Shabo Talay, Die Neuaramäischen Dialekte Der Khabur-Assyrer

208 Book Reviews / Aramaic Studies 7.2 (2009) 195–212 Shabo Talay, Die neuaramäischen Dialekte der Khabur-Assyrer in Nordostsyrien: Einführung, Phonologie und Morphologie (Semitica Viva, 40; Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2008). xxix, 479 pp. ISBN 978–3447057028. Shabo Talay, Neuaramäische Texte in den Dialekten der Khabur-Assyrer in Nordostsyrien (Semitica Viva, 41; Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz Verlag, 2009). xv, 712 pp. ISBN 9783447057011. With the publication of Shabo Talay’s two-volume study of the Neo-Aramaic dialects of the Khabur Assyrians, a large blank in our knowledge of Aramaic has been filled in. Since the late 1980s, a renewed interest in the contemporary forms of Aramaic, continuing the work of the pioneers of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, resulted in a steady stream of mostly descriptive grammatical studies and some interesting collections of texts. These studies included the Western Neo-Aramaic dialect of Ma#lula and the other villages near Damascus as well as the most important specimens of the Eastern Aramaic dialects in Tur Abdin, present-day Turkey. As Talay’s introduction and bibliography in the first volume show, the production of the last two decades also included important studies on dialects of the NENA-group (North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic), the dialects of northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and the extreme northeast of Turkey: a number of the southern Christian dialects such as Alqosh and Qaraqosh, a northern Christian dialect such as Jilu, a dialect from the Urmia group such as the Christian dialect of Sardaroud, and a number of Jewish dialects such as Koy Sanjaq and Arbil. However, the dialects of the Assyrian Christians that lived in the Hakkari Mountains, making up at least half of the NENA dialects, had been largely neglected. The present study is the first attempt to present a systematic overview of these dialects. Its title, however, does not mention the Hakkari Mountains. As many of the readers of Aramaic Studies will be aware, the Assyrians of this region were forced to leave their mountain homes during the First World War, fleeing first to Urmia in Iran, later to northern Iraq. Part of the Assyrians, especially those that lived in Iraq before the war, were content to resettle and accept the terms of the new Iraqi state that was established in 1932.Others,whose homelands in the Hakkari Mountains had been allotted to Turkey, wanted their own autonomous province and refused to settle in areas where that was not possible. The conflict between these Assyrians and the Iraqi state ended in a bloody episode in 1933, when many Assyrians were killed and their patriarch expelled to Cyprus. After international negotiations, the Assyrians were allowed to move to the Jazirah region in northeastern Syria, then under French mandate, © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/147783509X12627760049994 Book Reviews / Aramaic Studies 7.2 (2009) 195–212 209 not far from the border with Iraq and Turkey. There, in a string of villages along the river Khabur, they succeeded in recreating much of the community life of the Assyrian clans of the mountains, living in small agricultural settlements, family by family and clan by clan, changing the edge of the desert into rich farmland. In these isolated villages, whose inhabitants struggled to survive the difficult circumstances in a life oriented towards church and family, the dialects that had developed in the isolated mountain valleys of Kurdistan survived until today, touched only superficially by its new surroundings. Talay’s general introduction in the grammatical volume admirably recreates this history, summarizing existing literature and adding information that he himself gathered during long periods of fieldwork between 1997 and 2005.His overview of the names in use for this group (pp. 5–9) will prove especially helpful, though understanding does not solve the problems of translation (compare the author’s difficulties in translating the term suraye [‘Christians’, ‘Syrians’, ‘Assyrians’] in the second volume). Especially his information on the tribal structures of this group of Assyrians, their internal subdivisions and links with Kurdish tribal federations, is a welcome addition to older literature on this subject. In combination with the results of the linguistic analysis, this also enabled Talay to propose a refined subdivision of the dialects that are spoken by the Assyrians along the Khabur. Largely based on phonological characteristics, the author groups the twenty-five different dialects into five clusters, of which Tiyari, Txuma, and Hakkari are the three most important—a division conforming mostly, but not completely, to the subdivisions recognized by the Assyrians themselves (p. 47,n.91). Talay does not comment on their diachronic relationships, though some of his examples suggest that the dialect of Baz, one of the Hakkari dialects, is the most conservative of the Khabur dialects (cf. pp. 51, 180, 205, 447). Notably, no real koine seems to have developed, a fact that Talay attributes to the isolation of many of the villages during most of the twentieth century. The bulk of the first volume consists of a detailed grammatical description of the phonology and morphology of these dialects. Every paragraph includes examples from a number of sub-dialects illustrating the many communalities as well as the dialectal variety present in his material. In most cases, the author refrains from theorizing about the mutual relationships between the dialects or between these dialects and earlier forms of Aramaic. In a few cases, this leads to a somewhat confusing presentation, when the strict synchronic approach is mixed with categories from older Semitic or Aramaic grammar. This is the case in the treatment of the bgadkpat letters, where Talay seems to suggest that in some cases the earlier spirantization rules were still active in the Khabur.

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