Syriac language

“ Assuredly the variety of the common dialects in olden time cannot have been without influence upon the pronunciation of Syriac, in the mouths even of cultivated persons in different localities,—just as in Germany the Upper-Saxon language of polite intercourse assumes a very perceptible colouring, conditioned by the local dialect it meets with, in the case of the inhabitant for instance of Holstein or the Palatinate or Upper Bavaria,—or as in Italy the Tuscan tongue is similarly modified, in the case of the native of Lombardy, Genoa or Naples. ”

“ The language which the independent Syrians speak is Syriac, which is near the ancient Syriac, and that they understand fully the Syrian Scriptures when read in their churches. We hope, therefore, should the Lord spare our lives, to have an opportunity of circulating some of the many copies of the Scriptures in Syriac, which Mr. Pfander has brought from Shushee, and some that I expect will come from Bombay for me. ”

“ None of the Hebraeo-Aramaic dialects long survived in Syria the conquest of the Arabs. Syriac still lived on in Western Persia and in Mongolia, and in India for a time, but only survived as a dead liturgical language. Chaldæo-Hebraic made its way westwards to Morocco, Italy, Spain and Gaul. The faithful in Samaria, now nearly extinct, clung to their Pentateuch and their religion through all vicissitudes, and have never ceased to write the Bible in the Hebrew script of ancient Palestine. ”

“ There are several German "colonies" in Palestine, but the entire number of colonists does not exceed 2,500.
Language
The language of the country is Arabic (Syrian Arabic) spoken with considerable dialectal variation in different parts. Aramaic (Syriac) is now used only in a few villages to the north of Damascus and in the liturgies of some of the churches. Turkish is almost entirely the language of officials. The Jews speak a medley of languages, according to their origin, but most Jewish immigrants speak Yiddish. ”

“ The nearness of Syria to Judea, and the growth of the Church at Antioch and Damascus in the earliest days, must have produced a demand for a rendering into the Syriac languages; and the bilingual condition of most of the Roman Empire must have entailed a constant desire amongst vast multitudes to read in their own tongue a verification of the truths taught them. ”

“ No sooner do we see England in guardian possession of Syria than the idea enters into the scheme of reform of extending the English language. The Board of Directors of the Syrian Protestant College at Beyrout have shown their appreciation of the new era of British influence by a recent vote, which is to the effect that on January 1, 1879, all instruction in the college shall be through the English language. The Arabic will only be taught as any other dead language. ”

“ The son of the East has been richly rewarded. He is the religious teacher of all mankind. Through him all scriptures have come into being. All the great, living religions of the world originated in Asia; and the three greatest of them—Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism—have come into the world through the Semitic race in that little country called Syria. The perpetual yearning of the Oriental for spiritual dreams and visions has had its rewards. He sowed bountifully, he reaped bountifully.
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Note the Syrian's daily language: it is essentially Biblical. He has no secular language. ”

“ Syria found these words easy to act upon, since she had no such notoriously subversive elements in her population as existed, for example, in European Turkey and in some parts of Asia Minor; and, even in Damascus, there was not much bitterness between races or creeds. But with ideas of nationality, home rule, and representative institutions in the air, no wonder the Arabs thought of managing their own domestic affairs in their own language, of developing their own country, and of themselves enjoying the responsibilities and emoluments of its administration. ”

“ No doubt, from the time of the Moslem conquest there have been infiltrations of Arabic blood too; but this is lost in the general mass, as the Greek blood was before. The language people speak is never a safe nor a final test of their blood. The population of Syria, then, is mixed, as is that of nearly all countries. Fundamentally it is Syrian; it has Greek and Arabic elements. The case is exactly parallel in Egypt. Here we have a population, originally Egyptian, with Greek and Arabic strains lost in the general mass. ”

“ But the Arabs did not acquire their knowledge of this literature at first hand. The earliest Hellenic culture in the East was Syrian, and the Arabs made their first acquaintance with Greek chemistry, as with Greek philosophy, mathematics, medicine, &c., by the intermediary of Syriac translations. (See Arabian Philosophy and Syriac Literature.) Examples of such translations are preserved in MSS. at the British Museum, partly written in Syriac, partly in Arabic with Syriac characters. ”

“ The Syrian influence as an element of civilization has, probably, been undervalued. It was through the Syriac that two contiguous nations received much of their knowledge of what was to be learned from Greece, the Armenian and the Arabian; the latter, whose civilizational influence has been proportionately over-rated, being in many cases translators of Syriac translations rather than students of the original Greek. ”

“ The case of the Arabs in Syria is even more precarious. From the moment that the policy of the Young Turks was evolved, namely, to consolidate Osmanli supremacy by the weakening of its subject peoples, the Ottoman Government has been waiting for its opportunity to get rid of the 'Arab menace.' As we have seen, they began by substituting Turkish for Arabic as a written language in all official usages from the printing of the Koran and the prayers for the Sultan down to the legends on railway tickets. ”

“ Syriac, in the narrower meaning,—that is to say, the dialect of Edessa—, appears to have come somewhat nearer to the Aramaic dialects of the Tigris regions, than to those of Central Syria and Palestine. As far, however, as our imperfect knowledge goes, the dialect stands out quite distinctly from all related ones. ”

“ Syriac literature continued in life from the 3rd to the 14th century A.D., but after the Arab conquest it became an increasingly artificial product, for Arabic gradually killed the vernacular use of Syriac.
In the literature as it survives many different branches of writing are represented—homilies in prose and verse, hymns, exposition and commentary, liturgy, apocryphal legends, historical romance, hagiography and martyrology, monastic history and biography, general history, dogmatics, philosophy and science, ecclesiastical law, &c. ”

“ Map of ancient Syria
down to Alexander's conquest in 333 B.C. None of the external invaders had made much of an ethnic impression on the Semitic population, but a new wave of Semitic invaders from Arabia—the Aramaeans and Israelites—had permanently affected the ethnic and cultural patterns of Syria. The Aramaeans were originally Arabian nomads who had moved northward and settled along the middle Euphrates before 1500 B.C. There they developed a distinct nationality and language, and gradually spread eastward into Mesopotamia and westward throughout Syria. ”

“ The whole country between Asia Minor and Egypt is often called Syria, and its inhabitants, who have the same language and customs and are of practically the same—very mixed—blood, are known as Syrians. ”

“ For the general history of culture the work of Syriac writers as translators is, perhaps, as important as any of their original contributions to literature. Beginning with the earliest versions of the Bible, which seem to date from the 2nd century A.D., the series comprises a great mass of translations from Greek originals—theological, philosophical, legendary, historical and scientific. In a fair number of cases the Syriac version has preserved to us the substance of a lost original text. Often, moreover, the Syriac translation became in turn the parent of a later Arabic version. ”

“ The Syrian people have a civilisation and history that marks them off sharply from the Arabs. Both peoples speak Arabic, and both profess Islam: but as some of the Syrians are Shias, and therefore at variance with the Sunnite Arabs, they cannot be entirely identified. ”

“ And all of that is related to the production of knowledge in the Arabic language because the Arabic content of the internet is such a minuscule amount compared to the knowledge that is present on the internet. And it's very disproportional to the number of Arabic language speakers. And that doesn't include the many other languages that are present in our communities but are not represented in our online forms. So in Syria, we have a lot of Syrians and Kurds and Cherkess and many different languages that have online presences, but they're still marginalized even more than Arabic is. ”

“ Still, even when all authoritative sources have been disclosed, a good deal will continue to be obscure in the Phonology and Morphology of Syriac, as it is only for the Bible and a few ecclesiastical writings that an accurate tradition of the pronunciation exists. So much the less will the expert be disposed to find fault with me, for having left here and there, upon occasion, a mark of interrogation. ”

“ Moreover, just as we have taught many of the more educated natives to talk English, as we use English influence on the upper classes, whereas the crowded millions below remain unchanged; so many Syrians in towns learned to talk Greek, and Greek ideas filtered into their life, although the great mass of the people went on speaking their own language, worshipping their own gods, hardly touched by the aristocratic foreign element. ”

“ So none can reach the women of Syria but women. The Church of Rome understands this, and is sending French, Italian and Spanish nuns in multitudes to work upon the girls and women of Syria, and the women of the Syria Mission, married and unmarried, have done a noble work in the past in the elevation and education of their Syrian sisters. And in this connection it should be observed, that a sine qua non of efficient usefulness among the women of Syria, is that the Christian women who labor for them should know the Arabic language. ”

“ But the most important peculiarity of Syriac verbs is again in the sphere of syntax, and shows the same progress towards flexibility which we found in the nouns. Whereas the Hebrew verb is devoid of real tenses, and only expresses an action as completed or as in process without indicating time past, present or future, Syriac has by the help of an auxiliary verb constructed a set of tenses. Thus we have—
Pres. qāṭel, “he kills,” “he is killing” (sometimes “he is about to kill”) . ”

“ More than any other one people the Syriac-speaking Christians contributed to that general awakening and intel- lectual renaissance centred in Abbasid Baghdad which is considered the chief glory of classical Islam. Between 750 and 850 the Arab world was the scene of one of the most spectacular and momentous movements in the history of thought. The movement was marked by translations into Arabic from Persian, Greek and Syriac. The Arabian Moslem brought with him no art, science or philosophy and hardly any literature ”

“ But the Jewish citizens depending on their wealth, and on that account despising the Syrians, reproached them again, and hoped to provoke them by such reproaches. However, the Syrians, though they were inferior in wealth, yet valuing themselves highly on this account, that the greatest part of the Roman soldiers that were there were either of Cæsarea or Sebaste, they also for some time used reproachful language to the Jews also ”

“ One city-state could be traversed, devastated, or annexed, without in the least degree affecting neighbouring areas. It is true that the population of Syria has always been predominantly Semitic, for she was on the fringe of the great breeding-ground of the Semitic race and her landward boundary was open to the Arabian nomad. Indeed, in the whole course of her history the only race that bade fair at one time to oust the Semite in Syria was the Greek. ”

“ The Syriac Old Testament frequently approximates the original Hebrew text too closely; and, precisely because of the intimate relationship of the languages, we sometimes find ourselves at a loss as to whether the verbal reproduction is still in conformity with the true Syriac idiom, or is really a Hebraism. It should farther be noticed, that the genuine Syriac Canon is of much less compass than that of the Western Churches, and lacks, for instance, the Book of Esther and the Chronicles. ”

“ They have proved that the Assyrian language was not only the speech of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia but that it was also long used as the language of diplomacy by the Hittites and the Egyptians and by the peoples of Syria and Palestine. More than this, it was a kind of lingua franca from the Euxine to the valley of the Nile and from Cyprus to the plateau of Susiana. This fact is most strikingly proved by the priceless collections of cuneiform inscriptions which, only a few years ago, were found in Tel-el-Armana, Egypt, and in Boghaz-Keui, Asia Minor. ”

“ As a land-bridge of early humanity Syria was necessarily the scene of much coming and going at a time when the civilization of the world was largely confined to what is now known as Asiatic Turkey. Its population therefore presents a mixed character. Hittites, Arameans, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Turks conquered the land in turn and imparted their native customs to its inhabitants. The inhabitants of its southern area are now transformed almost beyond the possibility of analysis. ”