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Copyright

Phillip Yu. Burlakov; Anna S. Cherkashina; Charles G. Häberl; Sergey V. Loesov;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 667–692

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

The Church Militant

A Modern Western Aramaic Account

  • Phillip Yu. Burlakov (author)
  • Anna S. Cherkashina (author)
  • Charles G. Häberl (author)
  • Sergey V. Loesov (author)
Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic(pp. 667–692)
The article presents a recorded conversation in Modern Western Aramaic (MWA), known as Siryōn, collected during a fieldwork expedition in Maaloula, Syria, in 2021. The discussion provides linguistic and sociocultural insights, capturing the experiences of two elderly speakers, including one who recounts his uncle’s role as a bishop during political tensions involving Bishop Hilarion Capucci. The study highlights MWA’s endangered status, exacerbated by the Syrian Civil War, which has displaced speakers and disrupted intergenerational transmission. The transcription and analysis focus on phonological, morphological, and syntactic features, such as vowel shifts, assimilation, and construct forms, while also documenting new lexical items and borrowings from Arabic. The research underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive corpus to preserve the linguistic heritage of MWA.

Contributors

Phillip Yu. Burlakov

(author)

Philipp Yu. Burlakov (BSc, Higher School of Economics) is an aspiring researcher in the School of Linguistics at HSE University. His main academic interests are morphology, lexical typology, and computational tools for low-resource languages. His works include co-the authored ‘Description of the Syrian Civil War by a Resident of Maaloula’, Tirosh (2021), and ‘Conceptually Identical Anaphoric Pronoun in Khanty Language’, Institute for Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2021) and he is involved in the project ‘A Deep Learning Model for Western Neo-Aramaic Speech Recognition’ (Higher School of Economics, 2024).

Anna S. Cherkashina

(author)
Post-doctoral Researcher at Canadian Friends Of Tel-Aviv University

Anna S. Cherkashina (PhD, HSE University, Moscow) is a post-doctoral researcher at Tel-Aviv University and a Research Fellow of Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Her primary academic focus is Syriac magic and divinatory practices within the broader context of Middle Eastern magical traditions. She also specialises in Aramaic languages and comparative studies of the Semitic lexicon. Recent publications include ‘“Binding of Her Loins”: Erotic Binding Spells in Syriac Love Magic’, in La religion populaire des chrétiens de tradition syriaque (Geuthner, 2024) and ‘Towards a Historical Dictionary of Syriac: The Case for Etymology’, in Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias, 2024).

Charles G. Häberl

(author)
Professor of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University

Charles G. Häberl (PhD, Harvard University) is Professor of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) and Religion at Rutgers University. His primary academic focus is upon the languages of the Middle East, both ancient and modern, and ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities from the region. He has conducted field work with speakers of several different Semitic and Iranian languages. Selected recent publications include The Book of Kings and the Explanations of This World: A Universal History from the Late Sasanian Empire (Liverpool University Press, 2022) and Language Diversity in Iran: New Texts and Perspectives from Non-Iranian Languages (De Gruyter Mouton, 2024).

Sergey V. Loesov

(author)
Professor at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies at National Research University Higher School of Economics

Sergey V. Loesov (PhD, Russian State University for the Humanities) is Professor at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies at HSE University and Coordinator of the Moscow Circle for Aramaic Studies. His research interests include Semitic Languages, Aramaic, Neo-Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, Akkadian language and literature, Assyriology, Biblical Hebrew, morphosyntax, ergativity, corpus linguistics, and historical corpus linguistics. Recent publications include (with I. Arkhipov) ‘Observations on the Verb Morphology of the Language of the “Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals”’, Aramaic Studies 22/2 (2024), and (with S. Koval) ‘The Ventive and the Deictic Shift: The Case of Old Assyrian’, Studies in Language 49/1 (2025).