WRITTEN TUROYO W olfhart Heinrichs Among the three branches of Neo- (Western, Central, and Eastern) it is only the Eastern branch which-at least in some of its manifestations-can pride itself on a certain historical dimension in that it has several centuries of attested history. This is true for both Christian and Jewish varieties of the language. The vernacular of the plain of Mosul was turned into a written idiom at least since the beginning of the seventeenth century, the time of its earliest attestation, but probably already much earlier, as can be deduced from the fact that, according to reports, this language was no longer fully understood in the nineteenth century due to its archaic features (cf. Macuch 1976, 91). The written form of this language had apparently been created by priests of the so-called school of Alqosh for both Bible translations and religious poetry for the common people. The oldest attested Neo-Aramaic Midrashim of the Kurdistani Jews belong to the same period (Sabar 1976, xxix). In the 1830s another dialect, that of Urmia in Persian Azerbaijan, was made the basis of another written language through the efforts of the American missionaries (Justin Perkins and others) who had been sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to serve the Nestorian community in those parts. This developed into the most successful of all written Neo-Aramaic languages, and it is still very much alive today, although threatened by emigration and dispersal of its users in the West. As for the Central branch of Neo-Aramaic and, more particularly, Tun5yo, the language of the Jacobites in the Tur 'Abdin mountains in southeast Turkey (and the diasporas that have emanated from that region), it has been the prevailing view among specialists dealing with the culture of the Tur 'Abdin that the vernacular had, until a few years ago, never been reduced to writing. To quote a recent authority, Helga Anschiitz in her documentation on the Syrian Christians of the Tur 'Abdin (Anschutz 1984) says (my translation): "Only recently has the Turoyo language been put down in transcription through the efforts of Hellmut Ritter and Otto Jastrow; until then it had been transmitted only orally." This statement needs certain qualifications. The first pertains to scholarly writing systems for Turoyo that precede the period of what we might call the Ritter renaissance in Turoyo

181 182 W olfbart Heinrichs studies. The second qualification refers to the practical writing system that has been devised and used during these past few years, and the third one will point out earlier attempts at writing Turoyo for practical purposes. Let me take up these three points separately in the order mentioned. In singling out the work of Ritter and Jastrow, Anschutz has, of course, neglected to mention the respectable volume of Ttiroyo texts (in transcription and accompanied by a translation into German) that was published in 1881 by Eugen Prym and Albert Socin (Prym-Socin 1881 ). Their transcription system was extremely phonetic and detailed, so much so that Adolf Siegel in his Laut- und Formen/ehre des Neuaramiiischen Dialekts des Tur Abdin (Siegel 1923) introduced a simplified version of their system without, however, attempting anything like a phonemic way of spelling, for which the times were not yet ripe. But even Hellmut Ritter who initiated the recent revival of Ttiroyo studies could not be persuaded to use a phonemic transcription in the edition of his text collection. Ritter was a philologist of the highest caliber, but not a linguist in the modern sense of the word, and it seems to me that he had the feeling that, after a lifetime of dealing with written texts, he now wanted to reproduce a living language right from the mouths of its speakers without imposing on it the abstractions of a phonemic analysis. It is, however, only the first part of his corpus of texts (stories 1-92) which is presented in an elaborate phonetic spelling; the rest is given in a simplified orthography (stories 93-116) in which he dispenses with a great number of diacritics. This was done for practical reasons (Ritter 1967, *39*) and with the express hope that this system would be adopted by the speakers of the language. Indeed, some of Ritter's native informants have used his transcription in their letters to him (see facsimile in Ritter 1967, 36-37). I have no information whether it is still in use. What all this amounts to is the striking fact that in the scholarly field we have so far been presented with two full-fledged phonetic systems and two simplified ones, but with only one phonemic analysis and a transcription system based on it. The latter was devised by Otto Jastrow for his phonology and morphology (including some texts) of the dialect of Midin (Jastrow 196 7, 3 1985). It should be mentioned in passing that Prym-Socin 1881 and Siegel 1923 represent the town dialect of Migyag (Migyoyo), while Ritter's collection contains texts in this as well as in the village dialects of 'Iwardo ('lwarnoyo), Anl)il (Nil)loyo), Kfarze (Kfarzoyo), Midin (Midwoyo), and of the region called Raite (comprising seven villages). As far as the second rectification of Anschiitz's statement is concerned, she had probably not been aware at the time she wrote her book that an effort was under way to create an orthography and a literary language for Ttiroyo. This was happening in Sweden where a considerable number ofTtiroyo speakers had found asylum and where according to Swedish law their children had the right to be taught at school in their mother tongue. So, in 1983, Dr. Yusuf Ishaq and his collaborators published a primer for first-graders entitled Toxu