Description of the Syrian Civil War by a Resident of Maaloula

Abstract

The publication presents a fragment of a story by Philip Šōʕra (Arabic: Aš-Šāʕir) in the Maʕ lūla dialect of Modern Western Aramaic. Maaloula is a dialect of the Syrian city of the same name, located 55 km northeast of Damascus. Maaloula is one of three settlements in which dialects of modern Western Aramaic continue to be used as a living language. The story focuses on the capture of Maaloula by radical Islamists during the Syrian Civil War and the killing of several local residents. The available corpus of field records of modern Western Aramaic is insufficient to fully describe the grammatical structure of the language. Morphological analysis of texts is the first step towards solving this problem. And it is doubly important, since some features of the morphology of modern Western Aramaic occupy an important place among other modern Aramaic languages. The recording took place on December 10, 2020, in the city of Maaloula, Syria. Informant – Philip Sho’ra, 83, worked as a baker in Lebanon and returned to Maaloula to become a farmer. Glossing method: interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses. In addition to the standard designations given in the Leipzig Glossing Rules, some additional glosses have been used (See List of Additional Labels).