Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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ARAMAIC BRANCH
283 that the literature was never extensive. The earliest manuscripts seem to belong to the ninth century A.D., while the dialect was, at least since A.D. 700, replaced by Arabie as the speech of daily life, remaining for some centuries more the liturgical language. Furthermore, as F. Schulthess pointed out, the manuscripts belonging to the eleventh-thirteenth centuries show that even the clergy did not have a sufficient knowledge of the language.
Only two places are known where the Palestinian Syrians were settled, *Abud, a large village to the north-west of Jerusalem, and somewhere in Egypt. The fragments of the Palestinian Syriac manuscripts come from the libraries of Sinai monks.
The Palestinian Syriac community was the only one Aramaic speaking Christian group who remained "Melkite" (see below), while all the other communities were either Nestorian, Monophysite or Maronite,
Syriac Alphabet The Syriac alphabet consists (like the Aramaic) of the twenty-two old Semitic letters, all of them having consonantal values. The order of the letters in the alphabet is the same as in Hebrew, but the names of some of them are slightly different: alaph, for aleph, gamal for ginel, dalath or daladh for daleth, lamadh for lamedhi, mim for mem; the names of the letters samek and 'ayin have changed in semkath and e. The pronunciation of the names of some of these letters was modified in the later West Syrian or Jacobite alphabet:olaph, gomal, dolath or doladh, lomad; also the names of other letters were changed: yodh in yudh, nun in non, isadhe or sadhe (the emphatic ş) in yodle, resh in rish.
The letters b, g, d, k, P, f had a twofold pronunciation: one being hard (corresponding to the English big, d, k,p.1); the other, soft, aspirated or sibilated (o, gh, dh or th as in "thc," kh as the Scotch ch, ph, and th as in "thank").
As in the Arabic alphabet, the majority of the Syriac letters have different forms in accordance with their position in a word, whether at the beginning, middle or end, and whether they stand alone or joined to others, on right or on left, or on both sides, right and left. Eight letters (. , , *. >, is, and t) have only two forms, the unconnected, and the connected on right.
Vocalization
As in other Semitic languages, the consonants', w and y were originally employed to express vowel sounds. The expressed every final long a (pronounced as long o by the Jacobites) and e, and sometimes the longe within the word. (The long e was in certain cases pronounced as long i by the Jacobites), The to denoted any long or short u or o. The y expressed
