Translated material
Field studies of the modern Western Aramaic language
We continue the publication of the essays of Sergey Lyozov , professor of the Institute of the Classical East and the antiquity of the Higher School of Economics devoted to the study and documentation of Aramaic languages. See the previous notes of the cycle: “ The origins and genuine, or myths that we live ”, “ Aramaic is the language without the army and the fleet ”, “ The adoption of the chicken (about the vocabulary of the Turoo) ”, “Keys to the history of the Aramaic verb” , “All conception of non -rest” , “Aramaic as a native language of Jesus from Nazareth” . (By tradition, we retain the author’s punctuation.)
Some time after the Middle East was Islamized and Arabized, Christian and Jewish communities became minority communities here. Arabization led to the widespread decline of Aramaic languages, in the north and east of their pre -Islamic area (in the upper and lower Mesopotamia), as well as in the West (in Syria and Palestine). In particular, Christians and Jews in their intellectual work were increasingly used by Arabic and not Aramaic.
The difficulty for a philologist is that our historical sources report more and more “about victories and exploits” (A. A. Galich), but only accidentally speak of a language situation. Therefore, our knowledge about the real life of the living languages of the Protorist Asia between the Arab conquest and the end of the 19th century are fragmentary. For example, we know when the Mongol conquerors came to the upper Mesopotamia (in Turabdin, where I started writing this note), but we do not know when and how native speakers of Kurdish languages appeared there. (I would dream of getting information about the history of the Aramaic community of Turabdin through an analysis of lexical borrowings from Arabic, Kurdish and Ottoman, but I don’t know how to do it.)
The reader of the previous notes from the series “Notes of the Philologist” probably remembers that modern Aramaic languages are divided into eastern and western branches. This division has, from the point of view of the author of these lines, the genealogical meaning: Eastern Aramaic is “daughters” (or rather “granddaughters”) of the Law -Aramaic language, and Western Aramaic are descendants of the Pra -Aramaic. We do not have direct data about when the Aramaic was divided into these two branches. I begin from the fact that this happened long before the creation of the first Aramaisian monuments (IX century BC), that is, in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. e.
In previous notes, I spoke mainly about Turuo, which belongs to the eastern branch of Aramaic languages. And now we will move to the Western branch.
In the pre -commercial period, it is represented in particular, scarce in volume but important for the history of the language of monumental epigraphics of the VIII - VII centuries BC. e., the “imperial Aramaic” of the Achaemenid era (mainly the 5th century BC), Aramaic texts from Kumran, and three more “average” literary buildings created in the 1st millennium. E.: Jewish Palestinian, Samaritan and Christian Palestinian Aramaic.
When we move in the last third of the 19th century, in the whole Levant we find only three living Western Aramaic dialects - the last remnants of the Western dialect continuum, which, judging by the cumulative data, in the 7th century BC. e. He walked from the latitude of Aleppo to Gaza (that is, to the south of Palestine). These are the dialects of three adjacent villages in the mountains of Kalamun (northeastern part of the Antilivan ridge), an hour by car by car northeast of Damascus. In the foreseeable period of time (before the start of the current civil war in Syria), one of these villages, Maalul 1 (maʕlūla) was inhabited mainly by Christians of two faiths - parishioners of the Antiochian Patriarchate and Melkita (Catholics of the Byzantine rite). In two others-Bach (Baxʕa) and Dzhubbadin (ǧubbʕadīn, the Aramaic name-ġuppaʕōḏ) lived Muslim-Sunnis.
Before the civil war in Syria, the Maaluly population was more than three thousand people (according to the 2004 census - 2,762 people). In 2013, the village became the theater of military operations, almost all the inhabitants fled. In the winter of 2020–2021, almost more than two hundred inhabitants remains there, a significant part of the village was destroyed in the war and is still not restored.
In Bach, a Muslim village with a special Aramaic dialect, 1405 people lived according to the 2004 census. In the civil war, Bach was completely destroyed. Now she lies in ruins, no one lives there.
The population of Dzhubbadin is now more than four thousand people, the village was only weakly affected by the war: it was bombed, but it did not become the theater of military operations.
My own interest in the modern Aramaic, East and Western, was initially determined by the task of creating the history of the Aramaic language [ 1 ], which my colleagues and I set for ourselves about ten years ago. The history of Aramaic, in my understanding, is primarily the story of his verb (or, as they say, the “verb system”).
The most catchy feature of the history of the verb in the Aramaic is that some of the Aramaic languages of verbalization (“vanity”) subjected as many as three types (or three morphological models) of productive verbal adjectives formed from the verbs of the original breed - * Qātil , * Qatīl and Qattīl .
At the same time, the Eastern Aramaic group throughout its history is more prone to innovation than the Western , although the verb of both groups develops in the same direction: personal verb forms (or “times”), inherited from the Praaramaic language, are phased by innovative, withdrawal forms. I would like to notice not quite jokingly that the modern Western Aramaic (SZA) is a “classic Syrian today” (sometimes I’m talking to students): unlike the Turuo and almost all other eastern Aramaic, in the modern Western Aramaic (SZA) there are still reflexes of two basic forms of the PRARARARY VERGOM:
1) the past tense * Qatal (hidden due to suffixes as Russian present-beating);
2) the Praaramia future * yiqtol (hidden at the expense of prefixes and partly suffixes).
In the same place, in the SZA, there are innovative shemale forms, the derivatives of the verbal adjectives * Qatīl (for transition verbs) and * qattīl (for non -transitional). The German dialectologist Werner Arnold, my colleague and direct predecessor in the study of the SZA, described the meaning of these forms as a “perfection”, but in fact it depends on the lexical semantics of the verb.
And in my deep conviction, here, at the intersection of the morphological model of the root and lexical semantics of the root “rushing into verbs”, and the Bleeding Edge of the language is manifested - what may be explained by retroactively, but can hardly be predicted.
These considerations led the author of these lines and his graduate student according to the Higher School of Economics, Alexei Duntsov in Kalamun, where we worked in December last year. The fact is that the case of the field recordings of the SZA is insufficient for that subtle work with the morphological semantics of the verb that we have been engaged in in recent years. We need data elction in some groups of verbs, that is, working with informants on special questionnaires. Well, I wanted to expand the corps, that is, to record and publish new texts. This was seriously engaged in Werner Arnold, who spent about two years in Kalamun (1985–1987), meanwhile, as a result of the war, the situation of this relict language worsened.
And, to be honest, over the few years of working with unwilling Aramaic languages, I have developed a consciousness of responsibility (that which may replace religion for me) - a consciousness of responsibility for them or even almost “in front of them”. You see, if the case is about a “big” and “cultural” language, like Russian, then linguists (both native speakers of this language and experts who learned this language as a foreign one) sometimes get to all possible depth. Let us recall at least the works of the Russistic of Yuri Derynikovich Apresyan, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak and Elena Viktorovna Paducheva. And the inconsistent languages that have not yet died out by the time when they begin to study them should be content with a hungry ration: a brief description of the phonology and morphology of one of the dialects, a collection of field texts, a dictionary.
If we talk about the places where I work: this is the case with the Arabic languages of Anatolia, and to even more extent - with the numerous dialects of Kurmmanji there, in the east of Turkey. And then my heavy -handed consciousness of justice and the anti -bourgeois attitude turn out to be the covered: this is "racism"! Hundreds of scientists gather annually at the Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew conference, meanwhile, several languages are dying every year, each of which is no worse than Biblical Hebrew. And - nothing, we accept it.
In other words, I, since I took up the documentation of Turayo, thought with a guilt consciousness (I wanted to say “I felt”) that the SZA even more than Turio needs our (mine and my colleagues) attention.
And in the fall of 2018, I appointed myself a deadline-a reconnaissance trip to Kalamun will be in November 2020. But in November, I fell ill with Covid, the deadlines moved a little.
Be that as it may, December 5, Alexei Duntsov and I flew out of Domodedov Turkish Airlines along the route Moscow - Istanbul - Beirut. (There were almost no flights to Damascus from nowhere.) From Beirut by taxi - to Damascus. The Syrian Vael Mosa, our Moscow teacher of Damasky Arabic, created us in Situ support: we were met shortly after we crossed the border of Lebanon and Syria, staged an overnight stay in Damascus, and on December 6th was taken to Maalulo.
There we were settled in the strange house of the Holy Tekla monastery, and we spent the next two weeks there, working with informants from Maaluly and the neighboring Dzhubbadin - we went there by car, overcoming the checkpoints by passing our new comrade Yusef.
As a result, we made an idea of the current sociolinguistic situation and laid the foundation for the following trips: how to get to Kalamun, when the borders are partially closed due to the pandemic, and the movement in Syria is limited due to martial law; where to live; How to establish contact with SZA carriers ready to work with foreign scientists; How to ensure the ability to safely move around the region, etc.
We have successfully elited materials to study the grammatical semantics of the verb. We interviewed informants on the morphosontactic verb questionnaire: diagnostic sentences were presented to the carriers in the Damasian Arabic dialect, and they spontaneously transferred them to the SZA.
And we also managed to record several dozen texts related to the material and spiritual culture of the inhabitants of Maaluly and Dzhubbadin (description of agricultural work, hunting stories, lives and miracles of saints, stories about creatures of lower mythology, and so on), as well as personal memories (what is called Oral History), including about the recent civil war.
I hope to return there on the twentieth of March and decipher a series of stories about the war with informants. I have intuition that from this, Alyosha Duntsov and I will get a publication that is interesting not only to Aramaic dialectologists.
In the next note, I, as I want to believe, will tell you about that trip to Syria, which I am just getting ready for now.
And in conclusion, I will quote Alyosha's travel notes published on Facebook. (He gave permission for this.) In my opinion, a literary talent woke up in the mountains of Kalamun.
***
The courtyard in front of our pilgrims house and the walls of the monastery are visited by fragments of shells. Electricity is turned on in a matter of hours, so you need to catch it in order to charge the equipment necessary for work. It’s so cold in our rooms that steam is coming from your mouth at night. <...> I sleep in a sweater, pants, warm socks and a hat under four woolen blankets (more of them are typical blankets with the UN refugee logo). Maalula Malonaslen is, many houses seem non -residential: knocked out windows, to varying degrees destroyed facades, potholes from bullets and fragments on the walls. And before the war, in the winter, the number of residents of Maaluly fell to a minimum (about 1 thousand), now the figure of a couple of hundred people will be the most bold assessment. <...> Maalule was lucky. The neighboring Aramaome -speaking village of Bach now lies in ruins, and the inhabitants are scattered. One of them lives in Damascus and Yabruda, someone in Idlib, someone fled outside the country.
***
The identity of the inhabitants of Dzhubbadin is somewhat different from what we saw in a neighboring village. We were corrected a couple of times, saying that they say not “in Aramaic” ( b-rōmay ), but “in Syrian” ( p-siryēni ). <...> In general, they have fewer exotic ideas about themselves, unlike the inhabitants of the neighboring village 2 . Our language was and remains uninigned, and its native speakers, apparently, initially called ḳ uryōyin (“village”, that is, “from our village”)-then this word became the confessional “Christian”. In Dzhubbadin, we visited the local Aramaic Museum. <...> This is a real treasure! A collection of objects of traditional culture and economy. We excitedly began to run around the museum, photographing exhibits, many of which have signatures in Arab letters and Certo, and then came up with a view of the video in which the informant calls the exhibits and briefly talks about their mission, answering our questions: Mah Hešme? (“What is it called?”) And EXət miščġel? (“How does it work?”) Some words do not have some words in the Werner of Arnold and, therefore, in the published corps.
***
The third day is in Dzhubbadin, and today there will be only one photo. This is Hassan Isa, known in the village under the name Abu Ali Mubin, 64 years old, an electrician. And he surprisingly tells. He has a sonorous voice, a clear pronunciation. He speaks brightly, expressively, emotionally and with pleasure, modulates his voice. You hear. In four hours with him, we recorded several times more than in the previous three days. The feeling that the embodied Aramaic itself, living on this earth, has almost three thousand years, came to us.
***
Bach is located above Maaluly on the plateau (Maalula - 1400–1500 m, Bach - 1600–1700 m). There are no rocks around the Bach, and there are almost no trees either, so all the old houses in Bach are built of unbroken brick-saman ( Lebna ). The inhabitants of Bachs have traditionally been engaged in livestock. Women went to Maalulu to sell milk and cheese in the baskets that wore on their heads. The inhabitants of the Bachs are Muslims-Sunnis. They accepted Islam relatively late ( b-zamanōy ə t turkiyye, “in Turkish times”). Until the fifties of the last century, a woman named Aziza lived in Bach, who married a Muslim, but remained a Christian. Gradually, the remaining Christians of the Bachs moved to Maalulu (yesterday we met one of the inhabitants of Maalula, whose ancestors come from Bach). The ruins of the ancient monastery, which in Maalul, call ḏ ayril mar antrōwes (monastery of St. Andrew), and in Bach - ōb ə Š Šaybōn (Abu Shaiban), are preserved. The inhabitants of the Bahu retained the superstitious fear of the ruins of the monastery, so they did not pull it on the stones, went there to pray and give vows. <...>
Now Bach is a terrible sight. Broken houses and roads, broken walls and collapsing floors, the wind knocks on the shutters of the windows. In the bakers and cafes that we drove past, kitchen utensils were scattered on the floor, as if they had left the village in a hurry. Empty houses reflect an echo, and its only inhabitants are snakes and eagles. We met one snake on the feedback from Bach, when we stopped to see how Sumy grows (before the entire region on an industrial scale, he harvested Sumy and sold it in Damascus). We stood examined the branches and fruits of Sumakh, Abu George 3 told something, we recorded his speech, I heard a loud hiss behind him, two seconds I thought that it could be, turned and saw a huge black snake two meters from me. "Snake!" I shouted. When she realized that now not two eyes were looking at her, but six, she decided to crawl into a hole. I did not have time to photograph it. S.V., filming the video, managed to shoot a tail crawling into the hole. Abu George said that for twenty years he had not seen such large snakes and that if he had a stick, he would have killed her and hung her in Maaluly Square so that people would look. Well, in the same place, on the spot, we elited Qtīl of a static verb:
ḥūya rappa ṭmar b-wakre
“The big snake hid (Qatal) in its hole”;
ḥūya rappa ṭmer b-wakre
"A large snake is hiding (Qtīl) in its hole."
***
My gaze settled in one photo, which I decided to post the first. On it, Abu George tells, it seems, our main text about the war. Near the stone faces, Brom (Brōm) and Lwaise (Lwīza), the owners of the house froze. Rather, the rooms in which the recording takes place. Комнаты — потому что это всё, что у них осталось. Он с женой, детьми и престарелым отцом был вынужден бежать (буквально бежать, ногами!) под огнем в соседний городок Айн эт-Тине, а оттуда — на попутках в Дамаск. Когда он вернулся в Маалулу, то обнаружил, что большой добротный дом, который строил еще его дед, сожжен дотла. За несколько лет они смогли кое-как обустроить для жилья одну комнату, в которой теперь ютятся вокруг печи со своим немногочисленным имуществом. На полу коробки гуманитарной помощи от Антиохийского патриархата, на стене икона Богородицы, которую вышила бисером Луиза. Они рассказали нам историю их знакомства в Ливане, откуда Луиза родом. Он встретил ее у пекарни и спросил: «Пойдешь за меня?» Она ответила: «Пойду». Они поженились, и он привез ее в Маалулу.
1 С некоторых пор Маалула получила статус города, но я буду по традиции называть ее деревней. Рядом расположены две мусульманские деревни, и по-арамейски каждую из них, как и Маалулу, называют просто bl ṓ ta ('местность'). Это арамеизированное арабское слово bilā́d ('городá' и отсюда 'страна, местность').
2 То есть жителей христианской Маалулы. — С. Л.
3 Староста Маалулы, мы с ним подружились. — С. Л.