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The Missing Syriac Words

The CAL currently contains over 4,100 Syriac words that are not to be found in K. Brockelmann's Latin Lexicon Syriacum of 1928 nor in M. Sokoloff's English translation and update of that work: A Syriac Lexicon of 2009. Moreover almost half of them are also not to be found in J. Payne Smith's A Compendious Syriac Dictionary of 1903, a work that since it contains many more words and many more actual meanings than Brockelmann's work should prove far more useful to most students.1

Here you may view lists of those missing words, along with links to their full entries in the CAL. We have divided the list into sections, taking into account some of the more frequently missing morphological patterns:2

Adjectives: mostly in final -āyā, along with participial-based forms

Adverbs in -āˀīṯ      Miscellaneous

Nomina agentis       Abstracts in -ūṯā

Verbal Nouns (i.e., gerunds)   Verbs

Other Nouns: Masculine   Feminine

1: Students should note that neither work contains all of the gentilic adjectives, Greek words cited as foreign words in the texts (although LS2 contains far too many of this category for our taste), or the thousands of proper nouns to be found in the huge Syriac corpus. Nor does the CAL for that matter. For these the student needs to turn to the still indispensable Thesaurus Syriacus of Robert Payne Smith of 1879 now easily available to be viewed on Archive.org. One should also note that the Payne Smith tradition includes as abstract nouns in -ūṯā many examples from derived stems that are attested in the texts only as infinitives. We have not included these.
2: A few of the otherwise apparently missing adverbs in -āˀīṯ were given in LS2 but were hidden under the base-word adjective and simply indicated as "adv.". Sokoloff has managed to recover those and given them their own entry. So those are not listed here.