A History of the Intransitive Preterite of Ṭuroyo: from a Property Adjective to a Finite Tense1

Eugene Barsky and Sergey Loesov

1. Research Question

The ultimate source of inspiration for the present study is our ambition to offer a detailed description of the history of the Aramaic verbal system. A key event in this history is what Goldenberg used to call ‘the morphological revolution’, i.e. the shift, within Eastern Aramaic, from the Middle Aramaic2 verbal systems to those of Modern Aramaic. In the course of this shift, Eastern Aramaic gave up the inherited suffix conjugation3 (*qatala) and the prefix conjugation (*yaqtulu) and developed a new repertoire of verbal forms, all of whose bases were deverbal adjectives in earlier stages of Aramaic’s history.

We start our historical investigation with Ṭuroyo, since the verbal system of this language, with its two Preterites, qaṭəl-Preterite for most intransitive verbs of the G-stem vs. L-Preterite qṭəlle for transitive ones, seems to be more conservative than that of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA). It may represent a stage that used to exist in some of the ancestor languages of NENA as well.4

Various studies have attempted to establish how the Eastern Aramaic L-Preterite qṭəlle developed historically.5 As far as we know, however, there have been no corpus-based studies of the diachronic pathway that led to the qaṭəl-Preterite of Ṭuroyo, i.e. how the Central Semitic adjective *qaṭṭīl became verbalised.

In Aramaic, *qaṭṭīl started as an adjective expressing permanent properties and ended up being the base of various verbal forms in the past tense domain. The functional range of *qaṭṭīl in the modern Aramaic verbal system is not restricted to the G-stem intransitive Preterite of Ṭuroyo. *Qaṭṭīl is the Perfect of both transitive and intransitive verbs in Mlaḥsó (Jastrow 1994, 45, 52f.). Moreover, in certain village varieties of Ṭuroyo (in particular, Midən and Kfarze), *qaṭṭīl is the base for the Passive Preterite of III-y verbs. Thus, in these villages, the Passive Preterite of the verb ḥzy is ḥazi (‘he was seen’) rather than ḥze.6 The latter form exists in Midyat and some village dialects. This has been inherited directly from the Middle Aramaic ancestor of Ṭuroyo, while the former (ḥazi) developed within Ṭuroyo by analogy with the 1 f.s. and 3 f.s. intransitive Preterite forms of IIIy verbs: baxyono ‘I (f.) wept’ : ḥazyono ‘I (f.) was seen’, baxyo ‘she wept’ : ḥazyo ‘she was seen’, baxi ‘he wept’: x; x = ḥazi ‘he was seen’.7 In Maʿlula, a Western Neo-Aramaic variety, *qaṭṭīl of intransitive G-stem verbs functions both as a dynamic past verbal form8 and a stative (or continuous) present tense form, depending on the lexical semantics of the root and even on the utterance context.9

By contrast, in both NENA10 and Neo-Mandaic,11 reflexes of *qaṭṭīl have not produced new finite verb forms but rather are extant only in nominal forms (i.e., adjectives and substantives).

In this paper, we restrict the scope of the study to a comparison of the data collected from Classical Syriac and Ṭuroyo. For the Ṭuroyo data, we have drawn upon our Verb Glossary of Ṭuroyo (in progress).12 According to our glossary of verbs, Ṭuroyo has over 200 verbal roots with a qaṭəl-Preterite. Around 100 of them are of Aramaic origin, the majority of the remainder are of Arabic origin.

2. Prehistory of the Qaṭəl-Preterite: *Qaṭṭīl Outside Aramaic and in Early Aramaic

The Ṭuroyo qaṭəl-Preterite is the end product of the complete verbalisation of *qaṭṭīl, originally a deverbal adjective pattern. This pattern (in the guise of qaṭilo) still continues in Ṭuroyo for adjectives, including deverbal ones, i.e. as the ‘participle’ of certain intransitive verbs.13

2.1. The Etymology of *Qaṭṭīl

Diachronically, the verbal adjective *qaṭṭīl developed as follows: qaṭil → qaṭīl → qaṭṭīl.14 All three patterns have in common that they denoted property adjectives, and as a matter of fact this use is preserved for all the three patterns in various Central Semitic languages, e.g. Biblical Hebrew, Syriac, and Classical Arabic. This use as a property adjective must have been the original one for each of the three derivations in question.

In written Central Semitic languages apart from Aramaic, *qaṭṭīl is well-documented in Biblical Hebrew and Arabic. In both languages, it mostly expresses enduring properties of human beings. The respective nominals may be syntactically both substantives and adjectives, as the following lists illustrate.

Biblical Hebrew (complete list):

ʿallīz ‘exultant’, ʿārīṣ ‘violent, powerful’, ʿattīq ‘old; removed, set apart’ (<Aram., Wagner 1966, no. 229), ʾabbīr ‘strong, powerful’, ʾaddīr ‘mighty’, ʾammīṣ ‘strong’, bārīaḥ ‘fugitive’, kabbīr ‘strong, mighty’, pārīṣ ‘burglar’, ṣaddīq ‘innocent, just’, šallīṭ ‘having power’ (<Aram., Wagner 1966, no. 309), taqqīp̄ ‘mighty’ (<Aram., Wagner 1966, no. 330), yaqqīr ‘precious, dear’ (hapax in Jr 31:20; < Aram.?).

Arabic (selected examples):15

ʿirrīḍ ‘mean, malevolent’, ʿiššīq ‘lover’, ḏikkīr ‘having a retentive memory’, ḍillīl ‘steeped in deviation’, ḏ̣illīm ‘very unfair’, fiḫḫīr ‘self-important’, ḫibbīṯ ‘very bad’, ḫirrīq ‘very generous’, ḫittīr ‘one who frequently acts with treachery’, mirrīḥ ‘joyful’.

Our perusal of dictionaries shows that the lexicon of written Arabic has hardly more than some fifty tokens of the *qaṭṭīl pattern.

2.2. *Qaṭṭīl in Biblical Aramaic

It is in Aramaic, unlike Arabic and Biblical Hebrew, that *qaṭṭīl first becomes a productive noun pattern that is regularly derived from verbal roots. Biblical Aramaic (BA) has twelve *qaṭṭīl derivations, as many as Biblical Hebrew, though the Aramaic Biblical corpus is circa fifty times smaller than that of Hebrew.

*qaṭṭīl also started its life in Aramaic as an adjective expressing permanent properties. Thus, in Biblical Aramaic, *qaṭṭīl expresses properties, including the basic lexical items: ʿammīq ‘deep’, ʿattīq ‘old, aged’, ḥakkīm ‘wise’, ḥassīr ‘wanting, deficient’, qaddīš ‘holy’, raḥḥīq ‘far’, saggī ‘great, much, many’, šallīṭ ‘powerful, mighty’, šappīr ‘beautiful’, taqqīp̄ ‘strong, mighty’, yaqqīr ‘difficult, honourable’, yaṣṣīḇ ‘well established’, yattīr ‘extraordinary, exceeding’.

The innovative and productive nature of *qaṭṭīl in Aramaic of the 1st millennium BC stands in sharp relief when we compare the Biblical Aramaic adjectives from the list above with their Biblical Hebrew cognates, most of which display the patterns *qaṭil, *qaṭal, and *qaṭul, which are retentions from the proto-Semitic stage and no longer productive in Central Semitic: ʿāmōq ‘deep’, ḥāḵām ‘clever, skillful’, ḥāsēr ‘one in want’, qāḏōš ‘holy’, rāḥōq ‘far’, yāqār ‘scarce, precious, valuable’, yōṯēr ‘excessive’.

Thus Biblical Hebrew adjectives derived from the same roots as BA qaṭṭīl adjectives were mostly formed using archaic patterns, while Biblical Hebrew qaṭṭīl tokens are scarce and partly borrowed from Aramaic.

Syntactically, these Biblical Aramaic nominals are used as verbal arguments, attributive adjectives and nominal predicates. The qaṭṭīl of Biblical Aramaic still behaves syntactically as a nominal. We find, however, one instance where a qaṭṭīl adjective derived from a dynamic verb inherits the argument structure of the source verb (2):

The syntagm malḵīn … šallīṭīn b-ḵōl ʿăḇār nahărā ‘kings ruling in all Beyond-the-River’ in (2) replicates the argument structure of the finite verb šlṭ ‘have power, rule’. Both the derivation of a qaṭṭīl form (here šallīṭīn) from a fairly dynamic verb and its syntactic usage are atypical for Biblical Aramaic and foreshadow the career of qaṭṭīl in Middle Aramaic, which is represented in this paper by Classical Syriac.

3. *Qaṭṭīl in Syriac

We have searched for qaṭṭīl tokens in the Compendious Syriac Dictionary (CSD, J. Payne Smith 1903) and Peshitta New Testament (PNT). In CSD, we have found some 180 qaṭṭīl lexemes whose existence seems reliable. Of these, we have found some 64 in the PNT. We have found 207 vocalised words following the qaṭṭīl pattern in R. Payne Smith’s (1879–1901) Thesaurus Syriacus (TS), Sokoloff’s (2009) Syriac Lexicon (SL) and CAL (the online Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon) alongside CSD. Our principal source is CSD, where the tokens are either independent lemmata, such as šappīr ‘fair, good, lovely’ (CSD, 590), or nominal forms in verb entries, usually labelled ‘part. adj.’, e.g. sallīq (CSD, 379).

Unfortunately, these data cannot be accepted uncritically. The identification, in CSD or TS, of a form as qaṭṭīl rather than qṭīl is not always reliable. Note that J. Payne Smith employs the term ‘part. adj.’ in verb entries, both for qaṭṭīl and qṭīl tokens,16 while most qṭīl tokens she labels as ‘pass. part’. In verb entries of CSD, the meanings of nominal forms are not uniformly provided. Furthermore, we have been unable to find textual evidence for several qaṭṭīl tokens that appear in the dictionaries.

3.1. From Property Adjective to Verbal Adjective

A major difference between Biblical Aramaic and the Syriac NT regarding qaṭṭīl is that in PNT qaṭṭīl is formed not only from unambiguous property roots, but also from stative and dynamic verbal roots. Some of the examples are ʾabbīḏ ‘lost, gone astray’, ʾazzīl ‘(is) gone’, ʾattī ‘having come’, ʿallīl ‘having entered’, dabbīq ‘close to, cleaving’, daḥḥīl ‘fearing’, dammīḵ ‘asleep’, naḥḥīṯ ‘having gone down’, tammīh ‘amazed’. It stands to reason that these are used almost exclusively as predicates rather than independent nominals or attributive adjectives. Due to their semantics, they cannot be easily employed independently in specifically nominal syntactic functions. This means they were formed in order to serve as predicates in the first place, by analogy with the predicative use of the property adjective qaṭṭīl. Further research is required to establish the relative chronology of qaṭṭīl derivations, i.e. to answer the question which verbs (in terms of the four Vendlerian classes)17 were the first to form purely predicative qaṭṭīl forms. We speculate, however, that it was stative verbs that were the first to produce them, by analogy with property adjectives:

ḥakkīm ʾat ‘You are wise’ > tammīh ʾat ‘You are amazed’

The shared feature of the two kinds of clauses is as follows. Both were thought of as stative, while tammīh ʾat was also resultative, i.e., it encoded a stative situation that was thought of as ‘having come about’ rather than a property that ‘always’ existed of itself.

The predicate of (3a) has the same morphological shape qaṭṭīl as the predicate of (3b) and the same surface syntax as those of (3c) and (3d), while the predicative adjectives in (3c) and (3d) have morphological patterns other than qaṭṭīl. In (3a), w-ṯammīhīn-hwaw (semantically, a stative-resultative predicate) translates the Greek finite (Imperfect) form eksistanto, while the qaṭṭīl-predicate of (3b), w-ḇęrā ʿammīqā (semantically, a property adjective), translates the Greek predicative adjective (with the present-tense verbal copula) estin bathy ‘is deep’. In (3c) and (3d), Syriac predicative property adjectives translate Greek predicative property adjectives (note that in 1d the Syriac adjective is in the determined state).

3.2. From Stative-Resultative to Dynamic Perfect

What one observes in Syriac is a verbalisation stage of qaṭṭīl even more advanced than that of a stative-resultative predicate: qaṭṭīl lexemes formed from dynamic roots can take the kinds of verbal arguments and adjuncts that exclude a stative-resultative interpretation. This means these forms are no longer stative-resultative nominal predicates but rather dynamic verbal forms. The contexts show that these verbal forms encode past events and can express a perfect or anterior. They could be used as translations of past tense forms of the Greek NT texts.

Consider the following examples, which come both from translations and original texts:

In (4) men ruḥqā ʾattīʾīn, the adjunct men ruḥqā ‘from afar’ corroborates a dynamic past interpretation of ʾattīʾīn. The same applies to (5) w-nappīq mennāh šęʾḏāh. In (6), the two Greek pluperfects (skotia ede egegonei and oupo eleluthei... ho Iesous) were rendered differently in Syriac. The first one was translated with Preterite+hwā (ḥeškaṯ-hwāṯ lāh), the second by qaṭṭīl+hwā (lā ʾattī-hwā). This is because Syriac ḥaššīḵ denoted a property with the senses ‘obscure, under a cloud, in darkness, ignorant’ (CSD, 162), and, therefore, would be inappropriate in this text as a rendering of a dynamic event. In (7), wa-ʿḏakkēl lā ʿabbīr l-ḇēṯ rhomāyē, besides the endpoint of crossing, there is a phasal particle ʿḏakkēl ‘not yet’, well known for its propensity to combine with a perfect. In (8), šūrā … d-nappīl-hwā ... kullęh ʾeṯbannī, the form nappīl-hwā clearly has an eventive pluperfect force. In (9), b-haw da-ḥṭīṯā mayyīṯ-hwā, the predicate is clearly dynamic.

Thus, qaṭṭīl predicates in (4)–(9) are not stative but rather past dynamic (eventive, fientive). Semantically, they are perfects, not resultatives, as we consider (with mainstream functional typology) the resultative to be a sub-class of stative situations but the perfect to encode dynamic situations.19

So, the Syriac evidence for dynamic qaṭṭīl points to a ‘mature’ Perfect, which is employed as both an absolute and a relative tense: i.e., in narrative, a qaṭṭīl-Perfect has a reference point different from speech time. In other words, our Syriac qaṭṭīl-Perfect can function as both a shifter (or ‘deictic’) perfect and as a pluperfect.20 In the latter case, it may have an appropriate marker -(h)wā,21 which, as we have seen, may be used with all kinds of nominal predicates in Syriac.

Symmetrically, another innovative construction, qṭīl lęh, provides both active perfect and analytical pluperfect for Syriac transitive verbs:22

These sentences should not be interpreted as passive, since the agents are given prominence by special particles (in both the originals and translations) and by the context.23 The fact that corresponding verbal forms in the Greek original are active transitive further supports this.

Thus, one could surmise that Classical Syriac might have had a Perfect tense roughly comparable with German or Italian. This Perfect would have had two shapes depending on the respective verb’s value of transitivity. In the individual Syriac corpora we have perused, the dynamic qaṭṭīl is predominantly derived from intransitive telic verbs of motion, though even in such verbs it is rare. The data of our sample are as follows:

• Aphrahat, Demonstrations (written in 337–345 C.E.), 77,505 words. 2 verbs with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʾbd ‘perish’ (2 tokens), npl ‘fall’ (1 token). Total: 3 tokens.24
• Peshitta New Testament (PNT) (composed perhaps in the 5th century C.E.), 101,479 words. 4 verbs with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʾty ‘come’ (3 tokens), ʿll ‘enter’ (1 token), ʾbd ‘perish’ (4 tokens), npq ‘go out’ (1 token). Total: 9 tokens.25
• Eusebius, Church History (translated into Syriac no later than 462 C.E.), 63,194 words. 4 verbs with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʾbd ‘perish’ (1 token), ʿrq ‘flee’ (1 token), mrd ‘escape’ (1 token), nḥt ‘go down, land’ (3 tokens). Total: 6 tokens.26
• Chronicle of Joshua Stylite (written in 507 C.E.), 15,434 words. 2 verbs with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʿbr ‘cross’ (1 token), npl (1 token). Total: 2 tokens.27
• Ishodad, Commentary on the Pentateuch (written around 850 C.E.), 77,252 words. 10 roots with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʾty ‘come’ (1 token), ʾzl ‘go’ (2 tokens), ʿrq ‘flee’ (1 token), ʾbd ‘perish’ (1 token), myt ‘die’ (1 token), npl ‘fall’ (1 token), npq ‘go out’ (1 token), sgd ‘bow’ (1 token), škn ‘settle or rest upon’ (1 token), yqd ‘burn (intr.)’ (1 token). Total: 11 tokens.28
• Bar Ebroyo, Ecclesiastical History (written in the 13th century C.E.), 82,373 words. 5 verbs with dynamic qaṭṭīl: ʾty ‘come’ (1 token), ʾzl (1 token), ʿll ‘enter’ (1 token), ʿrq ‘flee’ (4 tokens), ḥrb ‘get ruined’ (1 token). Total: 8 tokens.29

The number of dynamic qaṭṭīl tokens in each of the individual corpora is small, but, throughout the nine centuries of Syriac literature examined for this study, the qaṭṭīl pattern tends to express the perfect consistently in the context of essentially the same tightly-knit group of telic/punctual verbs. In more detailed terms of lexical semantics, these are, for the most part, either verbs of motion or patientive intransitives, such as ʾbd ‘perish’, myt ‘die’, and ḥrb ‘get ruined’. This fact remains to be explained.

Moreover, throughout our corpus, the grammatical reading of individual deverbal tokens of qaṭṭīl still depends on the lexical semantics of the respective verb.30 For example, in Syriac, dammīḵ invariably denotes ‘he is asleep’ (not ‘he fell/has fallen asleep’). It expresses a state contemporaneous with a reference point, as observed in (12):

The predicate dammīḵ-hwā is a translation of the Greek Imperfect e-katheud-en ‘was sleeping/asleep.’

Most importantly, this is the only token of dammīḵ in the standard text of the Peshitta for both OT and NT.31 Otherwise, in this corpus, the situation ‘be asleep’ is rendered by the adjective dmeḵ for the Present (e.g., Mark 5:39 PNT) and dmeḵ-hwā for the Past (e.g., Acts 12:6 PNT). It stands to reason that the morphological form of the Syriac adjective dmeḵ is a reflex of the archaic pattern *qaṭil, no longer productive in Central Semitic (see Sections 1.1. and 1.2 above). Thus, dammīḵ is an inner-Syriac innovation that had not existed in earlier Aramaic. The same applies to nappīq and ʾattī. By contrast, ṭuroyo daməx corresponding to Syriac dammīḵ expresses ‘he fell asleep’, while damixo, the erstwhile determined form, means ‘asleep’, e.g. ono damíxo-no ‘I am asleep’.

3.3. Summary

In sum, throughout our Syriac sample, qaṭṭīl derivations of intransitive telic verbs have the force of the perfect (or a pluperfect when used as relative tense with a reference point in the past in narrative). Yet, their use to express these grammatical meanings is not obligatory, because qṭal also appears with the same functions in texts. Consider three Syriac renderings of the same Greek verse, Jn 6:17:32

In PNT, the ‘pluperfect’ sense is rendered by the qaṭṭīl form, while S uses the qṭal, and C uses the qṭal-wā form.

In the Classical Syriac corpus, qaṭṭīl need not be restricted to derivations of telic verbs to express the perfect. Thus, tammīh sometimes has the meaning ‘he became amazed’, and even yabbīš in certain contexts seems to express ‘it has dried up’ (cf. Mk 11: 20 PNT). These facts will hopefully be dealt with in the course of our further research.

4. The Development from an Assumed Middle Aramaic Ancestor of Ṭuroyo to the Ṭuroyo of Today

The transition from the Middle Aramaic past-tense repertoire to the Neo-Aramaic repertoire of Ṭuroyo seems broadly straightforward. The new Perfect (qaṭṭīl) takes root and its use increases exponentially, and finally ousts the old Preterite (qṭal) to become the basic Past tense. This follows the well-known typological pathway, which is found, for example, in Western European languages like French, certain dialects of Italian and most of contemporary German.

Our aim is to trace the development of the Ṭuroyo verbal system in as much detail as possible. This study is still in progress. For the moment, we have undertaken a comparison of qaṭṭīl formations found in CSD with approximately one hundred Ṭuroyo verbs of Aramaic origin that have qaṭəl-Preterites. It stands to reason that Proto-Ṭuroyo was not identical to Edessan Syriac, yet we have no better starting point for a diachronic study of Ṭuroyo than Syriac.

We have found around 50 overlaps between the two groups of verbs. Some 50 intransitive Syriac verbs with qaṭṭīl attested in CSD have direct correspondences in Ṭuroyo and have a qaṭəl-Preterite, while the rest of them (i.e., approximately 130 verbs with qaṭṭīl-derivations) are not in our Verb Glossary of Ṭuroyo and, therefore, most probably have not survived into this language.

The surviving verbs can be neatly divided into two semantic groups: motion and state-and-property (including body posture). In the table below, we present 14 Ṭuroyo motion verbs with Aramaic etymology out of 50 in total. The leftmost column of the table provides glosses of Syriac verbs whose qaṭṭīl forms stand in the next column. In the Ṭuroyo column, we adduce special glosses for Ṭuroyo when the meanings do not match the Syriac ones and we give the Preterite forms of the etymologically related Ṭuroyo verbs.

Table 1: Syriac and Ṭuroyo Correspondences of *Qaṭṭīl

Also worth mentioning is the Syriac verb rkb ‘mount, bestride, ride (a horse)’. CSD (541) only mentions rḵīḇ and not the expected *rakkīḇ. Cognate verbs in Ṭuroyo include raku/roku ‘to get on, to mount (vehicle, horse ʿal)’; raxu/roxu ‘ride, mount (horse)’. Note also lawišo ‘wearing, clothed’, while CSD (235) records lḇīš rather than *labbīš.

Thus, as far as the correspondences of geminated R2-stops in Ṭuroyo go, we have ʾattī vs. aṯi, ṭabbīʿ vs. ṭawəʿ, ʿabbīr vs. ʿabər. Additional relevant examples from our comparative list include yattīḇ ‘sitting, seated’ (CSD, 198f.) vs. yatu ‘he sat down’, sabbīʿ ‘full, satisfied’ (CSD, 358) vs. sawǝʿ ‘he became full/satiated’, and rabbīʿ (CSD, 526: “pass. part.” of rḇaʿ ‘lie down, couch; recline’) vs. rawǝʿ ‘it lied down, rested (animals)’, rakkīḵ ‘soft, gentle’ (CSD 540) vs. rakəx ‘it became soft’,33 rattīḵ ‘fervent, enthusiastic’ (CSD 552) vs. raṯəx ‘to seethe’. The behaviour of second radical stops vs. spirants appears to be unpredictable.34 This means that, e.g., aṯi is not an immediate reflex (or a direct descendent) of ʾattī. The implication is that the qaṭəl-Preterite was derived directly from the ‘new’ (Neo-Aramaic) root at a certain stage of development, and in no instance is it a continuation of the corresponding Syriac qaṭṭīl form.

Our preliminary conclusions are as follows.

We do not know whether qaṭṭīl became an inflectional form that was available for every intransitive verb in the ancestor of Ṭuroyo. (This is a possibility we have been entertaining for a long time in the course of our research.) Due to a lack of adequate Syriac textual corpora at our disposal, it is difficult to identify textual examples even for the 180 qaṭṭīl lexemes recorded in CSD.

Since, phonologically, numerous tokens of the Ṭuroyo Preterite qaṭəl and the deverbal adjective qaṭilo do not go back directly to the corresponding forms attested in Syriac, we believe that all the inflectional forms of Ṭuroyo verbs were derived at a certain period synchronically from the new roots, whether of Aramaic or Arabic origin. This means that we can neither prove nor refute the existence of a Middle Aramaic stage at which a productive finite form of qaṭṭīl of intransitive verbs existed. Finally, the diachronic background for plosive or spirant realisation of etymological stops in Ṭuroyo has to be studied in its own right, as a step forward in the reconstruction of Proto-Ṭuroyo.

Abbreviations

Bibliographical Abbreviations

Glossing Abbreviations not in the Leipzig Glossing List

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