§709. Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA), formerly known as Palestinian Syriac, is known from texts from the 5th to around the 14th centuries from Palestine and Transjordan. The earlier MSS are mostly fragmentary. Later texts survive from the 11th century.
§710. CPA was written in a hand that is similar, but not exactly like, Esṭrangelā. Most text editions use available Esṭrangelā types, with the exception of the somewhat recent A Corpus of Christian
354 Garšūnography, Adaptation & Alloglottography §710.
Palestinian Aramaic1 which uses a digital font that resembles the actual script.
§711. The CPA script differs from the Syriac script in a number of ways, but most importantly its unique joining properties: only
<d/r> and <z> are right-joining. CPA has an additional graph-eme, the inverted <p>,
ܧ
, which appears first in print type in 1892 (S16).2 In 1899, a more aesthetic glyph was produced.3 13.2. NENA Neo-Aramaic§712. Neo-Aramaic dialects, especially NENA4 dialects and to a lesser extent Ṭuroyo, called by older generations Sūrayt, are writ-ten using the Syriac writing system (with the exiswrit-tence of other competing scripts, most notably Cyrillic and Latin for NENA and Latin for Ṭuroyo).
§713. NENA dialects are first attested in written form at the end of the 16th century. They exclusively use the E. Syr. script (though Nöldeke used Serṭā for his Grammatik).5 These texts primarily rep-resent the dialects of Alqosh and Telkepe, but with influence from Classical Syriac. During the 19th century, missionaries among the Assyrians adapted the Christian Urmia dialect into a written lan-guage. Whereas the system of the earlier MSS is mostly phonemic, the system employed by the missionaries, and their Assyrian helpers, gradually became historico-etymological over time, with
1 Müller-Kessler and Sokoloff, A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Ara-maic.
2 Coakley, Typography 178.
3 Coakley, Typography 174.
4 For further discussion, see Murre-Van den Berg, From a Spoken to a Written Language.
5 Nöldeke, Grammatik der neusyrische Sprache.
359
1 1 4 4 . . A A l l l l o o g g l l o o t t t t o o g g r r a a p p h h y y
To read was to interpret. Although the text was fixed, its sense was not unambiguiously given in the characters but was, so to speak, conferred in the act of reading it-self.
Harry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church
§723. The term alloglottography1 is used in various contexts. It denotes the practice of writing a text in one language and reading it in another. This practice is known from the Aramaic of the Achaemenid period under Darius the Great (522–486 BC). Liter-ate notaries and scribes would write messages in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the time. The recipient notary would then read the message in Persian or another langauge.2
§724. A similar practice survives today in liturgical settings, but it is difficult to determine the historical depth of this tradition.
Here, the text is written in Classical Syriac, but read in a variety of target languages.3 Known target languages include sister Ara-maic languages such as Ṭuroyo and Swadāyā, a sister Semitic lan-guage, viz. Arabic, and languages of different families such as Turkish, Kurdish, and Malayalam. Other target languages such Armenian may have also existed. Of these target languages, Ṭuroyo and Swadāyā are very active and can be heard in many parishes in the Middle East and the diaspora. Arabic is still active
1 Gershevitch, ‘The alloglottography of Old Persian’; Rubio, ‘Writing in Another Tongue’.
2 Coulmas, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems 8–9.
3 A similar practice is used between Hebrew and Neo-Aramaic. See Hary, ‘Judeo-Arabic in Its Sociolinguistic Setting’.
360 Garšūnography, Adaptation & Alloglottography §724.
in the Middle East, but less so in the diaspora (it is somewhat ac-tive in Teaneck, NJ, mostly performed by Mor Cyril Ephrem Karim). Turkish is somewhat active in Istanbul. I have heard Kurdish once during a funeral service in The Netherlands. Mala-yalam is known to have been active at the beginning of the 20th century, and I was recently told that Mor Dionysius Geevarghese of Mor Ignatius Elias III Dayro, Pampady, Kottayam, is able to perform Syriac-into-Malayalam alloglottography. In June 2012, I heard the priest E. Shabo perform Syriac-into-English alloglot-tography in Cranbury, NJ.
§725. Alas, research in this area is non-existent. The following remarks are based on personal observations and analogy with He-brew-into-Jewish NENA alloglottography.4 My personal observa-tions are limited to Syriac-into-Ṭuroyo and Syriac-into-Arabic al-loglottography.
§726. Alloglottography is set during liturgies. The source text, written in Syriac, is either biblical or prose prayers. The latter are usually ḥusāyā, ʿeṭrā, or tlāytā prayers. These vary in length with ḥusāyā being the longest and tlāytā the shortest. The reader, or rather translator, is given the task of alloglottography on the spot.
(Once at the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus, I was asked to perform Syro-Arabic into Modern Standard Arabic al-loglottography in public, q.v. §731.)
§727. The ‘quality’ (if one can define such a thing) of the trans-lations depends on a number of factors. First and foremost is the reader’s familiarity with Syriac, and expertise in composition in the target language (which, typically, is the reader’s native or
4 Sabar, ‘The Hebrew Bible Vocabulary as Reflected through Tradi-tional Oral Neo-Aramaic Translations’; Sabar, ‘On the Nature of the Oral Translations of the Book of Exodus in Neo-Aramaic’.
363
I I V V . . T T e e c c h h n n o o l l o o g g i i c c a a l l D D e e v v e e l l o o p p m m e e n n t t s s
Part IV gives a synopsis of technological develop-ments vis-à-vis Syriac writing: the short history of lithography and mimeography (Chapter 15), type-writers (Chapter 16), and digital typography (Chapter 17). Finally, Chapter 18 gives an account of coding standards. The long history of Syriac ty-pography in the form of movable type is intesti-nally absent here as it has been already presented in great detail by Coakley in his Typography.
365
1 1 5 5 . . L L i i t t h h o o g g r r a a p p h h y y a a n n d d M M i i m m e e o o g g r r a a p p h h y y
This book of the šḥīmā prayers of the clergy of the one holy and catholic Church of Antioch was printed by the printing that is called līṭugrap̱īq which belongs to Eda-vazhikkal Philipose the priest, son of Sheryan who is Zachariah the deceased.
Colophon (1861)
15.1. Lithography
§732. Lithography was invented in 1796 by Alois Senefelder, who produced a press for it in 1817. It provides a mechanism to produce printing at low cost. The artwork is first drawn onto spe-cial paper which is then transferred as a mirror on stone. The stone is then pressed against the final product to reproduce an image. While lithography was mostly used by artists to produce prints, it was possible to use it to reproduce pages written by hand. The same technology would develop in the 20th century to be used with offset printing.
§733. The extent to which Syriac printing used the 19th century version of lithography is unknown. In 1874, Ceriani (1828–1907) published a photolithographic facsimile of an incomplete 8th or 9th century Syro-hexapla codex from the Ambrosian library (MS C 313 inf.).1 Between 1876 and 1883, he also published a similar
1 Ceriani, Codex Syro-Hexaplaris Ambrosianus photolithographice edi-tus.
366 IV. Technological Developments §733.
edition of the 6th or 7th century Old Testament Peshiṭtā codex, also from the Ambrosian library (MS B 21 inf.).2
§734. A
ܐ ܳ ܺ
was published in Kottayam in 1861 by Philipose Edavazhikkal. We are fortunate to have a colophon that gives the name of the technology in Syriac:ܐ ܶ ݂ ܶ ܳ ܰ ܕ ܐ ܒ ܒ ܒ ܬܐ ܰ ܶ
ܺ ܰ ܐ ܓ ܺ
‘it was printed with the printing that is called li-thography’. The free hand permitted the scribe to use decorative writings for headings. The colophon states that 250 copies were made and that the scribe was Edavazhikkal himself.§735. It is plausible that other books were published using this technology. We are told by Jacob III3 that the Syriac Orthodox bishop Cyril Yuwaqim was the first to publish liturgical texts in Malabar (no doubt other denominations may have been publish-ing books as well). The press was not his but belonged to Edavaz-hikkal who purchased the lithographic press in 1859. Jacob III mentions two other lithographic presses obtained during this pe-riod: one by the ‘Protestants’ (probably the predecessor of the Mar Thoma Church) and another by Bishop Athanasius Matta, who also published Syriac liturgical texts. Alas, some of Matta’s litho-graphic publications were later burnt by the party loyal to the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate.
§736. Syriac printing made use of lithography’s successors. The press at Deir al-Zaʿfarān published a number of books engraved on metal in the mid-20th century, as by then its movable type press was no longer operational. Many of these engravings are still preserved at Deir al-Zaʿfarān. A few specimens were obtained for display at the Beth Mardutho Research Library.
2 Ceriani, Translatio Syra Pescitto Veteris Testamenti ex codice Ambro-siano saec. 6 potolithographice edita.
3 Tuma, Tārīkh al-kanīsah al-suryāniyyah al-hindiyyah 285.
369
1 1 6 6 . . T T y y p p e e w w r r i i t t e e r r s s
The carriage of the ADLER-SPECIAL moves from the left to the right, so that Syriac manuscripts can be typed in the normal way, i.e. from the right to the left.
Koller & Van OS to W. Baars (Jan 4, 1968)
§742. The period between movable type and digital type wit-nessed a number of projects for designing Syriac typewriters.
Some of these projects materialized but others remained in the planning stages. The following section documents the information that I was able to gather, although no doubt there were other at-tempts made that I did not learn about.