(AINA) -- The belief that the spoken language of the Assyrians is corrupted form of the literary language known as Syriac has been challenged by Prof. Geoffrey Khan, professor of Semitic languages from Cambridge University.

The accomplished philologist pioneers a new view on the roots of the Assyrian vernacular in an article titled "Remarks on the historical background of the modern Assyrian language", published in The Journal of Assyrian Academic Studies (JAAS, vol. 21, nr 2, 2007).

Khan has been studying Assyrian dialects for the past ten years and has completed several books dealing with the subject; his latest work is an extensive description of the dialect of the Barwar area in northern Iraq.

The article in JAAS is rare in the sense that it touches on a subject that has not been given sufficient attention by most scholars.

It has often been assumed that the spoken language among Assyrians is nothing more than a corrupt descendant of literary Syriac.This assumption cannot, however, be sustained when the vernacular is studied in detail, as Khan demonstrates in his JAAS article. He points out that the great diversity of the dialects that are spoken today suggests that they split off from a common ancestor many centuries ago, quite possibly before the standardization of Syriac as a literary language. Moreover several of the dialects contain features that simply cannot be derived from Syriac.

The examination of the existence of Akkadian words only in the spoken language is perhaps the most interesting part of the article. Akkadian is a term applied to the language spoken by Assyrians in ancient times. Prof. Khan shows that several Akkadian words found in modern Assyrian, mainly relating to agriculture, are not found in Syriac. This is a further proof of the independence of the modern dialects from Syriac. It also indicates that the modern dialects have ancient roots, going back ultimately to a form of language that was spoken when Akkadian was still a living language.

Taken together, Khan's remarks present an alternative view on the origin of the Assyrian vernacular, which he sums up with the following sentence:

"The modern spoken language is not a direct descendant of Akkadian in its written form, nor is it a direct descendant of literary Syriac but it is related to both".

The Professor believes that, due to the ancient background of the modern spoken dialects, they are a precious heritage of the Assyrian people.

By Afram Barryakoub