Features of the Verbal System in the Christian Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Koy Sanjaq and Their Areal Parallels

Abstract

Koy Sanjaq, an Iraqi Kurdish town located fifty-five kilometers southeast of Arbil, once had two small minority communities of Neo-Aramaic speakers, one Jewish and one Christian, each speaking its own variety of Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA). In 1951 the Jews of Koy Sanjaq all left for Israel, and since then only the town's Christian Neo-Aramaic variety has lingered on in loco, now spoken by approximately 140 adherents of the Chaldean Catholic Church.' Whereas the grammatical and lexical profiles of the Jewish dialect of Koy Sanjaq are now largely known through the works of R. D. Hoberman and the present writer,2 the Christian dialect of the same town (henceforth CKS) has remained to date completely outside the scope of Neo-Aramaic dialectology. In section 2 salient features of the verbal derivation and verbal inflection of CKS will be presented. The description of these features is based on data obtained from two Koy Sanjaq-born Christians living in Detroit during fieldwork there in 2001, as well as from short recordings of the dialect, including one made in Koy Sanjaq itself, which I had received from my informants a few years earlier. Both informants (a man and a woman unrelated to each other) have been exposed to other Neo-Aramaic dialects since they left their hometown, especially to the dialects of Alqosh and Telkepe, prevalent among Neo-Aramaic speakers in Detroit, and can no longer speak their native dialect in its pristine form. Nonetheless, the dialectal interference detectable in my informants' native speech is by no means heavy, and they could readily furnish genuine CKS grammatical and lexical traits that are absent in the Neo-Aramaic varieties to which they were exposed. In section 3 I shall focus on two selected innovative features of the verbal system of CKS-the loss of Neo-paccel and the constructions of present progressive and present