Notes on the History of the Aramaic Verb

Abstract This paper assesses Stefan Bruweleit's The Verbal Systems of Aramaic from a historical-linguistic perspective and advances an account of how Aramaic verbal morphosyntax has changed over three millennia. We argue that Proto-Aramaic possessed an absolute-tense system: Suffix Conjugation for past, predicative Active Participle for present, and the long Prefix Conjugation for future, while aspect contrast in past domain was encoded through periphrases. Active Participle, originally an agent noun (qāṭil), grammaticalized into the core present across Aramaic and has remained stable in this function until now. Within a Stammbaum framework applied to the history of the Aramaic verb, we distinguish shared innovations, reconstructable to a common ancestor, from Sapirian drift: developments somehow anchored in a protolanguage that multiple branches undergo independently and with different results. We discuss the predicative qaṭṭīl derived from telic intransitive verbs and the qṭīlle construction in pre-modern Eastern Aramaic, and assign these two the status of grammatical borrowings into written corpora from vernaculars of Modern Aramaic type. In an attempt to make sense of Modern Aramaic innovations, we claim that Modern Western Aramaic preserves a more drift-compatible *qṭīl/*qaṭṭīl past alongside the inherited Suffix Conjugation, while the verbal systems of Ṭuroyo-Mlaḥsô and NENA took their shapes due to a heavy influence of Iranian.