Lexicography

A line of Syriac manuscript text — "And others loved to lexicalize!" — Bar Ebroyo, d. 1286

Beth Mardutho began converting the Brock & Kiraz dictionary (Gorgias Illustrated Learner's Syriac-English, English-Syriac Dictionary) into a lexical database in 2021 — thereby laying the groundwork for a collaborative, long-term project for a historical dictionary of the Syriac language.

This project provides a framework to provide citations from various historical periods of the language starting with the Old Syriac inscriptions (first to third centuries CE) and continuing to the Kthobonoyo era of the twenty-first century. It is strongly grounded in contact linguistics: lexical borrowings to and from Syriac are denoted, and cognates from the Aramaic language family and the broader Semitic family are collated as well. The project was formally launched in July 2022 at the Symposium Syriacum in Paris.

The project's lexical data is disseminated through SEDRA, Beth Mardutho's online Syriac lexical database.

Project Results

While the lexicography project is ongoing, the team's findings are already being published and shared with the academic community. Read the research below.

Publications

Hanna, Marie Guirguis. "Digital Humanities And Its Role In Semitic Historical Lexicography." The Egyptian Journal of Language Engineering 10, no. 2 (2023): 1–20. PDF
Cherkashina, Anna, Yulia Kirilenko, Artyom Badeev, and George Kiraz. "Towards a Historical Dictionary of Syriac: The Case for Etymology." In Syriac Lexis and Lexica. Compiling ancient and modern vocabularies. Edited by Mara Nicosia and Riccardo Contini. PLAL. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. Forthcoming.

Conference Presentations

Cherkashina, Anna. "Analyzing interborrowings between modern Eastern Aramaic languages and Classical Syriac." 5th Neo-Aramaic Languages Conference, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. October 26–27, 2023.
Kiraz, George. "Towards a Historical Dictionary of Syriac." XIII Symposium Syriacum, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (INALCO), Paris. July 4–9, 2022.
——. "Practical issues in building an Aramaic lexicon: A case study from Syriac with Neo-Aramaic implications." 5th Neo-Aramaic Languages Conference, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. October 26–27, 2023.
Kirilenko, Yulia, and Anna Cherkashina. "Semitic and Aramaic etymologies for the new lexicographic project of Beth Mardutho." Beth Mardutho summer conference, Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, Piscataway, NJ. August 26, 2022.

Team Members

Anna Cherkashina, PhD

Research Fellow

Anna Cherkashina (formerly, Nurullina) is a Research Fellow at Beth Mardutho. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, with a master's degree in Oriental Studies. Her master's thesis studied Syriac magic as attested by manuscripts dated to the 18th–20th centuries. In 2023, she completed her PhD on Syriac love magic at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. She has also been working on Aramaic and Semitic lexica contributing to the projects "Etymological dictionary of Akkadian" (Jena, Germany) and "Semitic Etymological Dictionary" (Moscow, Russia). Anna now holds a post-doctoral position at Tel Aviv University.
Yulia Kirilenko, MA

Research Fellow

Yulia Kirilenko is a Research Fellow in Lexicography at Beth Mardutho. She graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities with a master's degree in Oriental Studies, and her master's thesis examined the El-Amama letters from Palestine. Since graduation she has worked on a project creating a generative software for Akkadian grammar. Her current research interests lie in the field of Semitic lexicography.
Marie G. Hanna, PhD

Research Fellow

Marie G. Hannah is a Research Fellow (Lexicography) at Beth Mardutho. She started her career as a teaching assistant in 2009 in the Faculty of Arts Hebrew Department at Ain Shams University, specializing in Comparative Semitic Linguistics, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac. She received her PhD in 2018 titled: "Stress accent, intonation & juncture in the Hebrew, Aramaic & Syriac languages, Phonological study." She is currently an assistant professor at Ain Shams University. She also works as a lecturer of Classical Hebrew and Syriac at the Coptic Theological Institute in Cairo. She is an expert member of the Committee of Arabic Origins in the Semitic Languages as a participant in the Historical Dictionary of Arabic Language of Sharjah (UAE).
Girgis Boshra, PhD

Research Fellow

Girgis Boshra has an MA and Ph.D. from Cairo University's Department of Classics in "Contrastive Analysis between Greek, Syriac, and Coptic." He is a researcher at the Panarion Center for Patristic Heritage, where he edited and translated many Patristic texts from Ancient Greek, Latin, and Coptic into Arabic. He directs the publishing unit for the Faculty of Archaeology at Ain Shams University, Egypt, and he is the Editor of the Bulletin of The Center of Papyrological Studies, Ain Shams University. Girgis co-authored HAYAMUS Tri-Lingual Lexicon Ancient Greek – English – Arabic. He also participated in the Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (Free University of Berlin) by proof-reading the Greek data and translating it into Arabic.
Nikita Kuzin, PhD

Research Fellow

Nikita Kuzin earned his BA in Oriental studies (2015) and MA in Semitic philology (2017) at the Russian State University for the Humanities. In 2024, he completed his PhD with the subject "Voice and valency change in the Neo-Aramaic language Ṭuroyo" at the Freie Universität Berlin. He currently works at the Institute of Semitic studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has also contributed to several DH and NLP projects dedicated to developing the corpora and lexicons of various Neo-Aramaic languages. Nikita's research interests include Aramaic and Arabic linguistics, language contact, lexical semantics, and Semitic etymology.
Michael Weingart, PhD

Citations Research Associate

Michael Weingart studied Classics and Philosophy at Yale, then traded commodity options on Wall Street while earning an MA in Mathematics at Columbia. After completing the PhD at Rutgers he taught there in the Mathematics Department until 2021, and now studies Syriac and Biblical Hebrew.
Georgis Issa, BA

Citations Research Assistant

Georgis Issa earned a Bachelor's degree in Biology and a Diploma in Applied Sciences. Currently an instructor of Syriac, he is a Research Assistant on Beth Mardutho's Lexicography project.
Artyom Badeev, BA

Research Assistant

Artyom Badeev is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. He holds a BA in Oriental Studies from the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies (HSE University, Moscow). His bachelor's thesis examined Avestan and Old Persian demonstratives and deixis. In addition to Iranian-Syriac contacts, Artyom works with Old Iranian and Pamir languages and is currently examining elements of Shughni grammar.
Florian Jäckel, PhD

DH Research Associate

Florian Jäckel is a software developer at dblp.org, a computer science bibliography database. After studying theology and Islamic science in Tübingen and Beirut, he received his PhD from Universität Hamburg with a thesis on Barhebraeus's notions of the unborn (open access here). His current work at Beth Mardutho began with a DH fellowship in Summer 2022 and continued into the Lexicography project.
George Kiraz, PhD

General Editor

Founder and Director, Beth Mardutho

Advisors

Sebastian P. Brock, PhD

Senior Advisor

Professor Emeritus, University of Oxford
Robert D. Hoberman, PhD

Aramaic Cognates Reader

Professor of Linguistics, Stony Brook University
Maria Bulakh, PhD

Semitic Cognates Reader

Associate Professor, Higher School of Economics (HSE University), Moscow
Claudia Angela Ciancaglini, PhD

Iranian Consultant

Full Professor, Historical and General Linguistics; Faculty of Humanities, Department of Antiquity Sciences, University of Rome "La Sapienza"