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Copyright

Paul M. Noorlander;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 753–790

Language

  • English

Print Length

38 pages

Miracles of Saint Ephrem

Legends in the Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Umra d-Shish

Chapter of: Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 2: The Medieval World, Judaeo-Arabic, and Neo-Aramaic(pp. 753–790)
The article explores the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Umra d-Shish, a village in northern Iraq, and the legends surrounding Saint Ephrem’s miracles. It provides a detailed transcription and translation of a text recounting healings and other miraculous events attributed to Saint Ephrem, including the curing of mental illness and the granting of fertility to childless women. The study examines linguistic features such as phonological shifts, morphological markers, and syntactic structures that are characteristic of the dialect, including the preservation of certain archaic forms. It also highlights the influence of Kurdish and Arabic on the dialect and the socio-religious context of the legends, shedding light on the role of language in preserving communal identity and oral traditions.

Contributors

Paul M. Noorlander

(author)
Lecturer and Post-doctoral Researcher at Leiden University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9407-1453

Paul M. Noorlander (PhD, University of Leiden) is a Lecturer at the Institute for Area Studies, University of Leiden, and a Post-doctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He has published widely in the field of Semitic languages and linguistics and contact between Semitic and Iranian, in particular the areal-diachronic typology of the East Anatolian and Mesopotamian regions of West Asia. The endangered Neo-Aramaic languages and their documentation, typology and history are his main research focus. His recent publications include Ergativity and Other Alignment Types in Neo-Aramaic: Investigating Morphosyntactic Microvariation (Brill, 2021), (with Geoffrey Khan, Masoud Mohammadirad, and Dorota Molin), and Neo-Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq: A Comparative Anthology with a Sample of Glossed Texts (2 vols., University of Cambridge Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Open Book Publishers, 2022).