Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Despite widespread translation activity and the use of Syr. in Late Antiquity by numerous non-native speakers, there are no surviving Syr. lexical materials from this early period, with the exception of two 4th-cent. Manichaean Syr.-Coptic glossaries written on wooden boards, found in the kitchen of an abandoned house at Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt (Franzmann and Gardner). These were produced by the translator of a Syr. text into Coptic, and so the order of the Syr. words is determined by their occurrence in the source text. It is likely that similar glossaries will have been produced by other Syr. translators, and particularly in the 7th cent. when formal one-to-one Greek to Syr. correspondences were common, but these have not survived.
Lexical works of a different kind were produced by the Syr. scribal schools,
whose careful transmission of biblical and patristic texts led to the
production of a ‘masoretic’ literature that is comparable in many respects
to that of contemporary Jewish scribes (see Masora). Some texts
preserve the correct pronunciation of rare words or foreign names, others
provide lists of homographs. These lists are often included within
grammatical texts, mainly of Ch. of E. origin, and are associated with such
figures as
The first real Syr. lexica, containing alphabetic lists of words and their
glosses, were produced in 9th-cent. Abbasid
Puššāq šmāhe yawnāye b-suryāye ‘The interpretation of
Greek words with Syriac’. In addition to his work on Greek words and his
work on Syriac homographs, Ḥunayn is said to have written a ‘Compendious
Lexicon’ (Assemani, BibOr, vol. 3.1, 165). Hunayn’s
lexicographical works were augmented by
The largest of all these early Syr.-Arabic lexica (often more like an
encyclopedia than a dictionary), and the most useful for scholars today, is
that of
An alternative type of medieval Syr.-Arabic lexicon is ‘The Book of the
Interpreter’ of
With the beginning of Syriac printing in Europe in the 16th cent., there was
a growing demand for Syr.- Latin lexica. The first of these was the Syrorum peculium of
Lexicon
pentaglotton of Valentino Schindler (1612) and the NT lexica of
Johann Buxtorf the younger (1622), Martin Trost (1623), Aegidius Gutbier
(1667), and Carl Schaaf (1708). Castell’s Lexicon
Heptaglotton (1669), which was printed to accompany Walton’s London
Polyglot Bible, was the first to incorporate all the Syr. of the OT as well
as to make systematic use of the medieval Syr.-Arabic lexica. Michaelis
extracted the Syr. vocabulary from Castell and republished it in 1788, and
this became the standard Syr. lexicon in the early-19th cent., although much
criticised.
The late-19th cent. saw the production of numerous major Syr. lexica which
remain key reference works today (although they pre-date most critical
editions of Syr. texts). The largest was the Thesaurus
syriacus (1868–1901) of
The world-wide diaspora of Syr.-using Christians, and the arrival of Syr. word-processing software, has produced an explosion of Syr. lexica in recent decades. These are notable for including Classical Syr. neologisms for modern ideological and technological terminology, and some particularly useful examples were published by Hanna and Bulut (2000), Khoshaba and Youkhana (2000), and Afram (2005).
Although Christian Neo-Aramaic was included in Payne Smith’s Thesaurus, the first dedicated dictionary was the
Assyrian-Russian work of Kalashev (1894), soon followed by the important
Assyrian-English dictionary of Maclean (1901). Large lexica of the Christian
NENA dialects were later published by David (1924), Sarmas (1969, 1980), and
Sargizi (2002), and less comprehensive lexica of Ṭuroyo by Ritter
(1979), Jacob and Asmar (1985), and Ishaq (1988).
See Fig. 8.