On the Afel Stem in Western Neo-Aramaic

On the Afel Stem in Western Neo-Aramaic Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures Studies in the Grammar and Lexicon of Neo-Aramaic Studies in the Grammar and Geoffrey Khan and Paul M. [...] One begins with the Middle Aramaic attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, moves on to the Late Aramaic corpora of Jewish Palestinian, Christian Palestinian and Samaritan Aramaic, and concludes with Western Neo-Aramaic2 The study of Western Neo-Aramaic began in 1863 with the publication by Jules Ferrette (1863) of transcriptions of a text and vocabulary items from Maʿlula Since then, the dialect of Maʿl. [...] Since the publication of that grammar, however, thanks to the intensive investigation into the literary dialects of Late Western Aramaic and the rich material from Maʿlula, Baxʿa, and Jubbʿadin that Arnold has presented, scholars now have the wherewithal to investigate further the links between older Western Aramaic and Western Neo-Aramaic A detailed diachronic description of the development of We. [...] Contact with Arabic? Because of the considerable influence of Arabic on Maʿlula and the widescale absorption of Arabic verbs into the vocabulary of Maʿlula, one might be tempted to seek the origins of the phenomenon in the centuries of contact that existed between Aramaic and Arabic in Syria. [...] I would like to suggest that it was the retraction of stress and the subsequent creation of initial epenthetic vowels, a phenomenon that began in Late Western Aramaic, which led in Western Neo- Aramaic to the reinterpretation of Peal verbs as Afel forms Maʿlula and Jubbʿadin preserve verbs of the *qatila type, ie, intransitive verbs that have a reflex of e in the base of the verb in the perfect: i.