“May I Treasure Up the Words in My Heart!”: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral Tradition

“May I Treasure Up the Words in My Heart!”: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral TraditionJournal of the Canadian Society for Syriac StudiesSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference PortalThe National Endowment for the HumanitiesThe International Balzan Prize FoundationDavid A. Michelsoncbsc_adminRecord added to Zotero bycbsc_adminSyriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portalhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/8267W6U5/tei

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2024-08-15-04:00

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CREATED: This bibl record was autogenerated from a Zotero record.AlessandroMengozzi“May I Treasure Up the Words in My Heart!”: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral Traditionhttp://syriaca.org/cbss/8267W6U5https://www.zotero.org/groups/a_comprehensive_bibliography_on_syriac_studies/items/8267W6U5https://www.zotero.org/groups/4861694/items/8267W6U5Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies11201118-32Modern Aramaic philology is a research field that has attracted the attention of few scholars and vernacular literature preserved in manuscripts appears indeed to be a rather marginal phenomenon in comparison with both oral tradition and Classical Syriac writing (copying of the classical heritage and composition of new original texts). In the last few decades and especially in the last few years, a surprising number of grammatical descriptions of modern Aramaic varieties have appeared. All of them include the transcription and translation of oral texts, some of which are particularly valuable from a literary point of view. Both written and oral texts reveal an extraordinary tenacity of classical stories and motifs. A couple of examples will be given here: the story of the Maccabean martyrs and their mother Shmuni and of Joseph and Mary. In both cases oral transmission has preserved ancient lore in the collective memory of the community, although in rather creative and somehow distorted ways, as is typical of the oral/aural medium. Mengozzi, Alessandro. “‘May I Treasure Up the Words in My Heart!’: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral Tradition.” Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 11 (2011): 18–32. Alessandro Mengozzi, ‘May I Treasure Up the Words in My Heart!’: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral Tradition, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 11 (2011): 18–32.JosephMaccabeesMaryModern SyriacXIX-XXI CEdurektahymnographyoralitypoetryprimary sources [Syriac] + English translation