Aramaic - a language without an army and fleet

Linguist Sergey Lyozov , professor of the Institute of the Classical East and Antiquity to the Higher School of Economics, continues to talk about studies of the Aramaic language (see earlier [ 1 ]).

Several theses before the start of our conversation:

1. Aramaic is a living language with a three thousand -year -old written history. (There are few of them on Earth, comparable, perhaps only Greek and Chinese.) And I must say that the word “language” itself is inaccurate. Aramaic - he is a “language” in the same sense as the “Slavic”, that is, a group of related languages ​​with a common ancestor. (The same is true for Chinese, and for Greek.)
2. Aramaic is a language that probably has only one well -known medium, but what, Jesus from Nazareth. I may be able to mention how this fact affects the study of the Aramaic language in one of the notes of this cycle.
3. Aramaic - the language "without the army and the fleet." There is an aphorism known to everyone, attributed to the linguist Max Weinreyuh, an Yiddish specialist: “ A Language Is a Dialect with An Army and Navy” (“Language is a dialect with an army and a fleet”). The meaning of this statement is that the difference between language and dialect is sometimes determined by external conditions. " Army and Navy " capaciously indicate the status of a language as a state.

And Aramaic lived almost the entire history without statehood. And, therefore, not only “without the army and the fleet”, but - what is really important for the language - without school and, therefore, without normal. However, without exception, it was not without exception: in the Persian empire of the Achaemenids, the first superpower in the history of mankind (539–331 BC), the Aramaic language was official and in this capacity was used more than the ancient Persian, native Iranian language of the Achaemenid dynasty.

When a non-philologist thinks and speaks of the language, in most cases he actually thinks not about the structure of the language itself, but about the literary norm and the letter. About the norm that is often established by special documents. In high school, I was taught the Russian language for eight years, that is, the rules - how to write the unverified word of the cow through -o- and how to highlight the introductory words with commas. (People, that is, authorized by this authority, change the rules from time to time - not necessarily because the language itself has changed.)

And my mother loved to listen to the radio transmission about the Russian language, in which it went mainly about orthoepy, that is, about normative pronunciation. Of these programs, my mother (originally from Kharkov) learned the eldest Moscow norm and spread it among me-a resort: Sasisi, Zhira, Tall. In “Living until Monday”, one of the best Russian films, the principled teacher of history Ilya Semenovich Melnikov pronounces the primary school teacher: “ “ Lying ” - there is no such verb, Golubushka Taisiya Nikolaevna, where you took it, we are not on the market! "

That is, I. S. Melnikov has a tough legalist approach: it is appropriate to speak as it is prescribed by the public norm, and in the market it is not a language at all. And there is no verb, and there are no many well -known nouns.

But the majority of languages ​​live and die without a literary norm and writing. Aramaic is interesting here by the fact that he handed such a manner for three thousand years, and during this time some are very few - his varieties were still (to our happiness) codified recording, normalization.

I understand that many contemporaries violate the norm, unlike the unfortunate Taisiya Nikolaevna, consciously, sometimes in the order of the game. However, imagine that the “right” language of the school, in which the teacher was supposed to speak with students and colleagues, simply not. (And to some extent, this reflects what is happening with the Russian language of the last thirty years, but we will not take bread from Maxim Kronhaus.)

And here we return to where the author of these lines left the reader in the previous note: January 2018, an intelligence expedition, the city of Middle in the Turkish Upper Mesopotamia, the first clash of our group with a unnecessary Aramaic language of Turoo . Unceptible - this in our case means “irregular”, field notes - that is, the first of them were published in 1881.

In English, we speak about related languages ​​that they are “sisters” (like, say, Castilian and Catalan) or “mother-mother” (like the vulgar Latin of the Iberian Peninsula and modern Iberian-Romanian languages). Then about Turuo we can say that this is the “niece” of the classic Syrian, the most famous of the ancient Aramaic languages. Or, perhaps, a "granddaughter's niece."

The Lassic Syrian is one of the ancient Aramaic languages, the common language of Aramaic Christianity in the 1st millennium BC. e. Before the Arab conquests of the 7th century e. The Aramai Christians Mesopotamia were divided between Byzantium and Sasanid Iran and almost never had their own statehood. (The Syrian language, contrary to its name, was used sooner in modern Turkey, Iraq and Iran than in modern Syria.) So, in this language between the 3rd and XIII centuries BC. e. A large and versatile interesting corps of Christian literature was created.

For our conversation, one thing is important here: the language of this body is highly standardized. To notice the grammatical differences between the Syrian texts of the III and XIII centuries, you need to know what to look for what grammatical parameters to pay attention to. That is, the Syrian army and fleet did not, but the norm was. Probably, he was very well taught in church and monastery schools, grammars and dictionaries were compiled, that is, the church structure replaced the state here. (Actually, this is still like this: I know people who write books in this language, just as in Europe a scientist can now write a text in Latin.)

Where did our uninterrupted language Turayo come from, the reader will ask.

The literary Syrian language is based, as is commonly believed, in the dialect of the Edessa (in Syrian Oryāy), it is a modern Turkish city of Shanlyurf (or simply Urfa), located several to the west of Midyat, the center of our expedition in 2018–2020. For historical reasons, it was this dialect that received the status of a standard written language for two eastern Christian denominations, which in Europe are often called Yakovites and Nestorians.

Meanwhile, 250 km east of Edessa, on the western bank of the Tiger, in the highlands called Turabdin spoke in another dialect of Aramaic. It was the “mother” of Turuo and the “sister” of the Edessan dialect. The “sisters” were very similar, but the methods of historical linguistics allow us to find differences between them - differences that are already noticeable in the early centuries of the Christian era.

The literary Syrian, like standard Latin, eventually became “equal to itself”: it did not change, unlike the dialect that gave rise to it (Vernakular, as linguists say). As a result of historical shocks in the urf, they ceased to speak at the local Aramaic, while in Turabdin, Aramaic quietly lived and changed, not noticed by anyone, until the German orientalists Oygen Okam and Albert Socin, in the last third of the 19th century. But I will talk about this later.

Sergey Lyozov

1. TRV-SCIENCE.ru/2020/04/21/ISTOKI-I-podlinnoe/