‘These Languages Are Now under Threat, So We Must Hurry’
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Sergey Loesov, professor at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies (Faculty of Humanities), and his colleagues document endangered languages while working in the field in Tur Abdin and Qalamoun. In this interview, Prof. Loesov discusses field linguistics, Kurdish assistants, and a ‘bold analogy’ with the Prague Linguistic Circle.
— How did the Moscow Aramaic Circle come into being?
— More than twenty years ago, my colleague Leonid Kogan and I were working on a volume titled Semitic Languages. Akkadian. Northwest Semitic Languages as part of the Languages of the World series. This is a typological series in which languages from different families are described according to the same framework, making comparison easier. In that volume, I was responsible for the section on Aramaic languages.
This is a large branch of the Semitic language family, with a deeply documented history spanning nearly three thousand years, as well as a number of modern varieties, most of which are unwritten
By that time, I had already been teaching several ancient written forms of Aramaic: Imperial Aramaic, Biblical Aramaic, and Classical Syriac. Since the structure of the volume required a description of modern Aramaic languages as well, I began to study them and soon became deeply interested. In other words, my engagement with Aramaic languages began at a stage where most scholars usually finish—with major encyclopaedic articles. Typically, a researcher conducts studies first and then summarises them in a reference work, but I moved in the opposite direction. I became acquainted with many of the Aramaic languages, especially the modern ones, in order to write about them for the Languages of the World series.
This volume was published in the spring of 2009. At the time, we were all working at Russian State University for the Humanities. One day, I came to a class on Classical Syriac and said to my students from the programme ‘History and Philology of Ancient Syria-Palestine’: ‘Why don’t we read a text in a language that is a “niece” of Classical Syriac—the modern language Turoyo, which is still spoken today in Tur Abdin?’ And so we began reading. This happened at the beginning of the spring semester in 2009 and, in a sense, marked a new starting point for Russian Aramaic studies. Some of those students later went on to study modern Aramaic languages professionally. An informal community emerged, which we called the Moscow Aramaic Circle (see more details in Russian)—in a bold analogy with the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cercle linguistique de Prague). We began to meet regularly and to reflect on various issues in the history of the Aramaic language, particularly the transition from Middle Aramaic varieties, such as Syriac, to modern ones, for example Turoyo.
Later, we were invited to become a seminar within a broader academic community known as Seven Seminars.
At the turn of 2017–2018, our Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies moved from the Russian State University for the Humanities to HSE University.
At around the same time, I moved from studying modern Aramaic languages through published texts to conducting fieldwork. This was a step that changed my life and the lives of many of my students
— How is the work of the Moscow Aramaic Circle organised?
— Tur Abdin is part of Upper Mesopotamia, in what is now south-eastern Turkey, near the Syrian border. It is not exactly an originally Turkic-speaking region. Most people there speak Kurmanji, a north-western Iranian language, which exists in close contact with the Eastern Aramaic language Turoyo. All the Turoyo speakers I later worked with also had a good command of Kurdish, as they come from mixed villages where part of the population is Christian and part is Muslim Kurdish: the Christian population speaks Turoyo, while the Kurdish population speaks Kurmanji.
From August 2016, we began studying Kurmanji ourselves. We found a native speaker in Moscow and studied with him in person. Soon after, we decided to look for a Kurdish assistant for our fieldwork. Through connections within the Kurmanji-learning community, we were introduced to a young woman named Gülsüm Demir, whose parents were born in Tur Abdin, not far from the places where we soon began our field research on Turoyo. She spoke English, and her native language was Kurmanji. We got in touch with her, and I invited her to Moscow. She worked with us for several years, teaching us Kurmanji, while we taught her Turoyo and Classical Syriac.
And in January 2018, we travelled to Tur Abdin for the first time, together with a member of our department—once my student long ago, and now my colleague and friend, Alexey Lyavdansky—as well as our young Kurdish assistant Gülsüm Demir.
We were fortunate from the very beginning: we met an elderly woman from the village of Beqŭsyone (Turk. Alagöz) who turned out to be a true natural talent. She was someone who both could and loved to speak, knew a vast amount of local folklore by heart, and was willing to talk about herself and about everything else
We began working with her and, in the end, recorded what is known as oral literature and oral history—spoken narratives and life stories—amounting to several hours of audio. After that very first trip, I realised that we already had enough material for an entire book, and we decided to begin work on it.
During our first expedition, Alexey Lyavdansky and I hardly knew the Turoyo language. I knew its grammar and had read a number of texts, but I could not speak it. All our work was carried out through Gülsüm as a consultant and translator, using Kurmanji as an intermediary language. Gradually, however, I became immersed in the language, and after two months of working through Kurdish, I realised that I could already communicate directly with native speakers of Turoyo—provided they were patient and willing to teach and correct me.
In January 2019, I travelled to Tur Abdin alone. There I was met by my informant and assistant, İlyas İran, born in 1976, who had previously spent ten years teaching religion and Classical Syriac as a liturgical language in a church school. He is a very patient and tactful person, a teacher who at some point went into business because a teacher’s income is quite modest. He understood what I was trying to say in each particular situation, helped me express myself, and I quickly became fluent in conversation. From that point on, all my work has been conducted in Turoyo, and with each passing day my command of the language has improved.
In the summer of 2019, Charles Häberl, my American colleague and professor at Rutgers University (New Jersey), joined our project. We had invited him to Moscow to teach us a course on the modern Mandaic language. This is another branch of Aramaic, the language of the Mandaean community in Iraq and Iran, which until recently was spoken in the region of the Shatt al-Arab, where the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates flow together into the Persian Gulf.
Since June 2019, Charles Häberl and I have been working online on an upcoming book, which is gradually nearing completion; from time to time, we meet in Tur Abdin and continue our work there.
The book will be an edition of new texts that we have transcribed and recorded, accompanied by English translations and provided with interlinear lexical and morphological glossing. The aim is to enable a reader who does not know the language to understand and interpret the text by relying on this glossing. This is a standard practice when working with rare and endangered languages. When texts in endangered languages are published, they are supplied with such glosses because, naturally, readers do not know the language. One example is the Yaghan language, spoken by the indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, which by the early 21st century had only a handful of remaining speakers. The book will also include a full glossary—the vocabulary of our corpus—with examples, etymologies, and commentary.
In addition, the publication will be accompanied by folkloristic commentary. This involves analysing the texts in terms of the standard classification of narrative types and motifs. For example, Cinderella represents a tale type that includes a number of motifs: an orphan or persecuted girl, a cruel stepmother, difficult tasks, magical helpers, the heroine’s anonymous presence at a feast or celebration, recognition through a lost object, the search for a bride, and the contrast between the true heroine and a false claimant.
The book will also contain texts with interlinear glossing and a concise grammatical description of the language. In this way, it will form a self-contained volume from which one can learn the Turoyo language.
There will also be a cultural and anthropological section—commentary related to the realities of life in the highlands.
Taken together, the book will become an encyclopaedia of a small and disappearing Christian Turoyo-speaking people
This is the first direction of our work.
— How do you involve students in the work of the seminar?
— In 2021, we welcomed the first cohort of a new degree programme entitled ‘The Arab World and Christian Orient.’ It is unique—there is nothing quite like it anywhere in Europe—because we teach rather specialised subjects from the very first year of undergraduate study. Elsewhere, people usually begin working on such topics at the master’s or even PhD level, whereas we offer them straight away. It is a bold step, because the Christian Orient is less familiar than, say, Japanese or Arabic studies. Nevertheless, we enrolled ten students, and some of them also became members of the Moscow Aramaic Circle, having developed an interest in modern Aramaic languages. Students can choose between studying Aramaic languages and researching Syriac literature, which is supervised by my colleague and former student, Maksim Kalinin. In this way, the academic group and the Moscow Aramaic Circle function as communicating vessels. Membership is informal and fluid—usually around fifteen people—but there is a core group of about seven who share responsibility for editing texts and producing grammatical descriptions. Some of them do not live in Moscow or even in Russia: Charles Häberl is a regular participant based in the United States, and some of my former students are now working in Germany.
— How is the Circle’s work on another Aramaic languages organised?
— Another area of the Moscow Aramaic Circle’s work is the study of Modern Western Aramaic in Syria.
Modern Aramaic languages can be divided into eastern and western groups. The eastern group includes Turoyo and what is known as NENA (Northeastern Neo-Aramaic languages)—the languages of Iraq and Iran, which are studied by Alexey Lyavdansky. In addition, there is Modern Mandaic, studied by Charles Häberl, and Modern Western Aramaic, which I had long intended to explore.
When I decided to study the history of Aramaic languages, it seemed natural to begin with those that still exist today. That is how I came to study modern Aramaic languages from a historical perspective, and later became interested not so much in preserving them—since that is impossible—but in documenting them. I focused on tasks that I felt were manageable. I began with Turoyo and later expanded my work to include Modern Western Aramaic.
What kind of language is this? Genealogically, Aramaic languages are divided into eastern and western branches. The languages I discussed earlier all belong to the eastern group. Of the western languages—which were once the principal languages of the entire Levant in the early Middle Ages—only a small ‘linguistic island’ (or Sprachinsel) survives today in Syria, in the Qalamoun Mountains, part of the Anti-Lebanon range. This, too, is an endangered, vulnerable language. It was first identified in the 19th century. Later, the German Arabist Werner Arnold conducted fieldwork there between 1985 and 1987, recording and publishing four volumes of texts in its three dialects, as well as producing descriptions of its phonology and morphology and compiling a dictionary. Since the 1990s, however, very little new fieldwork has been carried out, and the corpus has hardly expanded.
In 2011, the Syrian Civil War began. I felt that there was no time to lose, and decided—without yet completing my work on Turoyo—to begin working on Western Aramaic in parallel
In December 2020, I travelled to Qalamoun, found reliable informants and a Syrian assistant, and began recording texts.
The place where I work is located about 56 kilometres north of Damascus, high in the mountains at an altitude of 1,600–1,700 metres above sea level. Winters there are cold. There are three villages—Maaloula, Bakh’ah, and Jubb’adin—where three dialects of Western Aramaic are spoken. One of them, Maaloula, is Christian and quite well known, while the other two are Muslim. Until recently, Bakh’ah and Jubb’adin were the only places in the world where Muslims spoke Aramaic. Today, only Jubb’adin remains, because during the civil war Bakh’ah sided with Islamist rebels against Bashar al-Assad, and after their defeat the inhabitants fled. When I visited Bakh’ah in December 2020, it was in ruins—there was nothing and no one there except snakes and birds. However, according to some reports, residents have since returned following the change of government. I hope that when I next travel there, I will be able to record new texts in the Bakh’ah dialect, which is the most endangered of the three. The fact is that all speakers of Modern Western Aramaic are also fluent in local Arabic dialects. Therefore, when they leave places like Bakh’ah, they quickly adapt to the surrounding ‘sea’ of Arabic, and it becomes extremely difficult to find material worth recording.
As a result, apart from Bakh’ah, Jubb’adin is now the only place in the world where Muslims still speak Aramaic. This dialect is relatively well preserved: the population is larger than in Maaloula, and the language is more actively maintained. There is a strong sense of a distinct Muslim–Aramaic identity. People do not try to raise their children solely in Arabic—they speak Aramaic with them. Overall, there is much to be studied there. Once I become more confident working with the Christian dialect, I plan to focus on the dialect of Jubb’adin. I have already recorded some texts in this dialect, and some have been partially transcribed.
I intend to do the same as with Turoyo: to produce a book with interlinear glossing that will be accessible to the wider scholarly community. The texts published by Werner Arnold consist simply of Aramaic texts with German translations, without a full scholarly apparatus. We are working on a new grammar, because the earlier one covers only morphology and phonology, without syntax—without, as it were, the ‘living essence’ of the language.
— Is the Christian Orient programme about the contemporary Christian East?
— It includes both a historical and a contemporary dimension. For example, it features survey courses on the Christian tradition of Armenia and on Coptic Christianity. At its core lies Aramaic and Syriac Christianity, while other areas are covered in overview courses. Among classical written cultures, Syriac culture and Biblical Aramaic are studied in depth, while the modern component focuses on the language and culture of contemporary Aramaic-speaking communities. There is a three-year course entitled ‘Introduction to Modern Aramaic Languages’: in the third year students study Western Aramaic, in the fourth year Turoyo, and in the fifth year NENA (Northeastern Neo-Aramaic). If a student is interested in Coptic or, say, Armenian, we can create the conditions for them to pursue these subjects in greater depth.
— Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the Gospels have come down to us in Greek—is that correct?
— The Gospels were originally written in Greek.
I have a book on this subject entitled History and Hermeneutics in the Study of the New Testament (in Russian), where everything is explained in detail. In addition, I published an article in October 2020 in the Troitsky Variant newspaper called ‘Aramaic as the Native Language of Jesus Christ’ (in Russian). It discusses in depth why Aramaic was the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.
— You also run another seminar—on Modern Aramaic Languages. What is its history?
— There is no major divide between the Moscow Aramaic Circle and the Modern Aramaic Languages seminar. The difference is that within the Moscow Aramaic Circle we mainly focus on Eastern Aramaic, whereas in the research and teaching group we primarily work on Western Aramaic.
— How do you find these ‘oases’ where endangered languages are still preserved?
— We have not discovered any new languages—there are none left to discover. Such discoveries were still possible some sixty years ago, but not today. However, if we speak about Turoyo and Modern Western Aramaic, they were only discovered for scholarship in the 19th century. In Damascus in the spring of 1869, the German scholars Eugen Prym and Albert Socin met a speaker of Turoyo from Midyat, named Jano, who was on his way to Jerusalem. From him, they recorded a large corpus of folklore texts. Later that same autumn, they reached Maaloula in the Qalamoun Mountains (not far from Damascus) and, for the first time, recorded a substantial number of folklore texts in Modern Western Aramaic from a female speaker. These languages have survived to the present day, but they are now under threat. That is why we are in a hurry.
