As described in the title, the book is a combination dictionary and phrasebook which covers two contemporary spoken Aramaic dialects, the Turoyo dialect from the Tur-Abdin area of Turkey, and the Mesopotamian-Lake Urmia Swadaya ('colloquial') dialect originally based in Northern Iraq and adjacent areas of Iran. The two dialects seem to be markedly different from one another, but luckily some of the differences fall into regular patterns (for 'hello' Turoyo says "shlomo" and Swadaya says "shlama"). The authors do a good job of integrating the two dialects in the book.
There is a readable, short, historical overview of the sometimes tragic experiences of the language's speakers, generally known as Assyrians or Chaldeans, and a helpful grammar summary that helps you make mores sense of the questions and answers you read in the phrasebook sections. The grammar summary would be more helpful if it had a table showing the full conjugations of half a dozen key verbs and a few sentences explaining the overall pattern (the grammar summary in the Lonely Planet Amharic book is a good example of what I think is ideal).
The striking thing about the phrasebook sections are the number of phrases related to war: "Please show me the minefields" is one of the sentences that caught my attention. I suppose this is a sad commentary on the experiences of people in Iraqi Kurdistan in recent times. I wonder whether a major part of the book's intended audience is the military (I had assumed it would have been mainly the Assyrian-Chaldean ethnic community and some curious individuals interested in Semitic languages, like myself).
I wish, in addition to an expanded grammar section, there was more use of the Eastern or "Nestorian" version of the Syriac script. The authors did present it in a short section, for which I'm grateful, but I would have liked some short texts in the script, as well (perhaps in the dictionary section), even just three of four examples of printed modern Aramaic. I suppose when the script is used the temptation arises to use the classical Syriac form of a word instead of the modern colloquial.
All in all, a fascinating and valuable book. I hope a recorded version is next.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2011
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KatjaReviewed in Germany on February 23, 2018
Ein sehr gutes Lernbuch indem man zwei Dialekte erlernen kann:)
Ich war lange schon auf der Suche nach einem geeigneten Buch, in dem man den West Dialekt erlernen kann. Somit habe ich mir dieses Buch bestellt das ich super geeignet dafür finde:) Ein Pluspunkt bekommt dieses Buch weil man zusätzlich noch den Ost Dialekt erlernen kann falls man diesen nicht spricht und gerne erlernen möchte:)KatjaEin sehr gutes Lernbuch indem man zwei Dialekte erlernen kann:)
Reviewed in Germany on February 23, 2018
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- Santiago R.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2025
Good book to deep in the Aramaic Language and Dialects
