Hertevin-Neo-Aramaic language
| Hertevin | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Turkey ; today mainly Western Europe | |
| speaker | 1,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | - | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
syr |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
hears |
|
Hertevin is a New Aramaic language that belongs to the northeast branch of Eastern Aramaic (see Aramaic Languages ). It was originally spoken in the village of Hertevin and some surrounding villages in the Siirt province in southeastern Turkey . Most of the speakers - traditionally Chaldean Catholics - emigrated in the course of the persecution and displacement of the Aramaic Christians in the 20th century and live scattered in many Western countries. Only a few remained in Turkey. The total number of speakers is estimated at 1,000 today. Hertevin was only "discovered" in 1970 by the German Semitist Otto Jastrow and described in a publication two years later.
Linguistic particularities
The town of Hertevin, near the town of Pervari in the province of Siirt, is located on the northeastern edge of the Eastern Aamaic language area, the Hertevin language is thus a peripheral north-east Aramaic idiom that differs in some respects from the related languages ( Chaldean-New Aramaic , Assyrian-New Aramaic ) has developed. Samuel Ethan Fox mentions a closer proximity of Bohtan New Aramaic in Georgia to Hertevin Aramaic than to any other form of New Aramaic, which is not surprising in view of the geographical proximity.
A phonetic peculiarity is the loss of the voiceless velar fricative / x /, which coincided with the voiceless pharyngeal fricative / ħ /. In Bohtan Neo-Aramaic, the development was exactly the opposite: the voiceless pharyngeal fricative coincided with the voiceless velar fricative, so that both are pronounced as / x /, while in Hertevin Neo-Aramaic as / ħ /. Another feature is the form of demonstrative pronouns . As with the other Eastern American languages, the near and far demonstrative (“this” or “that”) coincide, but Hertevin has developed an emphatic form of this pronoun, which has the meaning “exactly this one”.
- Normal demonstrative: āwa (m.sg.), āya (f.sg.), āni (pl.)
- Emphatic demonstrative: ōhā (m.sg.), ēhā (f.sg.), anhī (pl.)
In Hertevin New Aramaic there is no incorporation of pronominal objects.
All Hertevin speakers are bilingual in Kurdish ( Kurmanji ). The Syrian alphabet is used to write Hertevin , but there are no periodicals and hardly any literature. As a church language is classical Syriac used.
literature
- Otto Jastrow : Personal and Demonstrative pronouns in Central Neo-Aramaic. In: Wolfhart Heinrichs (Ed.): Studies in Neo-Aramaic. (= Harvard Semitic Studies. 36). Scholars Press, Atlanta GA 1990, ISBN 1-55540-430-8 , pp. 89-103.
- Otto Jastrow: The Neo-Aramaic Languages. In: Robert Hetzron (Ed.): The Semitic Languages. (= Routledge Language Family Descriptions ). Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-05767-1 , pp. 334-377.
Individual evidence
- ^ Estimate by Ethnologue .
- ^ Gideon Goldenberg: Aramaic Perfects . In: Joel L. Kraemer (Ed.): Israel Oriental Studies XII . EJ Brill, 1992, ISSN 0334-4401 , pp. 129 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 11, 2015]).
- ^ Samuel Ethan Fox: A Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Bohtan . In: Werner Arnold, Hartmut Bobzin (eds.): “Talk to your servants in Aramaic, we understand!” 60 articles on Semitic studies. Festschrift for Otto Jastrow on his 60th birthday. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-447-04491-8 , p. 165 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 11, 2015]).
- ^ Samuel Ethan Fox: A Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Bohtan . In: Werner Arnold, Hartmut Bobzin (eds.): “Talk to your servants in Aramaic, we understand!” 60 articles on Semitic studies. Festschrift for Otto Jastrow on his 60th birthday. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-447-04491-8 , p. 166 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 11, 2015]).
- ^ Samuel Ethan Fox: A Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Bohtan . In: Werner Arnold, Hartmut Bobzin (eds.): “Talk to your servants in Aramaic, we understand!” 60 articles on Semitic studies. Festschrift for Otto Jastrow on his 60th birthday. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-447-04491-8 , p. 168 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 11, 2015]).
- ↑ Geoffrey Khan: A Grammar of Neo-Aramaic: The Dialect of the Jews of Arbel (= Handbuch der Orientalistik . Volume 47 ). Koninklijke Brill, Leiden 1999, ISBN 90-04-11510-2 , pp. 120 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed August 11, 2015]).