The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr (review)

Modern dialects of Aramaic have attracted serious linguistic attention only in the last decade, although their study has been conducted for over a century. Despite their obvious interest for both linguists and anthropologists, they have largely been neglected by Semiticists. The surging interest in the languages and their speakers came not a moment too soon, as these languages are fast disappearing along with their aging speakers. Wars, religious animosity, and mass immigration have depleted the villages and towns in Iraq and Iran that once were teeming with Aramaic-speaking Christians and Jews. Among these languages, Neo-Mandaic is doubly orphaned. It is spoken by an obscure religious minority, which, unlike Jewish and Christian speakers of various Neo-Aramaic dialects, has attracted little scholarly attention. The number of speakers was small even in the heyday of the language, but now that the volatile political situation has forced them out of their native lands, they are dispersed in a number of countries, congregated in small pockets that do not allow for the preservation of their ancient language. Charles Häberl has, therefore, done a great service to both linguists and scholars of the native people of the region by publishing his extensive study of one of the Mandaic dialects. But the book offers much more than simply a grammatical description of a dying language. In his detailed and well-referenced introduction he carefully, though briefly, outlines not only the modern history of the language and its sociolinguistic situation, but also the poor state of its study, almost as cautionary tale. It becomes clear that the modern language was not studied on its own, but rather always in the context of its classical form and as a footnote to it (pp. 23–29). Häberl seeks to address the modern language as a linguistic unit in its own right. The result is fascinating and highly informative, with some peripheral lacunae hopefully to be filled in later publications.

The volume under review is currently the most well-informed and comprehensive study of Mandaic as a dialect group, not only of the particular dialect described in it. The information about subdialects in particular is invaluable (pp. 36–37). Häberl tracked down obscure and rare books describing the language and its speakers and has collated the information clearly. The introduction concludes with a Swadesh list, complete with IPA representation and transcription. In the following chapters, each word is transliterated and glossed. This may sound like an ordinary feature, but, in fact, it is quite uncommon in Semitic studies, where examples are typically presented in the original alphabet (and there are many alphabets for this language family), with only a translation, thus making most studies impenetrable to nonspecialists. As this language has been so poorly studied even by Semitists and Aramaicists, transcribing and glossing all the examples is a particularly helpful addition.

Classical Mandaic belongs to the Eastern branch of Late Aramaic, with Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac. The modern language, however, differs substantially from modern varieties of Late Aramaic, none of which is a direct descendant of either Syriac or Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. These descendants, known collectively as Northeastern Neo-Aramaic, are highly innovative. For example, they have essentially replaced their entire verbal system and innovated another, primarily based on verbal adjectives and infinitives. Mandaic, on the other hand, is much more conservative. It retained its suffix conjugation (“perfective” in Häberl’s terminology), and even most of the thematic vowel classes, both of these being inherited from West Semitic. The derived stems (primarily D and C) are retained and remain semantically distinct. Compare that to Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects where the derived stems have been lexicalized, and their distribution is random, without any semantic significance. Particularly interesting is the retention of the reflexive forms, although they are on their way to extinction–the reflexives already seemed to be doomed in the classical language, and yet they somehow survived to the modern period with their function intact. Furthermore...