Rhetoric was part of the borrowed Greek educational system of the Enkyklios paideia, together with logic and grammar. However, the technical terminology had to be adapted, so the question is which strategies were used to create the vocabulary of Syriac rhetoric. This paper aims at analyzing some meaningful loanwords, adaptations, calques and native words used to build this specialized lexis. A manuscript containing the Syriac version of Aristotle's Rhetoric was never found, and we need to rely upon other texts that dealt with this topic: Antony of Taġrit's Books of Rhetoric, a part of Bar Šakko's Book of dialogues and a part of Bar Hebraeus's Cream of wisdom.
If we wish to have a deeper appreciation of this vocabulary, however, we need to take into account the Arabic version of Aristotle's Rhetoric, since it displays some interesting peculiarities that can help us in the reconstructive process of what the Syriac version might have looked like. A very useful tool would be the compilation of a database comparing the Syriac lexis
Western Neo-Aramaic (WNA) is spoken as a minority language by less than 10.000 people in 3 villages of the Qalamūn plateau, 60 km to the north-east of Damascus (Syria). The whole populace of Baxʕā and Ǧubbʕadīn and about one-third of the inhabitants of Maʕlūla are Muslim, while the rest of the inhabitants of the third village are Christian, as is still a minority of the people of the region, since the parallel processes of religious Islamization and linguistic Arabization have followed diverse paths and different chronology. Since WNA has no native written tradition, the usual criteria defining an Islamic language put forward by Bausani (1981), namely allography in the Arabic/Persian script and a significant quota of Islamic religious vocabulary, cannot apply in this case. This paper discusses the possibility of laying down other parameters of linguistic Islamicity for part of WNA along the lines of the relevant debate in the fields of communal variation and Jewish interlinguistics, and opts in the end for a lexical/phraseological approach. We stress, however, that the linguistic situation portrayed in this paper is the pre-2010 one.
This paper reviews and comments upon a recent monograph by Aaron M. Butts on linguistic contacts between Greek and Syriac, Language Change in the Wake of Empire: this volume is also used as an opportunity to discuss the expectations for this kind of studies in the future years, and to reflect upon their past. The importance of Butts’ book as a crucial tool for the scholarly community involved in contact-induced studies is here highlighted. Butts offers a most welcome new and thorough analysis of the materials collected by his predecessors and adds his personal new data. This review article also provides a brief recollection of previous studies, that opened the way to Butts’ comprehensive approach.
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