Sabar, Yona
A Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dictionary

Dialects of Amidya, Dihok, Nerwa and Zakho, northwestern Iraq. Based on old and new manuscripts, oral and written bible translations, folkloric texts, and diverse spoken registers, with an introduction to grammar and semantics, and an index of Talmudic words which have reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic.

This dictlonary is an effort to document the vocabulary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic in all its written and oral registers. The documentation includes: (a) context references, whenever possible, to all words in the written sources, and most of the oral ones; (b) cognates in older Eastern Aramaic, especially Syriac and Babylonian (Talmudic) Jewish Aramaic; (c) in the case of the numerous loanwords, the source of each, be it Arabic, Hebrew, Kurdish Persian, Turkish etc. Jewish Neo-Aramaic was used by Jewish communities in the remote and inaccessible areas of Kurdistan. In the early 1950s, practically all the Jewish communities of Iraqi Kurdistan, with the rest of the Jews of Iraq, emigrated en masse to Israel and the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by them have been almost entirely superseded by Hebrew. XIII,337 Seiten, broschiert (Semitica Viva; Band 28/Harrassowitz Verlag 2002)