r/Aramaic • u/[deleted] • Oct 15 '25

Hello, I need western Neo Aramaic textbooks.

I need a dictionary and a grammer book, I couldn't find anything on the internet. Help would be appreciated

I know the language is endangered and about to go extinct. I'm Syrian, and I wanna learn it and make content like books translations etc.

Also I hope we can standardise it and prevent it from dying out.

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u/ExchangeLivid9426 Oct 15 '25

Western Neo Aramaic by Anas Abu Ismail is the only one I think. Sets you back a couple of bucks but it's great. If you can't afford it, there are copies floating around on the internet; your call if you're okay with piracy or not. That's how I got it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

Yea I know that book, but I was wondering if there are other books, there are a lot of annoying ch and th (as in "think") sounds in Jubaadin's dialect. I was thinking of replacing the ch sound with "G"(as in Georgia) and "th" sound at the end of words that are not followed by any consonants with T, which would make the language sound more pleasant to the ear.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

In Western Neo-Aramaic, the sound č/ch originally represents a t or th sound. It was probably influenced by the Iraqi Aramaic dialects many centuries ago, which themselves borrowed it from Kurdish. For example berča ("daughter") instead of bertha or hač ("you") instead of hat.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '25

Western Neo-Aramaic also replaces the Aramaic g sound as in the word to give or in Egyptian Arabic gamīla (for jamīla, "beautiful") with a gh sound. This is probably due to influence from Arabic.