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Mandaic language

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Mandaic
Mandāyì, Raṭnā
Native toIraq and Iran
RegionIraq – Baghdad, Basra
Iran – Khuzestan Province
Native speakers
5,500 (2001–2006)[1]
Mandaic alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3Either:
mid – Mandaic
myz – Classical Mandaic
mid Neo-Mandaic
 myz Classical Mandaic
Glottologmand1468
nucl1706
clas1253

Mandaic (Arabic: ٱلْمَنْدَائِيَّة, al-Mandāʾīyah) is the language of the Mandaean religion and community. Classical Mandaic is used by a section of the Mandaean community in liturgical rites. The modern descendant of Classical Mandaic, known as Neo-Mandaic or Modern Mandaic, is spoken by a small section of the Mandaean community around Ahvaz, Khuzestan Province, Iran. Speakers of Classical Mandaic are found in Iran, Iraq (particularly the southern portions of the country) and in diaspora (particularly in the United States). It is a variety of Aramaic notable for its use of vowel letters in writing (see Mandaic script) and the striking amount of Persian influence in its lexicon.

Classical Mandaic is a Northwest Semitic language of the Eastern Aramaic sub-family and is closely related to the language of the Aramaic portions of the Babylonian Talmud as well as the language of the incantation texts and Aramaic incantation bowls found throughout Mesopotamia. It is also related to Syriac, another member of the Eastern Aramaic sub-family, which is the liturgical language of many Christian denominations throughout the Middle East.

Neo-Mandaic

Main article: Neo-Mandaic

Neo-Mandaic represents the latest stage of the phonological and morphological development of Mandaic, a Northwest Semitic language of the Eastern Aramaic sub-family. Along with the other surviving dialects of Aramaic, it is classified as Neo-Aramaic; these form a constellation of dialects ranging from Lake Van and Lake Urmia in the north to Damascus and Ahvaz in the south, clustered in small groups. Having developed in isolation from one another, most Neo-Aramaic dialects are mutually unintelligible and should therefore be considered separate languages; however, determining the exact relationship between the various Neo-Aramaic dialects is a difficult task, fraught with many problems, which arise from our incomplete knowledge of these dialects and their relation to the Aramaic dialects of antiquity.

Aramaic became the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent largely during the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 934–609 BCE), and the Achaemenid Empire (576–330 BCE) after them, who adopted it as an auxiliary language for both international communication and internal administrative use. It gradually came to supplant the native languages of the region, but due to its wide geographic distribution and political circumstances, it soon evolved into two major sub-families, the Western sub-families comprising Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Samaritan Aramaic and the Eastern subfamilies comprising Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (which was in use until the Geonic period), Syriac, and Mandaic.

Although no direct descendants of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic survive today, most of the Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken today belong to the Eastern sub-family; these include Central Neo-Aramaic (Ṭuroyo and Mlaḥsô), Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (the largest Neo-Aramaic group, which includes various Jewish Neo-Aramaic forms, and the varieties of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic), and Neo-Mandaic. The only surviving remnant of the Western subfamily is Western Neo-Aramaic, spoken in the villages of Maaloula, Bakhʽa, and Jubb'adin to the northeast of Damascus. Of all of these dialects, Eastern or Western, only Neo-Mandaic can be described with any certainty as the direct descendant of one of the Aramaic dialects attested in Late Antiquity. For this reason, it is potentially of great value in reconstructing the history of this sub-family and the precise genetic relationship of its members to one another.

In terms of its grammar, Neo-Mandaic is the most conservative among the Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, preserving the old Semitic "suffix" conjugation (or perfect). The phonology, however, has undergone many innovations, the most notable being the loss of the so-called "guttural" consonants.

Neo-Mandaic survives in three subdialects, which arose in the cities of Shushtar, Shah Vali, Masjed Soleyman, and Dezful in northern Khuzestan Province, Iran. The Mandaean communities in these cities fled persecution during the 1880s and settled in the Iranian cities of Ahvaz and Khorramshahr. While Khorramshahr boasted the largest Mandaic-speaking population until the 1980s, the Iran–Iraq War caused many to flee into diaspora, leaving Ahvaz the only remaining Mandaic-speaking community.

Notes

  1. ^ Mandaic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Classical Mandaic at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)

References

  • Drower, Ethel Stefana and Rudolf Macuch. 1963. A Mandaic Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon.
  • Häberl, Charles. 2009. The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
  • Malone, Joseph L. 1997. "Modern and Classical Mandaic Phonology" in Phonologies of Asia and Africa, ed. Alan S. Kaye. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.
  • Macuch, Rudolf. 1965. Handbook of Classical and Modern Mandaic. Berlin: De Gruyter.
  • Macuch, Rudolf. 1989. Neumandäische Chrestomathie. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz.
  • Macuch, Rudolf. 1993. Neumandäische Texte im Dialekt von Ahwaz. Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz.
  • Nöldeke, Theodor. 1862. “Ueber die Mundart der Mandäer.” Abhandlungen der Historisch-Philologischen Classe der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 10: 81-160.
  • Nöldeke, Theodor. 1875. Mandäische Grammatik. Halle: Waisenhaus.
  • Voigt, Rainer. 2007. "Mandaic" in Morphologies of Asia and Africa, ed. Alan S. Kaye. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.


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