Neo-Mandaic
Neo-Mandaic, also known as Modern Mandaic, sometimes called the "ratna" , is the modern reflex of the Mandaic language, the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. Although severely endangered, it survives as the first language of a small number of Mandaeans in Iran and in the Mandaean diaspora. All Neo-Mandaic speakers are multilingual in the languages of their neighbors, Arabic and Persian, and the influence of these languages upon the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is considerable, particularly in the lexicon and the morphology of the noun. Nevertheless, Neo-Mandaic is more conservative even in these regards than most other Neo-Aramaic languages.
General information
Neo-Mandaic 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 as a first language. Two surviving dialects of Neo-Mandaic have thus far been documented, those of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr. These dialects are mutually intelligible to the extent that speakers of either dialect will deny that there are any differences between the two.Genetic affiliation
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, and the Eastern dialects 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 and Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by Jewish and Christian communities in north-east Syria, northern Iraq, and north-west Iran.
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.
History of scholarship
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. This Glossarium was to have a perennial influence upon subsequent generations of Mandaeologists; it was consulted by Theodor Nöldeke and Rudolf Macúch in the preparation of their grammars, and the contents of its Neo-Mandaic column were incorporated into Drower and Macuch's 1963 dictionary. No complete Neo-Mandaic text was published until the beginning of the twentieth century, when de Morgan published five documents collected in Iran. The last few decades have seen a marked increase in the number of Neo-Mandaic texts available to scholarship and a descriptive grammar.Writing system
Neo-Mandaic is generally unwritten. On the rare occasions on which it is written, in personal letters and in the colophons that are attached to manuscripts, it is rendered using a modified version of the classical script. With the exception of, all vowels are represented, but without any indication of length or quality. The letter ʕ consistently represents an epenthetic vowel, either or. Additionally, the Arabic letter ع has been borrowed to indicate the voiced pharyngeal fricative as well as the glottal stop. The letters b, g, k, p, and t may represent stops or fricatives. Formerly the fricatives were not distinctive segments but merely allophones of the stops after a vowel; the sound rule governing this alternation is now defunct. Neo-Mandaic orthography differs from that of Classical Mandaic by using u to represent even when it is a reflex of Classical Mandaic b. As Neo-Mandaic contains several phonemes not found in Classical Mandaic, several letters from the original script have been modified with two dots placed below to represent these phonemes: š may represent, d represents, and h represents. Private Mandaic schools in Iran and Australia employ a version of this same script with a few further pedagogic modifications.Phonology
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.Consonants
Neo-Mandaic has 28 distinctive consonantal segments, including four loan-phonemes: the postalveolar affricates č and j and the pharyngeal fricatives and ḥ, which are found only in vocabulary of foreign origin, particularly Arabic and Persian. Two pharyngealized segments are found in a few Arabic loan words. They have been excluded from the phonemic inventory of Neo-Mandaic due to their marginal status.Voiceless stops are lightly aspirated.
Vowels
The vowel system in Neo-Mandaic is composed of seven distinct vowels, of which six are principal phonemes, and one is marginal. The vowels are distinguished by quality rather than quantity. Three of the principal vowels, the "tense" vowels i, u, and ɔ, are lengthened in open accented syllables to,, and or. and are realized as and whenever they occur in closed syllables, either accented or unaccented. The other three principle vowels, the "lax" vowels o, e, and a, appear only exceptionally in open accented syllables. is realized as in open syllables and in closed syllables. is realized as in open syllables and as in closed syllables. is realized as in closed accented syllables, and as or elsewhere. Schwa has the widest allophonic variation of all the vowels. It is regularly fronted, backed, raised, or lowered in harmony with the vowel of the following syllable. When it is followed by, it is regularly raised and backed to. When the accent falls on a closed syllable containing schwa, it becomes fronted and raised to.There are also five diphthongs, ey, ay, aw, ɔy, and ɔw. The diphthongs and, which had already collapsed in closed accented syllables to and in the classical language, have collapsed in all accented syllables in the dialects of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr, apart from those in words of foreign origin. The collapse of diphthongs appears to be further advanced in the dialect of Ahvāz; compare Khorramshahr gɔw 'in' with Ahwāz gu id. Closely tied to the collapse of the diphthong in open accented syllables is the breaking of its outcome, to in the same environment. For example, classical baita 'house' has become bieṯɔ in Neo-Mandaic. This sound change is today typical of both the contemporary dialects of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr, but is not present in the unpublished texts from Iraq collected by Drower or in Macuch 1989.
Syllable structure
Neo-Mandaic words range in size from one to five syllables. Each syllable consists of an onset and a rime. The rime consists of a nucleus with or without a coda. The onset and the coda which frame the nucleus consist of consonants; the onset is mandatory for all word-internal syllables, but the coda is optional in all environments. Whenever an enclitic pronominal suffix lacking an onset is added to a closed accented syllable, the coda of the syllable is geminated to form the onset of the following syllable. Whenever the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ is geminated in this environment, its outcome is the cluster rather than the expected . For example, when the pronominal suffixes are appended directly to the existential particle *eṯ , it regularly takes the form ext- . This rule affects the conjugation of the verb meṯ ~ moṯ ‘to die,’ e.g. meṯ ‘he died’ but mextat ‘she died.’ It is also responsible for the modern form of the abstract ending uxtɔ.The syllable patterns V, VC, CV, and CVC are the most common. Slightly less common are syllables containing clusters of consonantal or vocalic segments, such as VCC, CCV, CCVC, CVCC, CVVC, and even CVVCC. Permissible consonant clusters in Neo-Mandaic fall into two categories: clusters that form at the beginning or the end of a syllable, and those that span syllable boundaries. The former are strictly limited to certain combination of segments. The latter are less restricted; with few exceptions, Neo-Mandaic tolerates most clusters of two or occasionally even three consonants across a syllable boundary. Consonant clusters consisting of a stop followed by a sonorant, a sibilant followed by a sonorant, or a sibilant followed by a stop, are tolerated in both syllable-final and syllable-initial environments. Consonant clusters consisting of a sonorant and a stop or a sonorant and a fricative are tolerated in word final environment alone. /ə/ is regularly inserted as an anaptyctic vowel to break up impermissible consonant clusters; whenever a sonorant is the second segment in a word-final consonant cluster, the cluster is eliminated by syllabifying the sonorant. Neo-Mandaic does not tolerate clusters of the bilabial nasal /m/ and the alveolar trill /r/ in any environment. The voiced bilabial stop /b/ regularly intervenes between these two segments, e.g. lákamri ‘he didn’t return it.’ Clusters of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ with another consonant are also not tolerated, even across a syllable boundary; /h/ is generally deleted in this environment.