History of Aramaic language

Aramaic, with its three-thousand-year written history, is of immeasurable importance to historical linguistics (among living languages, comparable temporal depth is only found in Chinese and Greek). However, its history remains unexplored, and the task itself is not even set. This is likely explained by the fact that studying ancient (especially epigraphic) monuments of Aramaic languages requires a lot of "philology" and even paleography, which true linguists tend to shy away from. As for the living Aramaic languages, they are mostly unwritten and insufficiently studied, making linguists' access to them challenging.

The earliest monuments written in the Aramaic language date back to the 9th century BCE, and contemporary Neo-Aramaic dialects are spoken by religious minorities in several Middle Eastern countries and in the diaspora.

Chronologically, Aramaic languages are divided into ancient, middle, and modern stages, while genealogically, they are classified as Western and Eastern.

Ancient Aramaic is attested through epigraphy from the first millennium BCE, as well as a small corpus of Biblical Aramaic and texts from Qumran.

The Middle Aramaic stage is represented by six literary languages: Western (Christian Palestinian, Jewish Palestinian, Samaritan) and Eastern (Syriac, Jewish Babylonian, Mandaic).

The new stage of Aramaic history involves a multitude of (still) living or recently extinguished (along with their speakers) unwritten idioms. The Western branch of Aramaic languages is represented by the Maalula dialect from the village of the same name in Syria. The Eastern branch comprises a cluster of Turoyo dialects, widespread in southeastern Turkey, on the Tur Abdin plateau, and the northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages—a group of Christian and Jewish dialects from Iraq and Iran, as well as Neo-Mandaic, the language of the Mandaean religious community residing in Iran.

Over the last millennium, during the transition from the middle stage to the new stage, Aramaic languages, particularly those of the Eastern branch, have undergone a near-complete overhaul of their verbal system.

The immediate goal of the participants in the circle is to describe the history of the Aramaic verb. Circle participants work on both diachronic aspects of the verb (the history of adjectival verbalization, reconstruction of the history of the passive voice in ancient Aramaic, etc.) and on synchronic descriptions of verbal systems (classification of verbs in the Syriac language based on morphological semantics, morphosyntax of detransitive forms in Turoyo, and others). In doing so, synchronous questions arise from a historical perspective.