GENERAL EUROPEAN LOANWORDS IN THE JEWISH NEO-ARAMAIC DIALECT OF ZAKHO, IRAQI KURDISTAN Yona Sabar 1. Introduction 1 Neo-Aramaic, like other old and new Semitic languages, has incorporated a certain number ofloanwords from European languages.2 These loanwords are mostly from the semantic areas of modem technology, general western culture and medicine. Most of these words were probably incorporated in the spoken Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Zakho during the 1940's, just prior to their emigration en masse to Israel during 1950-51. They have been gleaned from my Dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic (in progress) and from my personal knowledge of the dialect. Zakho was a central Kurdish town of about 30,000 people, of whom about 5,000 were Jews (the largest Jewish community in Kurdistan at that time). The rest were mostly Muslim Kurds, and a substantial number of Christian Assyrians, Armenians, and some Arabs, mostly Iraqi officials. Direct contact between the Jews of Zakho and speakers .of European languages was practically non-existent. Only rarely would European travelers reach the distant border town of Zakho. Therefore, we have to assume that most of the European loanwords were incorporated via the intermediary urban languages, i.e., Arabic (mainly the spoken dialects of Mosul and 1A paper based on this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association at New Orleans, on November 23, 1985. I am grateful to my colleague Dr. Ralph Jaeckel for his kind help regarding the possible origin of some Turkish loanwords, and my brother Dr. Shalom Sabar for his help regarding the origin of several Italian loanwords. Special thanks to Professor Wolfhart Heinrichs for his most useful and keen editing remarks and suggestions. 2For specific studies on such loanwords in modem Arabic, see Smeaton, Sa'id; on modem Hebrew, see Weiman; on modem Persian, see Jazayery; on Turkish, see Kahane, Kahane and Tietze; for general studies on language expansion see the bibliography in Smeaton, pp. 183-190; Blau, Joshua (on Hebrew and Arabic); Stetkevych. 53 54 Yona Sabar Baghdad), Turkish (especially during the first quarter of the century, when the Turkish cultural influence was still strong, to be gradually replaced by Arabic), and probably Persian and Kurdish. Zakho is located not too far from the common borders of Iraq with Turkey, Syria, and Iran; hence, a strong cultural influence and linguistic borrowing from these countries. In the l 940's the contact of the Jews of Zakho with the much larger Jewish communities of the major cities of Mosul and Baghdad was greatly intensified thanks to the intoduction of motorized vehicles (bus till Mosul, and train to Baghdad). Many traveled back and forth to these urban centers, and some stayed there as immigrants, thus establishing a bilingual (Neo-Aramaic and Arabic) community. After the collapse of the Ottoman rule, British-English cultural and linguistic influence became quite common in the major urban cities of Iraq.3 This is indicated not only by borrowing many words from English, but also by the common use of English proper names, especially by Jews and Christians of Iraq, e.g., Albert, Edward, George, Maurice; Daisy, Doris, Juliet, Nancy. It seems that the French and Italian loanwords belong to the earlier stage of borrowing, probably via Turkish or Syrian Arabic. While borrowing from Russian is rare in Zakho, it is common in the Christian and Jewish Neo­ Aramaic dialects of Urmi (Persian Azerbaijan), due to the common borders with the Soviet Union and Neo-Aramaic-speaking immigrants in Russia.4 2. General Notes An effort was made to track each word in the various available dictionaries of the contact languages, i.e., Iraqi Arabic, Anatolian Arabic, modern written Arabic, Syrian Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, and Persian. Not every word could be found in the various dictionaries. Especially those for the spoken dialects are by nature incomplete. For various reasons (some practical, some nationalistic-puristic) they lack many words, especially European loanwords, even when those are common in the everyday speech of the masses. For example, the Dictionary ofIraqi Arabic is actually only of the colloquial Arabic spoken in Baghdad, excluding the distinct spoken dialects in other major cities of Iraq (e.g., Mosul, Kirkuk in the north, Basra in the south). Moreover, the entries belong to the spoken Arabic used by an educated Muslim Baghdadi in everyday speech,5 thus excluding again the other distinct Jewish and Christian Arabic dialects of Baghdad.6 Furthermore, foreign European loanwords often have a short life, usually accompanying the newly imported cultural or technical item only in its initial lQn the intensive contacts between British officials and the Jews of Mosul see Laniado, pp. 97-101. •Cf. Tsereteli, p. 95; Garbcll, Glossary, passim (see below, end of section S). 'See Woodhead and Beene, p. IX. 6See Blanc; Mansour's dictionary on the Arabic of the Jews of Baghdad includes so far only the first seven letters of the (Arabic) alphabet ('-t). .