Iranian and Greek influence on the Syriac lexicon: The emergence of compound words

Nominal compounds are almost entirely lacking in the ancient and classical Semitic languages, while they are relatively frequent in the modern Semitic languages. Particularly, they are well attested in all Modern Aramaic varieties, especially in the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages, spoken by Christians and Jews around North-West Iran and South-West Turkey. In these languages, the presence of nominal compounds is correctly attributed to the contact of these languages with Kurdish and New Persian, together with many other non-Semitic features. This paper argues that the presence of nominal compounds is not an innovation of the modern Neo-Aramaic languages, because compounds began to appear already in Classical Syriac, where they are to be attributed to the contact with Greek and Middle Persian. The great amount of Greek and Iranian compounds borrowed into Syriac fostered the formation of indigenous compounds through the crystallization of older sequences in the construct state or in the d-construction. If we are right in arguing that the formation of compounds in Classical Syriac is due to the contact with Greek and Middle Persian, this can be considered a further contact phenomenon confirming that borrowing between typologically different languages can happen, even in the case of slight or mid-slight structural borrowing, as long as a sufficiently long time span, fairly strong cultural pressure, and a large group of multilingual speakers are given