Неомандайский язык: современное состояние и диалекты

Modern Mandaean language from West Asia

Neo Mandaic (ISO 639 3: mid) represents the latest stage of the development of Classical Mandaic, a language of the Middle East which was first attested during the period of Late Antiquity and which continues to be used to the present date by the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. While the members of this community, numbered at roughly 70,000 or fewer adherents throughout the world, are familiar with the classical dialect through their sacred literature and liturgy, only a few hundred Mandaeans, located primarily in Iran, speak Neo Mandaic (known to them as the raṭnɔ) as a first language. Two surviving dialects of Neo Mandaic have thus far been documented, those of Ahwāz (in Macuch 1965a, Macuch 1965b, Macuch 1989, and Macuch 1993) and Khorramshahr (in Häberl 2009). These dialects are mutually intelligible to the extent that speakers of either dialect will deny that there are any differences between the two.

Neo Mandaic is a dialect of Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language that was formerly spoken throughout the Middle East. Already in antiquity, a split had developed between the Western dialects of Aramaic (spoken in primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel), and the Eastern dialects (spoken primarily in Mesopotamia and Iran) to which Neo Mandaic pertains. The bulk of scholarship on these modern reflexes of these dialects, collectively described as Neo Aramaic, has focused primarily on Eastern Aramaic languages, particularly the Central Neo Aramaic (Turoyo and Mlahsô) and Northeastern Neo Aramaic (NENA) dialects spoken by Jewish and Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iranian Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan. A smaller but still considerable volume of scholarship is dedicated to the more peripheral dialects such as the Western Neo Aramaic dialects spoken by Christians and Muslims in three villages near Damascus, and Neo Mandaic. Of all the dialects that have thus far been documented, only Neo Mandaic can be described with any certainty as the modern reflex of any classical written form of Aramaic.

The first attempt at documenting Neo Mandaic, a polyglot glossary including a column of lexical items from the Neo Mandaic dialect of Basra, was produced roughly 350 years ago by a Carmelite missionary whom Borghero has identified with the Discalced Carmelite it. This Glossarium was to have a perennial influence upon subsequent generations of Mandaeologists; it was consulted by Theodor Nöldeke and Rudolf Macúch No complete Neo Mandaic text was published until the beginning of the twentieth century, when de Morgan published five documents collected in Iran (transliterated and translated by Macuch

There are 35 distinctive segments in Neo Mandaic: 28 consonants and seven vowels. For most of these segments, there is a relatively wide degree of allophonic variation. The transcription system, which is phonemic, does not reflect this variation; nor does it reflect sporadic assimilations, deletions, and other features that are typical of allegro speech.

The Neo Mandaic verb may appear in two aspects (perfective and imperfective), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), and three voices (active, middle, and passive). As in other Semitic languages, the majority of verbs are built upon a triconsonantal root, each of which may yield one or more of six verbal stems: the G stem or basic stem, the D stem or transitivizing denominative verbal stem, the C stem or causative verbal stem, and the tG , tD , and tC stems, to which a derivational morpheme, t , was prefixed before the first root consonant. This morpheme has disappeared from all roots save for those possessing a sibilant as their initial radical, such as eṣṭəwɔ ~ eṣṭəwi (meṣṭəwi) ‘to be baptized’ in the G stem or eštallam ~ eštallam (meštallam) in the C stem, in which the stop and the sibilant are metathesized. A seventh stem, the Q stem, is reserved exclusively for those verbs possessing four root consonants. Verbs that begin with a vowel rather than a consonant are called I weak. Verbs beginning with the approximants n and y, which were susceptible to assimilation in Classical Mandaic, have been reformed on the analogy of the strong verbs. When they appear as the second or third radical of a consonantal root, the liquids w and y are susceptible to the general collapse of diphthongs described above. The verbs that are thus affected are known as II weak and III weak verbs. Those roots in which the second and third radical consonants were identical have been reformed on the analogy of the II weak verbs; this process had already begun in Classical Mandaic. A very large and productive class of verbs in Neo Mandaic consists of a verbal element and a non verbal element, which form a single semantic and syntactic unit. The non verbal element is most often a noun such as əwɔdɔ ‘deed’ in the compound əwɔdɔ əwad ~ əwod (ɔwed) ‘to work or to do something,’ or an adjective such as həyɔnɔ ‘alive’ in the compound həyɔnɔ tammɔ ‘to survive,’ although prepositions such as qɔr ‘at,’ in the compound qɔr tammɔ ‘to be born to s. o.,’ are attested. In many of these compounds, the verbal element is a "light" verb, which serves only to indicate verbal inflections such as person, tense, mood, and aspect; the meaning of these compounds is primarily derived from the non verbal element, which always precedes the verbal element. The most common light verbs are əwad ~ əwod (ɔwed) ‘to do,’ əhaw ~ əhow (ɔhew) ‘to give,’ məhɔ ~ məhi (mɔhi) ‘to hit,’ and tammɔ ‘to become.’ Although phrasal verbs similar to these are attested in Classical Mandaic, most Neo Mandaic phrasal verbs are calqued upon Persian phrasal verbs, and many non verbal elements are Persian or Arabic loan words.

The ensemble of the features described above suggest that the grammar of Neo Mandaic is remarkably conservative in comparison with that of Classical Mandaic, and that most of the features that distinguish the former from the latter (in particular, the restructuring of the nominal morphology and the verbal system) are the result of developments already attested in Classical and Postclassical Mandaic. Unlike the other Neo Aramaic dialects (apart from Western Neo Aramaic), Neo Mandaic alone preserves the old Semitic suffix conjugation (the Neo Mandaic perfective). Apart from the imperative forms, the prefix conjugation (the Classical Mandaic imperfect) has been replaced by the Neo Mandaic imperfective, which was already anticipated in Classical Mandaic as well. Even the lexicon preserves the vocabulary of Classical Mandaic to a large degree; in a list of 207 of the most common terms in Neo Mandaic collected by Häberl, over 85% were also attested in the classical language, the remaining 15% deriving primarily from Arabic and Persian. As the latest stage of a classical Aramaic dialect with a long and fairly continuous history of attestation, Neo Mandaic is potentially of great value for elucidating the typology of the Aramaic dialects as well as the study of the Semitic languages in general.