H. ezi Mutsafi Knihy

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Betanure, which has hitherto remained unattested, is among the rarest and most seriously endangered varieties of Aramaic spoken at the present time. One of the most archaizing Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties and a member of the Lishana Deni dialect cluster of northernmost Iraq, the dialect is currently spoken in Israel by no more than three dozen elderly people, of whom only a small minority are proficient speakers. The grammatical description of the dialect is synchronic, but it includes etymological and historical comments as well as several paragraphs dealing with diachronic processes. The large and variegated corpus of texts, based on narratives furnished by the last two superb speakers of the dialect, comprises, inter alia, descriptions of the village of Betanure and its history, the fauna and flora of the region, agriculture and other occupations of the Jewish villagers, customs and traditions, legends, folktales, anecdotes and amusing stories. The glossary is extensively etymological and offers much comparative data drawn from numerous Neo-Aramaic varieties, apart from recourse to Classical Aramaic lexical data.

This book describes the dialect of the Jewish community of the town of Koy Sanjaq in eastern Iraqi Kurdistan which is now spoken only by approximately 200 elderly people in Israel and is heading towards extinction. The dialect, which until now has remained virtually univestigated, displays the typical features of the Jewish NeoAramaic dialects east of the Greater Zab river, e. g. the shift of the Old Aramaic interdentals to l and the merger of the third person masculine and feminine singular independent pronouns into a common form o. The phonological analysis, though synchronic in principal, deals also with major diachronic processes which have shaped the phonological profile of the dialect. In morphology, the complicated verbal system of the dialect is described in great detail. The book contains a selection of texts which represents the different genres of oral literature (historical narrative, fable, Jewish legend, oral translation of the Bible). The comprehensive glossary is extensively etymological and offers new insights based on comparative data from numerous Aramaic dialects, most of them as yet undescribed.