 |
Contact us |
|
|
|
||
|
Contact us |
|
|
|
||
The CAL aims to be a lexicon of all of the Aramaic dialects from the periods of the widespread use of Aramaic in the Near East as both a spoken and literary language. But we recognize that many of our users are interested only in a specific subset of dialects and may have difficulties or little interest in dealing directly with textual material from other dialects.Thus we have here decided to make available an option to view sub-lexicons of those dialects either not represented by other modern works, or, as in the case of Syriac and Mandaic, insufficiently represented.
This is a complete dictionary of the formal Jewish Aramaic dialects, i.e., Biblical Aramaic, Qumran, Targum Onkelos, Targum Jonathan to the Prophets, the Palestinian Targum, and Late Jewish Literary Aramaic. Excluded, then, are epigraphic texts and the midrashic and talmudic texts, all of which reflect colloquial Aramaic rather than a literary tradition, and all of which have been well-treated in the recent dictionaries of M. Sokoloff. Biblical Aramaic and Targum Onkelos were important sources for the later formal material, but, especially in the case of the Palestinian Targum and LJLA, the appearance of words and forms not attested in the earlier material should prove to be a useful guide to issues of dating and localization.
Vocalization (converted to Tiberian!) is only provided where attested in Biblical Aramaic, JLA targumic, Genizah mss. of Palestinian Targumic, or otherwise clear from parallels.
The Syriac dictionaries of the Payne-Smith tradition contain thousands of words not found in the Syriac Lexicon of Brockelmann as modernized by Sokoloff. The latter contains thousands of words not found in the former (mostly Greek loans), while the CAL contains almost a thousand Syriac words not found in either. Here we provide access to the entire vocabulary of Syriac as currently collected and analyzed in the CAL.
As pointed out by M. Morgenstern in several studies, the sixty-year-old A Mandaic Dictionary of Drower and Macuch is very much out of date and had many incorrect interpretations even for its time. The CAL is especially rich in its coverage of newly published epigraphic material.