New Lexical Findings in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Urmi

Abstract The present article discusses seven fieldwork-based lexical findings in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmi, a seriously endangered variety of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA). A comparative examination of cognates in literary Aramaic languages such as Jewish Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, as well as in some of the modern Aramaic varieties, is adduced to establish the etymology of each of these findings. Five of these lexical items are shown to be inherited from older layers of Aramaic and to have cognates in other varieties of modern Aramaic; while the remaining two are innovations derived from Aramaic lexical elements through processes of word-formation. The latter two lexical innovations are exclusive to Jewish Urmi amongst the modern Aramaic languages. The seven lexemes presented here, together with their etymologies, are added to numerous other Jewish Urmi words that have already been attested and analyzed in previous studies.