" ("kingdom" is feminine), and thus is "her taxes, those of the kingdom".

Adjectives always agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify. Adjectives are in the absolute state if they are predicative, but agree with the state of their noun if attributive. Thus, ܒܝܫܝ̈ܢ ܫܩ̈ܠܐ, bîšîn šeqlē, means "the taxes are evil", whereas ܫܩ̈ܠܐ ܒܝ̈ܫܐ, šeqlē ḇîšē, means "evil taxes".

Verbs

Most Syriac verbs are built on triliteral roots as well. Finite verbs carry person, gender (except in the first person) and number, as well as tense and conjugation. The non-finite verb forms are the infinitive and the active and passive participles.

Syriac has only two true morphological tenses: perfect and imperfect. Whereas these tenses were originally aspectual in Aramaic, they have become a truly temporal past and future tenses respectively. The present tense is usually marked with the participle followed by the subject pronoun. However, such pronouns are usually omitted in the case of the third person. This use of the participle to mark the present tense is the most common of a number of compound tenses that can be used to express varying senses of tense and aspect.

Syriac also employs verb conjugations such as are present in other Semitic languages. These are regular modifications of the verb's root to express other changes in meaning. The first conjugation is the ground state, or Pə`al (this name models the shape of the root). form of the verb, which carries the usual meaning of the word. The next is the intensive state, or Pa``el, form of the verb, which usually carries an intensified meaning, The third is the extensive state, or Ap̄`el, form of the verb, which is often causative in meaning. Each of these conjugations has its parallel passive conjugation: the Eṯpə`el, Eṯpa``al and Ettap̄`al respectively. To these six cardinal conjugations are added a few irregular forms, like the Šap̄`el and Eštap̄`al, which generally have an extensive meaning.

Sounds

There is some variation in the pronunciation of Syriac in its various forms. The various Modern Eastern Aramaic vernaculars have quite different pronunciations, and these sometimes influence how the classical language is pronounced, for example, in public prayer. Classical Syriac has two major streams of pronunciation: western and eastern. Pronunciation has also been affected by other languages.

Consonants

Syriac shares with Aramaic a set of lightly contrasted plosive/fricative pairs. In different variations of a certain lexical root, a root consonant might exist in plosive form in one variation and fricative form in another. In the Syriac alphabet, a single letter is used for each pair. Sometimes a dot is placed above the letter (qûššāyâ, or strengthening; equivalent to a dagesh in Hebrew) to mark that the plosive pronunciation is required, and a dot is placed below the letter (rûkkāḵâ, or softening) to mark that the fricative pronunciation is required. The pairs are:

Some Syriac speakers, however, reduce each of these pairs to a single unvarying consonant. For example, an Arabic-influenced speaker of Western Syriac might reduce the set to /b/, /ɣ/, /d/, /f/ and /t/, with only the /k/-/x/ pair remaining.

As with other Semitic languages, Syriac has a set of five emphatic consonants. These are consonants that are articulated or released in the pharynx or slightly higher. The set consists of:

Syriac also has a rich array of sibilant consonants:

Table of Syriac consonants
Place of articulation → Labial Coronal Dorsal Radical (none)
Manner of articulation ↓ Bi­labial Labio-
dental		 Den­tal Alveo­lar Post-
alveolar		 Pharyn-
gealized
coronal		 Pala­tal Ve­lar Uvu­lar Pharyn-
geal		 Glot­tal
Plosive voiced b d ɡ  
voiceless p t tˁ k q   ʔ   
Nasal m n  
Trill r    
Fricative voiced v ð z ɣ ʕ
voiceless f θ s ʃ sˁ x ħ h
Approximant l j w (ʕ)

Vowels

As with most Semitic languages, the vowels of Syriac are mostly subordinated to consonants. Especially in the presence of an emphatic consonant, vowels tend to become mid-centralised.

Classical Syriac had the following set of distinguishable vowels:

In the western dialect, /ɑ/ has become /ɔ/, and the original /o/ has merged with /u/. In eastern dialects there is more fluidity in the pronunciation of front vowels, with some speakers distinguishing five qualities of such vowels, and others only distinguishing three. Vowel length is generally not important: close vowels tend to be longer than open vowels.

The open vowels form diphthongs with the approximants /j/ and /w/. In almost all dialects the full sets of possible diphthongs collapses into two or three actual pronunciations:

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ according to SIL Ethnologue
  2. ↑ Beyer, Klaus; John F. Healey (trans.) (1986). The Aramaic Language: its distribution and subdivisions. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. pp. 44. ISBN 3-525-53573-2. 

See also

External links

- ܣܘܖ̈ܝܝܐ
Syriac Christianity
Churches (West Syrian)
Maronite Church · Syriac Catholic · Syriac Orthodox
 16th c. icon of the Virgin Mary from Sinai
Churches (East Syrian)
Ancient Church of the East · Assyrian Church of the East · Assyrian Evangelical Church · Chaldean Catholic Church
Churches (in India)
Chaldean Syrian Church · Jacobite Syrian Christian Church · Malabar Independent Syrian Church · Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church · Mar Thoma Church · Syro-Malabar Catholic Church · Syro-Malankara Catholic Church
Languages
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic · Bohtan Neo-Aramaic · Chaldean Neo-Aramaic · Garshuni · Hértevin · Koy Sanjaq Surat · Syriac · Malayalam · Mlahsô · Senaya · Turoyo
National identity
Naming issues · Assyrian identity · Chaldean identity  · Aramaean identity