Neo-Mandaic , also known as Modern Mandaic , sometimes called the " ratna " ( Arabic : رطنة raṭna "jargon"), is the modern reflex of the Mandaic language , the liturgical language of the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran . Although severely endangered, it survives today as the first language of a small number of Mandaeans (possibly as few as 100–200 speakers) in Iran and in the Mandaean diaspora. All Neo-Mandaic speakers are multilingual in the languages of their neighbors, Arabic and Persian , and the influence of these languages upon the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is considerable, particularly in the lexicon and the morphology of the noun. Nevertheless, Neo-Mandaic is more conservative even in these regards than most other Neo-Aramaic languages .
89-532: Neo-Mandaic (ISO 639-3: mid) represents the latest stage of the development of Classical Mandaic, a language of the Middle East which was first attested during the period of Late Antiquity and which continues to be used to the present date by the Mandaean religious community of Iraq and Iran. While the members of this community, numbered at roughly 70,000 or fewer adherents throughout the world, are familiar with
178-587: A crowd watching a military parade on 22 September 2018. In order to connect more between east and west Ahvaz, several big bridges have been built on the Karun river , for this reason, Ahvaz has become known as the City of bridges , although since the beginning of the 20th century, this city has always been known as the Oil Capital of Iran, along with other cities of Khuzestan province! There are 9 bridges over
267-542: A few further pedagogic modifications. There are 35 distinctive segments in Neo-Mandaic: 28 consonants and seven vowels. For most of these segments, there is a relatively wide degree of allophonic variation. The transcription system, which is phonemic, does not reflect this variation; nor does it reflect sporadic assimilations, deletions, and other features that are typical of allegro speech. Neo-Mandaic has 28 distinctive consonantal segments, including four loan-phonemes:
356-477: A main clause and one or more dependent clauses introduced by a relative pronoun, provided that the referent of the antecedent of the clause is definite—if it is indefinite, no relative pronoun is used. The Classical Mandaic relative pronoun d - has not survived, having been replaced by elli , an Arabic loan that introduces non-restrictive relative clauses, and ke , a Persian loan that introduces restrictive relative clauses, both of which appear immediately following
445-606: A new privately owned stadium is currently under construction by Foolad F.C. in Ahvaz. Football is a major part of the city's culture. The abundant enthusiasm has made Ahvaz home to three Iranian major Football clubs: Foolad , Esteghlal Khuzestan are currently playing in the Persian Gulf Pro League , and Esteghlal Ahvaz is playing in Azadegan League . Foolad have won the league on two occasions,
534-498: A predicate locative construction to express the notion of possession. In the simple present tense, this construction uses the independent form of the existential particle * eṯ and the preposition l - ‘to/for,’ which takes the enclitic suffixes introduced in Table 5. Before l -, the existential particle assumes the form eh -, yielding the forms ehli ‘he has’ (lit. ‘there is for him’), ehla ‘she has,’ and so forth. In tenses other than
623-401: A result, the most common inflectional morphemes associated with the states have been replaced by morphemes borrowed from Persian, such as the plural morphemes ɔn (for native and nativized vocabulary) and - (h)ɔ (for words of foreign origin), the indefinite morpheme - i , and the ezɔfe . This last morpheme indicates a relationship between two nouns (substantive or adjective) corresponding to
712-401: A rime. The rime consists of a nucleus (usually a vowel or a syllabic consonant) with or without a coda. The onset and the coda which frame the nucleus consist of consonants; the onset is mandatory for all word-internal syllables, but the coda is optional in all environments. Whenever an enclitic pronominal suffix (see 3.3. below) lacking an onset is added to a closed accented syllable, the coda of
801-572: A sibilant as their initial radical, such as eṣṭəwɔ ~ eṣṭəwi ( meṣṭəwi ) ‘to be baptized’ in the G-stem or eštallam ~ eštallam ( meštallam ) in the C-stem, in which the stop and the sibilant are metathesized. A seventh stem, the Q-stem, is reserved exclusively for those verbs possessing four root consonants. Verbs that begin with a vowel rather than a consonant are called I-weak. Verbs beginning with
890-472: A sonorant is the second segment in a word-final consonant cluster, the cluster is eliminated by syllabifying the sonorant. Neo-Mandaic does not tolerate clusters of the bilabial nasal /m/ and the alveolar trill /r/ in any environment. The voiced bilabial stop /b/ regularly intervenes between these two segments, e.g. lákamri [ˈlɑ.kɑm.bri] ‘he didn’t return it.’ Clusters of the voiceless glottal fricative /h/ with another consonant are also not tolerated, even across
979-603: A steady increase in population. At the time of the National Census of 2006, the city had 969,843 inhabitants in 212,097 households; 1,112,021 people in 288,271 households in 2011; and in 2016 the census counted 1,184,788 people in 331,556 households. The river Karun flows through the middle of the city. It is one of the two navigable rivers in Iran, alongside the Arvand Rud . Ahvaz has a long history, dating back to
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#17327648551361068-461: A syllable boundary. Consonant clusters consisting of a stop followed by a sonorant, a sibilant followed by a sonorant, or a sibilant followed by a stop, are tolerated in both syllable-final and syllable-initial environments. Consonant clusters consisting of a sonorant and a stop or a sonorant and a fricative are tolerated in word final environment alone. /ə/ is regularly inserted as an anaptyctic vowel to break up impermissible consonant clusters; whenever
1157-423: A syllable boundary; /h/ is generally deleted in this environment. The accent preferably falls upon a tense vowel within a closed syllable. The placement of the accent is determined from the final syllable. Any final syllable (or ultima) that is closed and contains a tense vowel automatically receives the accent, e.g. farwɔh [fær.ˈwɔh] ‘thanks.’ If the final is open or contains a lax vowel, the accent will fall upon
1246-467: A variety of functions (generally attributive or genitive). In Neo-Mandaic, the attributes of both the Iranian ezɔfe and its Classical Mandaic analogue are reconciled. Whenever a noun bearing the nominal augment – ɔ is immediately followed by another noun or adjective expressing a genitive or attributive relationship, the augment is regularly apocopated, e.g. rabbɔ ‘leader’ but rab Mandayɔnɔ ‘leader of
1335-579: Is a boy’), CVCC ( waxt [væχt] ‘time’), CVVC ( bieṯ [biɛ̆θ] ‘house’), and even CVVCC ( šieltxon [ˈʃiɛ̆lt.χon] ‘I asked you (pl.)’). Permissible consonant clusters in Neo-Mandaic fall into two categories: clusters that form at the beginning or the end of a syllable, and those that span syllable boundaries. The former are strictly limited to certain combination of segments. The latter are less restricted; with few exceptions, Neo-Mandaic tolerates most clusters of two or occasionally even three consonants across
1424-547: Is a city in the Central District of Ahvaz County , Khuzestan province, Iran. It serves as capital of the province, the county, and the district. It is home to Persians , Arabs , Bakhtiaris , Dezfulis, Shushtaris, and others. Languages spoken in the area include Persian , Arabic , Luri and dialects such as Bakhtiari , Dezfuli and Shushtari . Ahvaz is home to over 1.2 million people within its metropolitan area, including Sheybani . Census results suggest
1513-477: Is a reflex of Classical Mandaic b . As Neo-Mandaic contains several phonemes not found in Classical Mandaic, several letters from the original script have been modified with two dots placed below to represent these phonemes: š may represent /tʃ/, /ʒ/, or /dʒ/ , d represents /ðˤ/ , and h represents /ħ/ . Private Mandaic schools in Iran and Australia employ a version of this same script with
1602-419: Is also known for its universities as well as its role in commerce and industry. Ahvaz institutes of higher learning include: [REDACTED] Ahvaz travel guide from Wikivoyage [REDACTED] Media related to Ahvaz at Wikimedia Commons Voiced pharyngeal fricative The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages . The symbol in
1691-409: Is also represented by a single III-weak passive participle, maḥwɔ ‘kept.’ The inflected forms of the verbs are produced by adding personal suffixes to the principal parts. The forms given in parentheses were cited by Macuch, who noted that they were infrequently found and not consistently used. The feminine plural forms were not present at all in the texts collected by Häberl, and it would appear that
1780-729: Is also spoken among the Mandaeans of Ahvaz. It is a descendant of the Classical Mandaic language that has been partially influenced by Khuzestani Persian. In 2011, the World Health Organization ranked Ahvaz as the world's most air-polluted city. The reason Ahvaz is so polluted is because of its oil industry. The pollution can be very dangerous, causing different types of diseases, and can be harmful to plants. Ahvaz International Airport ( IATA : AWZ , ICAO : OIAW ) ( Persian : فرودگاه بینالمللی اهواز)
1869-459: Is an airport serving the city of Ahvaz, Iran . Ahvaz railway station ( Persian : ايستگاه راه آهن اهواز, Istgah-e Rah Ahan-e Ahvaz ) is located in Ahvaz, Khuzestan Province . Traditionally, Khuzestan province has been a major soccer hub in Iran. The city has two existing sport complexes: Takhti Stadium and the newly constructed Ghadir Stadium . There are several other smaller complexes for martial arts, swimming pools and gymnasiums. Also,
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#17327648551361958-464: Is caseless. Capital ⟨⟩ and lower-case ⟨⟩ are pending at Unicode U+A7CE and U+A7CF. Features of the voiced pharyngeal approximant fricative: Pharyngeal consonants are not widespread. Sometimes, a pharyngeal approximant develops from a uvular approximant. Many languages that have been described as having pharyngeal fricatives or approximants turn out on closer inspection to have epiglottal consonants instead. For example,
2047-660: Is composed of seven distinct vowels, of which six ( i /i/ , u /u/ , e /e/ , o /o/ , a /a/ , and ɔ /ɒ/ ) are principal phonemes, and one ( ə /ə/ ) is marginal. The vowels are distinguished by quality rather than quantity. Three of the principal vowels, the "tense" vowels i , u , and ɔ , are lengthened in open accented syllables to [iː] , [uː] , and [ɔː] or [ɒː] . /i/ and /u/ are realized as [ɪ] and [ʌ] whenever they occur in closed syllables, either accented or unaccented (exceptions are Persian loanwords (e.g. gush "ear") and contextual forms such as asut , from asuta "health"). The other three principle vowels,
2136-494: Is most apparent from the verbs relating to a change of state, e.g. mextat eštɔ ‘she is dead now,’ using the perfective of meṯ ~ moṯ ( mɔyeṯ ) ‘to die.’ The indicative is used to make assertions or declarations about situations which the speaker holds to have happened (or, conversely, have not happened), or positions which he maintains to be true. It is also the mood used for questions and other interrogative statements. The perfective, by its very nature, refers to situations that
2225-492: Is regularly fronted, backed, raised, or lowered in harmony with the vowel of the following syllable. When it is followed by /w/ , it is regularly raised and backed to [ʌ] . When the accent falls on a closed syllable containing schwa, it becomes fronted and raised to [ɛ] . There are also five diphthongs, ey /ɛɪ/ , ay /aɪ/ , aw /aʊ/ , ɔy /ɔɪ/ , and ɔw /ɔʊ/ . The diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ , which had already collapsed in closed accented syllables to /i/ and /u/ in
2314-641: The Achaemenid period . In ancient times, the city was one of the main centers of the Academy of Gondishapur . The original inhabitants of the Khuzestan province , the Khuzi, are the source of the name "Ahvaz". Later the name was changed to Hormazd-Ardašēr (Persian: هرمزداردشیر Hormozd ardeshir ) and it became abbreviated to Daravashir later, but as a matter of fact, it's not quite clear if this change
2403-677: The Central Neo-Aramaic ( Turoyo and Mlahsô ) and Northeastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects spoken by Jewish and Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia , Iraqi Kurdistan , Iranian Kurdistan and Iranian Azerbaijan . A smaller but still considerable volume of scholarship is dedicated to the more peripheral dialects such as the Western Neo-Aramaic dialects spoken by Christians and Muslims in three villages near Damascus , and Neo-Mandaic. Of all
2492-497: The Discalced Carmelite Matteo di San Giuseppe [ it ] . This Glossarium was to have a perennial influence upon subsequent generations of Mandaeologists; it was consulted by Theodor Nöldeke and Rudolf Macúch in the preparation of their grammars, and the contents of its Neo-Mandaic column were incorporated into Drower and Macuch's 1963 dictionary. No complete Neo-Mandaic text was published until
2581-665: The International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ ʕ ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\ . Epiglottals and epiglotto-pharyngeals are often mistakenly taken to be pharyngeal. Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [ʕ] is usually an approximant . The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation. The IPA letter ⟨ ʕ ⟩
2670-603: The Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988). Ahvaz was close to the front lines and suffered badly during the war. Iraq had pressed its claims to Khūzestān. Iraq had hoped to exacerbate ethnic tensions and win over popular support for the invaders. Most accounts say that the Iranian Arab inhabitants resisted the Iraqis rather than welcome them as liberators. However, some Iranian Arabs claim that as a minority they face discrimination from
2759-690: The Karun river. The Black Bridge, also known as the Victory Bridge, was the first modern bridge over the Karun River. The bridge was built during World War II and used to supply the Allies in the Soviet Union and had a major impact on the Allied victory. White Bridge is an arch bridge completed on 21 September 1936 and inaugurated on 6 November 1936. The bridge remains a symbol of
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2848-682: The Khūzestān Province was transferred there from Shûshtar in 1926. The Trans-Iranian Railway reached Ahvaz in 1929 and by World War II , Ahvaz had become the principal built-up area of the interior of Khūzestān. Professional segregation remained well marked between various groups in that period still feebly integrated: Persians , sub-groupings of Persians and Arabs . Natives of the Isfahan region held an important place in retail trade, owners of cafes and hotels and as craftsmen. Iraq attempted to annex Khūzestān and Ahvaz in 1980, resulting in
2937-405: The "lax" vowels o , e , and a , appear only exceptionally in open accented syllables. /e/ is realized as [e] in open syllables and [ɛ] in closed syllables. /o/ is realized as [oː] in open syllables and as [ʌ] in closed syllables. /a/ is realized as [ɑ] in closed accented syllables, and as [a] or [æ] elsewhere. Schwa (ə) has the widest allophonic variation of all the vowels. It
3026-571: The 1880s, under Qajar rule, the Karun River was dredged and re-opened to commerce. A newly built railway crossed the Karun at Ahvaz. The city again became a commercial crossroads, linking river and rail traffic. The construction of the Suez Canal further stimulated trade. A port city was built near the old village of Ahvaz, and named Bandar-e-Naseri in honor of Nassereddin Shah Qajar . Oil
3115-529: The 2013–2014 season and the 2004–2005 season. Esteghlal Ahvaz finished runners–up in the league in the 2006–2007 season. In 2016, Esteghlal Khuzestan won the league for the first time. A number of other teams such as Foolad B the second team of Foolad and Karun Khuzestan play in the 2nd Division . Ahvaz has also two teams in the Iranian Futsal Super League , which are Sherkat Melli Haffari Iran FSC and Gaz Khozestan FSC . Ahvaz
3204-524: The 2016 census, the city had an estimated population of 1,184,788 people. Based on a survey taken by the Iranian ministry of culture in 2010, the most common languages in Ahvaz are Persian (44.8%), Arabic (35.7%), and Bakhtiari (15.8%). Many Ahvazis are bilingual , speaking both Persian and one of the following languages/Dialects. The Arabic spoken in Ahvaz is a variety of Khuzestani Arabic . Another part of Ahvazis speak Bakhtiari dialect of Luri language . Modern Mandaic (or Mandae ) language
3293-559: The Mandaeans’ and kədɔwɔ ‘book’ but kədɔw Mandɔyí ‘a Mandaic book.’ Despite the collapse of the system of states, and the obsolescence of the most common classical plural morpheme – ia , much of the morphology of the noun has been preserved. While most masculine and feminine nouns alike are marked with the plural morpheme - ɔn -, the grammar continues to mark a distinction between the two genders. The feminine plural morpheme - (w/y)ɔṯ - most commonly appears on nouns marked explicitly with
3382-476: The accent, such as the negative morpheme lá -, which causes the accent to shift to the first syllable of the verb which is negated. As in Classical Mandaic and other Aramaic dialects, vowels in open pretonic syllables are regularly subject to reduction. The morphology of the noun has been greatly influenced by contact with Persian. The classical system of states has become obsolete, and only vestiges of it survive in some frozen forms and grammatical constructions. As
3471-405: The antecedent of the clause. The antecedents of restrictive relative clauses are marked with the restrictive morpheme – i , which resembles the indefinite morpheme in form alone, e.g. ezgit dukkɔni ke həzitu awwál ‘I went to the places which I saw before.’ If the antecedent is the object of the relative clause, it will be represented within the relative clause by a resumptive relative pronoun, as in
3560-406: The approximants n and y , which were susceptible to assimilation in Classical Mandaic, have been reformed on the analogy of the strong verbs. When they appear as the second or third radical of a consonantal root, the liquids w and y are susceptible to the general collapse of diphthongs described above. The verbs that are thus affected are known as II-weak and III-weak verbs. Those roots in which
3649-432: The beginning of the twentieth century, when de Morgan published five documents collected in Iran (transliterated and translated by Macuch). The last few decades have seen a marked increase in the number of Neo-Mandaic texts available to scholarship (Macuch 1965b, 1989, and 1993) and a descriptive grammar (Häberl 2009). Neo-Mandaic is generally unwritten. On the rare occasions on which it is written, in personal letters and in
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3738-464: The central government ; they agitate for the right to preserve their cultural and linguistic distinction and more provincial autonomy. See Politics of Khūzestān . In 1989, the Foolad Ahvaz steel facility was built close to the town. This company is best known for its company-sponsored football club, Foolad F.C. , which was the champion of Iran's Premier Football League in 2005. In 2005
3827-430: The city still today. The other 7 bridges are third bridge, Naderi bridge, Fifth bridge, Sixth bridge, Seventh bridge (also named Dialogue among civilizations bridge ), Cable bridge, and Ninth bridge. Ahvaz is located 100 km north-east of Abadan and is accessible via following routes in addition of a single runway airport: Ahvaz, being the largest city in the province, consists of two distinctive districts:
3916-522: The city witnessed a series of bomb explosions . Many government sources relate these events to developments in Iraq, accusing foreign governments of organizing and funding Arab separatist groups. The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz claimed credit for several of the bombings, including four bombs on 12 June 2005, that killed 8 people. Gunmen killed at least 29 people in an attack on
4005-530: The classical dialect through their sacred literature and liturgy, only a few hundred Mandaeans, located primarily in Iran, speak Neo-Mandaic (known to them as the raṭnɔ ) as a first language. Two surviving dialects of Neo-Mandaic have thus far been documented, those of Ahwāz (in Macuch 1965a, Macuch 1965b, Macuch 1989, and Macuch 1993) and Khorramshahr (in Häberl 2009). These dialects are mutually intelligible to
4094-438: The classical language, have collapsed in all accented syllables in the dialects of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr, apart from those in words of foreign origin. The collapse of diphthongs appears to be further advanced in the dialect of Ahvāz; compare Khorramshahr gɔw /ɡɔʊ/ 'in' with Ahwāz gu /ɡuː/ id. Closely tied to the collapse of the diphthong /aɪ/ in open accented syllables is the breaking of its outcome, /iː/ to /iɛ̆/ in
4183-540: The classical language, the remaining 15% deriving primarily from Arabic and Persian. As the latest stage of a classical Aramaic dialect with a long and fairly continuous history of attestation, Neo-Mandaic is potentially of great value for elucidating the typology of the Aramaic dialects as well as the study of the Semitic languages in general. Ahvaz Ahvaz ( Persian : اهواز ; [ʔæhˈvɒːz] )
4272-466: The colophons that are attached to manuscripts, it is rendered using a modified version of the classical script. With the exception of /ə/ , all vowels are represented, but without any indication of length or quality. The letter ʕ consistently represents an epenthetic vowel, either /ə/ or /ɛ/ . Additionally, the Arabic letter ع has been borrowed to indicate the voiced pharyngeal fricative as well as
4361-406: The compound həyɔnɔ tammɔ ‘to survive,’ although prepositions such as qɔr ‘at,’ in the compound qɔr tammɔ ‘to be born to s.o.,’ are attested. In many of these compounds, the verbal element is a "light" verb, which serves only to indicate verbal inflections such as person, tense, mood, and aspect; the meaning of these compounds is primarily derived from the non-verbal element, which always precedes
4450-577: The contextual form; instead, the singular forms are used before plural nouns (the plural morpheme indicating plurality on the whole noun phrase). Neo-Mandaic also has two locative demonstrative pronouns, hənɔ / ehnɔ ‘here’ and ekkɔx ‘there.’ The interrogative pronouns are used to elicit specific information beyond a simple yes or no answer (which can be elicited simply by employing a rising intonation, as in English). Of these interrogative pronouns, only man ‘who’ and mu ‘what’ may substitute for either
4539-404: The dialects that have thus far been documented, only Neo-Mandaic can be described with any certainty as the modern reflex of any classical written form of Aramaic. The first attempt at documenting Neo-Mandaic, a polyglot glossary including a column of lexical items from the Neo-Mandaic dialect of Basra , was produced roughly 350 years ago by a Carmelite missionary whom Borghero has identified with
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#17327648551364628-629: The example above ( həzitu ‘I saw them’). There is noticeable variation in pronunciation, lexicon, and morphology among individual speakers of Neo-Mandaic. For example, below are some words and phrases with different forms as noted by Häberl (2009). Charles G. Häberl worked with Nasser Sobbi in 2003, while Rudolf Macúch worked with Salem Choheili in 1989 and Nasser Saburi in 1953. Other fluent native speakers of Neo-Mandaic include Salah Choheili (the rishama or Mandaean head priest in Australia) and many of his family members. The ensemble of
4717-939: The extent that speakers of either dialect will deny that there are any differences between the two. Neo-Mandaic is a dialect of Aramaic, a Northwest Semitic language that was formerly spoken throughout the Middle East . Already in antiquity, a split had developed between the Western dialects of Aramaic (spoken in primarily in Syria , Lebanon , Jordan , and Israel ), and the Eastern dialects (spoken primarily in Mesopotamia and Iran ) to which Neo-Mandaic pertains. The bulk of scholarship on these modern reflexes of these dialects, collectively described as Neo-Aramaic, has focused primarily on Eastern Aramaic languages , particularly
4806-543: The features described above suggest that the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is remarkably conservative in comparison with that of Classical Mandaic, and that most of the features that distinguish the former from the latter (in particular, the restructuring of the nominal morphology and the verbal system) are the result of developments already attested in Classical and Postclassical Mandaic. Unlike the other Neo-Aramaic dialects (apart from Western Neo-Aramaic), Neo-Mandaic alone preserves
4895-422: The feminine singular morpheme - t -, although it can also be found on the plural forms of many feminine nouns not marked as such in the singular. Most loan words take the plural morpheme - (h)ɔ , although a few retain the plural forms of their source languages. Additionally, many of the heteroclite plurals attested in the classical language have been retained. The appearance of the indefinite and plural morphemes on
4984-473: The first, which is the most common of the three, whereas the latter two typically characterize intransitives and stative verbs. Transitive verbs also commonly yield a passive participle, which takes the form CəCil, e.g. gəṭil ‘killed (m.sg.),’ f.sg. gəṭilɔ and pl. gəṭilen . The D-stem is represented by one passive participle, əmšabbɔ ‘praised,’ which belongs to the III-weak root consonant class. The C-stem
5073-414: The forms - ɔt - and - nan(n) - respectively before object suffixes. Aspect is as basic to the Neo-Mandaic verbal system as tense; the inflected forms derived from the participle are imperfective, and as such indicate habitual actions, progressive or inchoative actions, and actions in the future from a past or present perspective. The perfective forms are not only preterite but also resultative-stative, which
5162-412: The function of a general plural demonstrative pronoun. It is also often used in the place of the independent third plural personal pronoun. The demonstrative pronouns precede the noun they modify. In this position, the final vowel of the singular demonstratives is apocopated (these are the forms listed as ‘contextual,’ e.g. ɔ šeršɔnɔ ‘these religions’). Note that the plural demonstrative does not appear in
5251-431: The glottal stop. The letters b , g , k , p , and t may represent stops ( /b/, /ɡ/, /k/, /p/, and /t/ ) or fricatives ( /v/, /ʁ/, /χ/, /f/, and /θ/ ). Formerly the fricatives were not distinctive segments but merely allophones of the stops after a vowel; the sound rule governing this alternation is now defunct. Neo-Mandaic orthography differs from that of Classical Mandaic by using u to represent /w/ even when it
5340-474: The majority of verbs are built upon a triconsonantal root, each of which may yield one or more of six verbal stems: the G-stem or basic stem, the D-stem or transitivizing-denominative verbal stem, the C-stem or causative verbal stem, and the tG-, tD-, and tC-stems, to which a derivational morpheme, t-, was prefixed before the first root consonant. This morpheme has disappeared from all roots save for those possessing
5429-426: The morpheme qə -, it is used to express the indicative, but when it is not thus marked, it expresses the subjunctive. The subjunctive is most commonly used to indicate wishes, possibilities, obligations, and any other statements which may be contrary to present fact. As in the other Semitic languages, the subjunctive must be used in the place of the imperative for all negative commands and prohibitions. In Neo-Mandaic,
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#17327648551365518-524: The most powerful leader of Khuzestan's Bakhtiaries . He had power and authority over most regions of Khuzestan, such as Dezful, Shushtar, Izeh, even Ahvaz and Amir mojahede bakhtiari in Ramhormoz and Behbahan. At this time, the newly founded Ahvaz was named Nâseri in honour to its founder Nassereddin Shah Qajar. Afterwards, during the Pahlavi period, it resumed its old name, Ahvaz . The government of
5607-524: The newer part of Ahvaz which is the administrative and industrial center, which is built on the right bank of the Karun river while residential areas are found in the old section of the city, on the left bank. Ahvaz has a subtropical hot desert climate ( Köppen climate classification BWh ) with long, extremely hot summers and cool, short winters. Summer temperatures are regularly at least 45 °C (113 °F), sometimes exceeding 50 °C (122 °F), with many sandstorms and duststorms common during
5696-405: The noun is determined primarily by its pragmatic status, such as the referentiality and identifiability of the referent. "Referentiality" concerns whether the speaker intends a particular, specific entity, which is thus referential, or whether the entity is designated as non-specific or generic, and thus non-referential. Referential nouns are explicitly marked when plural as well as when they serve as
5785-523: The noun. On nouns of foreign origin, they are affixed by means of the morpheme – d -. On the noun na p š - ‘self’ they also serve to form the reflexive pronouns. Neo-Mandaic also has two reciprocal pronouns, ham ‘each other’ and hədɔdɔ ‘one another.’ Neo-Mandaic demonstrative pronouns distinguish between near-deixis and far-deixis in the singular, but not in the plural. They also reflect no distinction in gender. The original far-deictic plural demonstrative pronoun ahni ‘those’ (classical hania) has assumed
5874-456: The object of a verb, in which case they are marked with the enclitic morpheme əl and anticipated by a pronominal suffix on the verb. The referent of an unmarked noun such as barnɔšɔ can either be specific (‘the person’) or generic (‘people’) but not non-specific (‘a person’). The "identifiability" of a referent reflects whether the speaker assumes that it is identifiable or unidentifiable to the addressee. The indefinite morpheme – i indicates that
5963-460: The old Semitic suffix conjugation (the Neo-Mandaic perfective). Apart from the imperative forms, the prefix conjugation (the Classical Mandaic imperfect) has been replaced by the Neo-Mandaic imperfective, which was already anticipated in Classical Mandaic as well. Even the lexicon preserves the vocabulary of Classical Mandaic to a large degree; in a list of 207 of the most common terms in Neo-Mandaic collected by Häberl, over 85% were also attested in
6052-448: The paradigm is in the process of being leveled towards the masculine forms. Before personal morphemes beginning with a vowel, the vowel of the syllable immediately preceding the suffix is deleted and the former coda becomes the onset for the new syllable. The addition of the morpheme may also cause the accent to shift, resulting in the reduction of vowels in pretonic syllables noted in 2.4. Enclitic object suffixes, introduced above, also have
6141-463: The penultimate syllable, provided that it is closed or contains a tense vowel, e.g. gawrɔ [ˈgæv.rɔ] ‘man.’ Otherwise, the stress will fall on the final syllable, e.g. əxal [a.ˈχɑl] ‘he ate.’ In words of three or more syllables, if neither the ultima nor the penultima is closed and contains a tense vowel, then the accent recedes to the antepenultimate syllable, e.g. gaṭelnɔxon [ga.ˈtˤɛl.nɒ.ˌχon] ‘I will kill you.’ Several morphemes automatically take
6230-522: The postalveolar affricates č /tʃ/ and j /dʒ/ and the pharyngeal fricatives ʿ / ʕ / and ḥ / ħ / , which are found only in vocabulary of foreign origin, particularly Arabic and Persian. Two pharyngealized segments (a voiced alveolar stop ḍ / ðˤ / and a voiced alveolar fricative ẓ / zˤ / ) are found in a few Arabic loan words. They have been excluded from the phonemic inventory of Neo-Mandaic due to their marginal status. Voiceless stops are lightly aspirated. The vowel system in Neo-Mandaic
6319-790: The referent is neither generic nor identifiable, but is ambiguous as to whether the referent is specific (‘a particular person’) or non-specific (‘some person’). Macuch (1965a, 207) has noted that this morpheme, originally borrowed from the Iranian languages, is attested already in the Classical Mandaic texts. Nouns and adjectives modified by the indefinite morpheme - i can serve as indefinite pronouns to indicate non-specific or indefinite referents (such as enši ‘someone’ and mendi ‘something’). There are five types of pronouns in Neo-Mandaic: personal pronouns (both independent and enclitic), demonstrative pronouns, indefinite pronouns (introduced in 3.2. above), interrogative pronouns, and relativizers (introduced in 6. below). The personal pronouns are illustrated to
6408-491: The relationship of the action or state described by the verb to its arguments can be described by one of three voices: active, middle voice, and passive. When the action described by the verb is initiated by its grammatical subject, the verb is described as being in the active voice, and the grammatical subject is described as its agent. The t-stems introduced above express the middle voice. The agents of verbs in these stems, which are syntactically active and intransitive, experience
6497-399: The results of these actions as if they were also the patient; in many cases, the action of the verb appears to occur on its own. As a result, verbs in these stems are often translated as if they were agentless passives, or reflexive actions that the subject takes on its own behalf, e.g. etwer minni wuṣle ‘a piece broke off / was broken from it.’ In the passive voice, the grammatical subject of
6586-438: The right. The independent personal pronouns are optionally employed to represent the subject of a transitive or intransitive verb. Whenever the singular forms appear before a verb, their final vowel is apocopated. The enclitic personal pronouns are in complementary distribution with them; they may represent the object of a transitive verb, a nominal or verbal complement or adjunct in a prepositional phase, or indicate possession on
6675-400: The same effect upon preceding syllables, affecting the form of the personal morpheme. All third person imperfective forms take the enclitic object marker - l - before the object suffix. The final consonant of the third plural personal suffix -en regularly assimilates to this enclitic object marker, producing the form - el(l) -. Additionally, the second singular and first plural morphemes assume
6764-432: The same environment. For example, classical baita 'house' has become bieṯɔ in Neo-Mandaic. This sound change is today typical of both the contemporary dialects of Ahwāz and Khorramshahr, but is not present in the unpublished texts from Iraq collected by Drower or in Macuch 1989. Neo-Mandaic words range in size from one to five syllables. Each syllable consists of an onset (which is optional in word-initial syllables) and
6853-570: The second and third radical consonants were identical have been reformed on the analogy of the II-weak verbs; this process had already begun in Classical Mandaic. A very large and productive class of verbs in Neo-Mandaic consists of a verbal element and a non-verbal element, which form a single semantic and syntactic unit. The non-verbal element is most often a noun such as əwɔdɔ ‘deed’ in the compound əwɔdɔ əwad ~ əwod ( ɔwed ) ‘to work or to do something,’ or an adjective such as həyɔnɔ ‘alive’ in
6942-419: The simple present, the copular verb həwɔ ~ həwi ( hɔwi ) is used in the place of the existential particle, e.g. agar pərɔhɔ həwɔle, turti zawnit ‘if I had money, I would have bought a cow.’ Compound sentences combine two or more simple sentences with coordinating conjunctions such as u ‘and,’ ammɔ ‘but,’ lo ‘or,’ and the correlative conjunction - lo … - lo ‘either … or.’ Complex sentences consist of
7031-455: The speaker holds to have happened or not to have happened, and thus pertains to the indicative, apart from explicitly counterfactual conditional clauses, e.g. agar an láhwit, lá-aṯṯat əl-yanqɔ ‘if I hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t have brought (=given birth to) the baby.’ The imperfective, on the other hand, is used to describe situations which are ongoing, have yet to happen, or about which there may exist some uncertainty or doubt. When marked by
7120-499: The subject or the object of a verb, obligatorily appearing at the beginning of the interrogative clause. Other interrogatives in Neo-Mandaic include elyɔ ‘where,’ hem ‘which,’ hemdɔ ‘when,’ kammɔ ‘how,’ kaṯkammɔ ‘how much/many,’ mojur ‘how, in what way,’ and qamu ‘why.’ The Neo-Mandaic verb may appear in two aspects (perfective and imperfective), three moods (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative), and three voices (active, middle, and passive). As in other Semitic languages,
7209-570: The summer period. However, in winters, the minimum temperature can fall to around 5 °C (41 °F). Winters in Ahvaz have no snow. The average annual rainfall is around 230 mm. On June 29, 2017, the temperature reached 54 °C (129 °F). Furthermore, the dew point peaked at 23 °C (73 °F) which is unusually humid for the usual dry heat. Despite the fact that it has never snowed in Ahvaz, it has fallen down to −7.0 °C (19.4 °F) before. (precipitation), (humidity), (days with precipitation), (sunshine) According to
7298-417: The syllable is geminated to form the onset of the following syllable. Whenever the voiceless interdental fricative /θ/ is geminated in this environment, its outcome is the cluster [χt] rather than the expected [θθ]. For example, when the pronominal suffixes are appended directly to the existential particle * eṯ [ɛθ] (Classical ‘it ), it regularly takes the form ext- [ɛχt]. This rule affects the conjugation of
7387-514: The verb meṯ ~ moṯ ( mɔyeṯ ) ‘to die,’ e.g. meṯ ‘he died’ but mextat ‘she died.’ It is also responsible for the modern form of the abstract ending uxtɔ (Classical - uta ). The syllable patterns V ( ɔ [ɔ] ‘this’), VC ( ax [ɑχ] ‘that’), CV ( mu [mu] ‘what’), and CVC ( tum [tum] ‘then’) are the most common. Slightly less common are syllables containing clusters of consonantal or vocalic segments, such as VCC ( ahl [ahl] ‘family’), CCV ( klɔṯɔ [ˈklɔː.θɔ] ‘three’), CCVC ( ṣṭɔnye [ˈstɔn.je] ‘he
7476-441: The verb are built are the perfective base (represented by the third masculine singular form of the perfective), the imperative base (represented by the masculine singular form of the imperative), and the imperfective base (represented by the active participle in the absolute state). In the G-stem, the second syllable of the perfective base can have one of three thematic vowels: /a/, /e/, and /o/. Transitive verbs predominantly belong to
7565-601: The verb is the recipient of the action described by it, namely the patient. There are two ways of forming the passive voice in Neo-Mandaic: the analytic passive, in which the passive participle is combined with the copula, and the much more common impersonal passive, in which an impersonal third plural form is used, e.g. əmaryon ‘it is said,’ literally ‘they said.’ Neo-Mandaic preserves the SVO word order of Classical Mandaic, despite its longstanding contact with Persian (which follows SOV word order). Topic-fronting, which tends to obscure
7654-446: The verbal element. The most common light verbs are əwad ~ əwod ( ɔwed ) ‘to do,’ əhaw ~ əhow ( ɔhew ) ‘to give,’ məhɔ ~ məhi ( mɔhi ) ‘to hit,’ and tammɔ ‘to become.’ Although phrasal verbs similar to these are attested in Classical Mandaic, most Neo-Mandaic phrasal verbs are calqued upon Persian phrasal verbs, and many non-verbal elements are Persian or Arabic loan words. The principal parts upon which all inflected forms of
7743-413: The word order, is typical of all three languages. Simple sentences consist of a subject, which may be implied in the verb, and a predicate, which is headed by a verb or the copula (see Table 9 below). The independent forms of the copula introduce predicate nominal and predicate locative constructions, and the enclitic forms introduce predicate adjectives. Much like other Semitic languages, Neo-Mandaic employs
7832-652: Was by the King Ardashir I , in 230 (cf. Encyclopædia Iranica , al-Muqaddasi , et al.) or by his grandson Hormizd I (according to the Middle Persian Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr ( shahrestān hā-ye Irānshahr ) . The city had two sections; the nobles of the city lived in one part while the other was inhabited by merchants. In the 19th century, "Ahvaz was no more than a small borough inhabited mainly by Sabeans (1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants according to Ainsworth in 1835; 700 according to Curzon in 1890)." In
7921-503: Was found near Ahvaz in the early 20th century, and the city once again grew and prospered as a result of this newfound wealth. From 1897 to 1925, the city of Ahvaz was in the hands of heshmatoddoleh Ghajar, who acted as governor and Sarhang Reza Gholi Khane Arghoon commander of Ghajari's army based in Khuzestan. Sheikh Khaz'al was recognized by Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar as hereditary ruler of Mohammerah , Sardar Asad Bakhtiari as
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