Neo-Mandaic (ISO 639-3: mid) represents the latest stage of the development of Classical Mandaic, a language of the Middle East which was first attested during the period of Late Antiquity and which continues to be used to the present date by the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran.
While the members of this community, numbered at roughly 70,000 or fewer adherents throughout the world, are familiar with the classical dialect through their sacred literature and liturgy, only a few hundred Mandaeans, located primarily in Iran, speak Neo-Mandaic (known to them as the raṭnɔ) as a first language.
Of all the dialects that have thus far been documented, only Neo-Mandaic can be described with any certainty as the modern reflex of any classical written form of Aramaic.
This Glossarium was to have a perennial influence upon subsequent generations of Mandaeologists; it was consulted by Theodor Nöldeke[8][9] and Rudolf Macúch[2] in the preparation of their grammars, and the contents of its Neo-Mandaic column were incorporated into Drower and Macuch's 1963 dictionary.
The last few decades have seen a marked increase in the number of Neo-Mandaic texts available to scholarship (Macuch 1965b,[3] 1989,[4] and 1993[5]) and a descriptive grammar (Häberl 2009[6]).
On the rare occasions on which it is written, in personal letters and in the colophons that are attached to manuscripts, it is rendered using a modified version of the classical script.
Additionally, the Arabic letter ع has been borrowed to indicate the voiced pharyngeal fricative as well as the glottal stop.
Formerly the fricatives were not distinctive segments but merely allophones of the stops after a vowel; the sound rule governing this alternation is now defunct.
Neo-Mandaic has 28 distinctive consonantal segments, including four loan-phonemes: the postalveolar affricates č /tʃ/ and j /dʒ/ and the pharyngeal fricatives ʿ /ʕ/ and ḥ /ħ/, which are found only in vocabulary of foreign origin, particularly Arabic and Persian.
/i/ and /u/ are realized as [ɪ] and [ʌ] whenever they occur in closed syllables,[13] either accented or unaccented (exceptions are Persian loanwords (e.g. gush "ear") and contextual forms such as asut, from asuta "health").
The collapse of diphthongs appears to be further advanced in the dialect of Ahvāz; compare Khorramshahr gɔw /ɡɔʊ/ 'in' with Ahwāz gu /ɡuː/ id.
This sound change is today typical of both the contemporary dialects of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr, but is not present in the unpublished texts from Iraq collected by Drower or in Macuch 1989.
For example, when the pronominal suffixes are appended directly to the existential particle *eṯ [ɛθ] (Classical ‘it), it regularly takes the form ext- [ɛχt].
The voiced bilabial stop /b/ regularly intervenes between these two segments, e.g. lákamri [ˈlɑ.kɑm.bri] ‘he didn’t return it.’ Clusters of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ with another consonant are also not tolerated, even across a syllable boundary; /h/ is generally deleted in this environment.
As in Classical Mandaic and other Aramaic dialects, vowels in open pretonic syllables are regularly subject to reduction.
This last morpheme indicates a relationship between two nouns (substantive or adjective) corresponding to a variety of functions (generally attributive or genitive).
The appearance of the indefinite and plural morphemes on the noun is determined primarily by its pragmatic status, such as the referentiality and identifiability of the referent.
Macuch (1965a, 207) has noted that this morpheme, originally borrowed from the Iranian languages, is attested already in the Classical Mandaic texts.
The enclitic personal pronouns are in complementary distribution with them; they may represent the object of a transitive verb, a nominal or verbal complement or adjunct in a prepositional phase, or indicate possession on the noun.
In this position, the final vowel of the singular demonstratives is apocopated (these are the forms listed as ‘contextual,’ e.g. ɔ šeršɔnɔ ‘these religions’).
Those roots in which the second and third radical consonants were identical have been reformed on the analogy of the II-weak verbs; this process had already begun in Classical Mandaic.
Transitive verbs also commonly yield a passive participle, which takes the form CəCil, e.g. gəṭil ‘killed (m.sg.
The D-stem is represented by one passive participle, əmšabbɔ ‘praised,’ which belongs to the III-weak root consonant class.
The C-stem is also represented by a single III-weak passive participle, maḥwɔ ‘kept.’ The inflected forms of the verbs are produced by adding personal suffixes to the principal parts.
The final consonant of the third plural personal suffix -en regularly assimilates to this enclitic object marker, producing the form -el(l)-.
The perfective forms are not only preterite but also resultative-stative, which is most apparent from the verbs relating to a change of state, e.g. mextat eštɔ ‘she is dead now,’ using the perfective of meṯ ~ moṯ (mɔyeṯ) ‘to die.’ The indicative is used to make assertions or declarations about situations which the speaker holds to have happened (or, conversely, have not happened), or positions which he maintains to be true.
As a result, verbs in these stems are often translated as if they were agentless passives, or reflexive actions that the subject takes on its own behalf, e.g. etwer minni wuṣle ‘a piece broke off / was broken from it.’ In the passive voice, the grammatical subject of the verb is the recipient of the action described by it, namely the patient.
In the simple present tense, this construction uses the independent form of the existential particle *eṯ and the preposition l- ‘to/for,’ which takes the enclitic suffixes introduced in Table 5.
In tenses other than the simple present, the copular verb həwɔ ~ həwi (hɔwi) is used in the place of the existential particle, e.g. agar pərɔhɔ həwɔle, turti zawnit ‘if I had money, I would have bought a cow.’ Compound sentences combine two or more simple sentences with coordinating conjunctions such as u ‘and,’ ammɔ ‘but,’ lo ‘or,’ and the correlative conjunction -lo … -lo ‘either … or.’ Complex sentences consist of a main clause and one or more dependent clauses introduced by a relative pronoun, provided that the referent of the antecedent of the clause is definite—if it is indefinite, no relative pronoun is used.
[16] Other fluent native speakers of Neo-Mandaic include Salah Choheili (the rishama or Mandaean head priest in Australia) and many of his family members.