SYRIAC LANGUAGE. Syriac is the name given to the language used by Christian writers in the region east of Antioch, including the Christian subjects of the Persian empire. It seems to have been originally the local Aramaic dialect of Edessa (q.v.), which became a centre of Christianity as early as the last third of the 2nd century. Edessa was till 216 the seat of a native monarchy, consequently the new religion took a vernacular form there, whereas inside the Roman empire no languages except the imperial Greek and Latin were used by Christians for literature or public worship until the 4th century. But the Bible and the forms of Christian liturgy having been translated into the Edes sene dialect and publicly used, this dialect was accepted all over the East by native Christians as a classical literary language.
Since the 5th century A.D. owing to theological differences Syriac-using Christians have been divided into Nestorians or East Syrians and Jacobites (Monophysites) or West Syrians, and these groups are now linguistically distinguished by certain differences of pronunciation, chiefly in the vowels. The East Syrians in most cases have kept the more primitive pronunciation, e.g., the old Semitic a with them remained a, but with the Jacobites passed into ö. The name Jesus is by the East Syrians pronounced Isho' , by the Jacobites Yeshu` . The language of the Maronites, a reli gious body now in communion with Rome and chiefly living in the Lebanon region, is in all respects the same as that of the Jacobites or West Syrians. Classical Syriac is now nowhere a spoken language. A variety of the Western Syriac survived till about 5o years ago in some villages near Damascus, and the Nestorians of the Tigris valley speak a modern dialect akin to the old East Syriac though differing considerably from it.
Writing.—Syriac has the same 22 letters as Hebrew. Their forms are ultimately derived from the Old Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets. The oldest mss., of the 4th and 5th centuries, are written in a very beautiful current hand known as Estrangela, the lapidary form of which is still preserved in some old inscrip tions at Edessa. This gave place to other scripts from about the
9th century, the Jacobite form being less graceful and further removed from the Estrangela than the Nestorian. Speaking gen erally, this writing only indicates the consonants, the vowel u (short or long without distinction), long i, and final a. The other vowels, so long as Syriac remained a living language, were not indicated at all, or only partially indicated by a dot above or below the whole word. But about the time when Syriac began to be supplanted by Afabic two systems of vowel-signs were invented, one by West Syrians, who borrowed the forms of Greek vowels, and the other more elaborate by East Syrians, who used combinations of dots. These signs are written above and below the consonantal letters. Neither system completely distinguishes long from short vowels the Nestorian system is more satisfac tory, though more cumbrous.
The peculiar dentals and sibilants of early Semitic, preserved almost in their original diversity in classical Arabic came to be pronounced differently in Hebrew and Syriac. So we get Arab. thalathei Heb. shlosha Syr. tlefflei ("three") „ „ dak3a ("gold") „ 'ard 'arcs ar'd ("earth") „ zuhr „ sFoh5raim „ Wird ("midday") In the Arabic s and sh sounds Syriac generally agrees with Hebrew against Arabic, but the details are too complicated to be given here.