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Copyright

Eleanor Coghill;

Published On

2025-03-07

Page Range

pp. 823–862

Language

  • English

Print Length

40 pages

The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Tin

  • Eleanor Coghill (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. 823–862)
The article presents the Neo-Aramaic dialect of Tin, a village in the Ṣapna valley in northern Iraq, focusing on the dialect’s phonology, morphology, and lexicon. This variety, spoken by Christians of the Chaldean Catholic Church, is most closely related to the nearby Christian dialect of Aradhin, but is nevertheless distinct in many ways. The synchronic description is supplemented with a comparative and historical perspective, indicating how Tin’s features fit into the NENA dialectal map and how unusual or unexpected forms can be explained by historical developments. Contact influences from Northern Kurdish and vernacular Arabic are also discussed. Interesting features of this dialect include the innovation of an initial /d/ in the Present Base forms of verba primae /ʾ/ and sporadic cases of vowel harmony.

Contributors

Eleanor Coghill

(author)
Professor in Semitic Languages at Uppsala University

Eleanor Coghill (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Professor in Semitic Languages in the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala. Her work has focused on Aramaic, especially the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic varieties, whose highly endangered status makes documentation a priority. Her research also has a diachronic focus, looking at the development of Aramaic, in particular the effects of language contact. She is also interested in the Arabic dialects of the same region. Among her publications are The Rise and Fall of Ergativity in Aramaic: Cycles of Alignment Change (Oxford University Press, 2016) and ‘Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and language contact’, in (Anthony Grant, ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact (Oxford University Press 2020).