The Linguist

FEATURES Chartered Institute of Linguists WINTER 2025 The Linguist 19 A new understanding When I moved to Canada that feeling of homesickness grew bigger and I could no longer remedy it with frequent trips back home. This is when I decided to start learning Syriac. The language belongs to the Semitic family, in the branch called Eastern Aramaic, which encompasses several widely spoken dialects in the core territories of Mesopotamia. It is therefore related to but distinct from Arabic, since both share features typical of Semitic languages such as root-and-pattern morphology, a set of emphatic consonants and similar basic grammatical categories. This meant that my background in Arabic, not to mention my frequent exposure to the language in a liturgical context, made certain patterns and the concept of triliteral roots feel familiar. As my skills in the language grew, hymns I had heard a thousand times ( ; The Lord's Prayer, ; Sanctus Sanctus) started to make sense. The cadences I had carried in memory from childhood prayers revealed grammatical patterns I could now recognise. Language learning changed the past for me. The hymns were no longer just comforting sounds, they were sentences with subjects and verbs, with metaphors and references that linked them to a broader intellectual tradition. I grew up with Maronite liturgies that preserved Syriac lines, sometimes in whole prayers and sometimes in fragments that interlaced with Arabic. For many Lebanese, Syriac is a cultural or religious texture, a signifier of antiquity and of belonging to a long chain of local Christian practices. I heard it as a child without always knowing its history. Returning to it as an adult feels like tracing the filament of a family story back through several lives. It is a way of listening to the people who came before me and understanding how they heard the world. This is where history and present become personal. Syriac was once a lingua franca of a region whose map looks very different now. It moved across borders that were porous to trade and to ideas. The medieval schools of Nisibis and Edessa taught theology and medicine in Syriac. Manuscripts circulated along caravan routes. Later, during the upheavals of the 20th century, these networks frayed. Communities scattered. Yet the tradition did not vanish. It adapted. Church books were copied and preserved in monasteries and carried all over the world with the diaspora, which is partly why Syriac has survived. Today, only a few hundred thousand people speak modern varieties of Syriac fluently. I can't make a convincing professional case for a linguist to spend hours learning it instead of improving their Russian or picking up a new language. The hours of delayed gratification cannot be recouped; the chances of ever speaking the language or using it in a professional setting are slim. Yet for me, it has never been about practicality. Learning Syriac has been a remedy for homesickness, carrying me back to my hometown even from thousands of miles away. It has become a way to reconnect with my grandparents and to feel that I belong to something deeply rooted in a land far away. And that, I think, is reason enough. MARONITE TRADITION The Cathedral of Saint Georges in Beirut (top); and Saydet El Herzmanet Maronite Church (above) in very few communities, as a remedy for homesickness © SHUTTERSTOCK LEBNEN18 CC BY-SA 3.0 AHMAD MOUSSAOUI CC BY 2.0

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