[2] According to a note on the last page (folio 312v) of the only surviving manuscript of the Nestorian Mašlmonutho (British Library, Add.
According to the Jacobite historian Bar Hebraeus, Joseph merely altered a preexisting system from Edessa into the one that prevailed in the Nestorian churches.
[6] Bar Hebraeus also records that Joseph wrote a work on homographs, which may have been the first in the history of the Syriac language.
Since the Syriac alphabet is purely consonantal, homographs are words with the same consonants but different vowels and different meanings.
Joseph omits those part of the Art that are specific only to Greek (such as those on orthography and phonology), while adapting others (e.g., diathesis) with Syriac examples.