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 Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

This book explains the verbal system of the Aramaic of Daniel in the context of current research on grammaticalization, which, though first mentioned by Meillet in 1912, did not flourish until the beginning of the 1980’s, and has only more recently been applied to the study of Ancient Near Eastern languages. Although various aspects of the Aramaic of Daniel have been subject of numerous studies, including a few exhaustive studies on the verbal system in the last century, it remains among the most difficult to explain. The explanation offered here is coherent with the historical development of Aramaic as well as the observable tendencies in the development of human languages in general.

This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

Grammarians have been unable to provide a sufficient explanation for the verbal system of Biblical Aramaic by means of the standard categories of tense and aspect. Michael B. Shepherd exposes this situation and suggests a way out of the present impasse through distributional analysis by proposing that Biblical Aramaic has a primary verbal form for narration and a primary verbal form for discourse. This simple yet comprehensive proposal holds true not only for Biblical Aramaic but also for extra-Biblical Aramaic texts. This volume is an indispensable resource for courses in Biblical Aramaic and for anyone who wishes to read and understand the Biblical Aramaic corpus.