Mlahsô language

Mlahsô
ܡܠܚܬܝܐ Mlaħsô, ܣܘܪܝܝܐ Suryô
Spoken in	Syria, Turkey
Region	Qamishli in northeastern Syria, two villages in Diyarbakır Province of southeastern Turkey
Extinct	with the death of Ibrahim Hanna in 1998
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Aramaic Neo-Aramaic Central Neo-Aramaic Mlahsô
Language codes
ISO 639-3	lhs

Mlahsô (Syriac: ܡܠܚܬܝܐ) is a Modern West Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic. It was traditionally spoken in eastern Turkey and north-eastern Syria by members of the Assyrian/Syriac people.

Mlahsô is closely related to the Turoyo language. It was spoken in the villages of Mlahsó and `Ansha near Lice, Diyarbakır, Turkey. The name of the village and the language comes from the Syriac word melħo, 'salt'. The literary Syriac name for the language is Mlaħthoyo. The native speakers of Mlahsô referred to their language simply as Suryô, or Syriac.

The last speaker of Mlahsô, Ibrahim Hanna, died in 1998 in Qamishli. It was reported in 1999 that his daughter knew the language well, but was nearly deaf and had no one to converse with in the language.

Mlahsô is more conservative than Turoyo in grammar and vocabulary, using classical Syriac words and constructions. However, it is phonologically less conservative than Turoyo. This is particularly noticeable in the use of s for classical θ and y (IPA /j/) for ġ. Mlahsô renders the combination of vowel plus y as a single, fronted vowel rather than a diphthong or a glide.

See also

• Turoyo language
• Syriac language

References

• Jastrow, Otto (1994). Der neuaramäische Dialekt von Mlaḥsô. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN 3-447-03498-X.

External links

• Ethnologue report for Mlahsô
• Semitisches Tonarchiv: Dokumentgruppe "Aramäisch/Mlahsô" (text in German)