language and script 105
salient) direct objects can be introduced by the particle ʾyt /ʾiyyāt/ in ara
maic in western Syria or its byform wt /wāt/ in Samʾalian, but object
marking does not seem to be compulsory.107 the precative particle lw
/lū/, which occurs sometimes in official aramaic, is already attested in
Samʾalian. its asseverative counterpart l /la/ seems to be used with the
“imperfect” in tell fekheriye and Samʾalian (see the discussion above),
perhaps also, though more freely, in the personal name ʾdnlrm (‘indeed,
the lord is exalted’, Kai 203) and at the beginning of the dedication
llʿbdbʿlt (‘indeed, for ʿabdbaʿalat’, Kai 204).
- Syntax
the most frequent word order pattern in old aramaic is VSo for verbal
clauses and, if indeed such a general distinction can be made, Subject
predicate for nominal clauses. due to internal developments and presum
ably also because of contact with akkadian and old persian, however,
the situation seems less clear for official aramaic. proleptic pronouns,
which later become a characteristic feature of aramaic, are rarely used
in the earliest stages; possessive constructions like brh zy pn ‘his son, the
one of pn’ = ‘pn’s son’, where a suffixed head noun is linked to a modi
fier by means of the relative marker zy, first seem to occur between the
end of the 6th and the beginning of the 5th century B.c. this may point
to a more fundamental, and possibly contactinduced, change of clause
patterns in aramaic after the period under review here. double subordi
nation is avoided in favor of parataxis.108 agreement usually appears to
be straightforward, but, as in other older Semitic languages, the numerals
from three to ten take the opposite gender to the counted noun (e.g., šbʿ
bnth ‘his seven daughters’, Kai 222 a: 24).109
- Lexicon
Besides a common stock of lexical items inherited from previous stages
of Semitic, the inscriptions from central Syria, tell fekheriye, and Zincirli
all contain a number of words distinctive of the aramaic language group:
107 cf. degen 1969: 95–97.
108 See gzella 2004: 160.
109 See degen 1969: 104f. Very few numerals are attested in old aramaic.