📄 Building a ‘New’ Semitic Language: Lexical Enrichment in Modern Assyrian and Its Problems

Summary

The paper looks at Modern Assyrian, the written koiné of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic. People use it widely in everyday speech and in literature, but it lacks vocabulary for modern domains such as politics and technology. The authors first set out the sociolinguistic background: the endangerment of Neo-Aramaic, its history as a written language (the Urmia koiné, the Soviet-era standard, and a newer Iraqi-based "koiné 2"), and its revival in northern Iraqi schools since the 1990s. They frame this through Kloss's notion of an Ausbau language, which is built up by being used in administration, economy and politics rather than through belles-lettres. They then examine the political vocabulary in a small corpus of Assyrian Universal Alliance declarations, comparing each Modern Assyrian text with its Arabic and/or English version. The comparison shows where the lexicon falls short and how coinages are formed. It matters because it shows how purism, school policy and contact languages shape a minority standard that is still being built. (The detailed analysis section is missing from the supplied extract.)

Key points

• The data are two political declarations published online by the Assyrian Universal Alliance (AUA, founded in Pau, France, 1968). Both have Arabic and/or English counterparts. The analysis draws on Gasparini's BA thesis.
• The enrichment mechanisms covered are revival of existing (Classical Syriac) material, derivation using native or borrowed morphology, calquing, and borrowing.
• Following Odisho, koiné 2 is said to replace Turkish and Persian loans with Syriac-based neologisms or Iraqi colloquial words. It also leans toward Old Aramaic grammar, which reflects a purist trend linked to endangerment.
• Official labels are inconsistent. For example, the Iraqi constitution says "Syriac", while schools use a modern standard enriched from Old Aramaic.
• The reference tools include Oraham's dictionary of "stabilized and enriched" Assyrian, Maclean, Brockelmann, Payne Smith, Wehr and Steingass.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The authors line up a weak-language text with its version in a dominant language, so that gaps in vocabulary and phrasing become visible one segment at a time. — For Mova (learn): Mova could align its graphs for parallel versions of the same text and flag the places where one side produces no frame, using these as targeted repair cases.
• I2. New words are classified by how they were formed (revived old word, derivation, calque, loan), which gives a principled guess at what an unfamiliar word means. — For Mova (tokens): unknown words could be labelled with a likely formation type (compound, affixal derivation, loan), so the lemmatizer can propose a lemma and meaning with an explicit reason.
• I3. Each coinage is traced back to its source through historical and contact-language dictionaries, keeping a record of where the word came from. — For Mova (world): ontology entries could carry provenance tags (WordNet, Wikidata, derived rule), so that every compiled fact can be traced in an explanation.
• I4. Following Kloss, a language's maturity is judged by how many functional domains (politics, administration, economy) it can handle, not by its literary output. — For Mova (answer): Mova's evaluation could be broken down by domain register, adding administrative and political texts alongside fables and school tests to expose coverage gaps.