Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Mandaic language
Summary
Mandaic also known as Classical Mandaic is the liturgical language of Mandaeism and a southeastern Aramaic variety in use by the Mandaean community, traditionally based in southern parts of Iraq and southwest Iran, for their religious books. Mandaic, or Classical Mandaic is still employed by Mandaean priests in liturgical rites. The modern descendant of Mandaic or Classical Mandaic, known as Neo-Mandaic or Modern Mandaic, is spoken by a small section of Mandaeans around Ahvaz and Khorramshahr in the southern Iranian Khuzestan province.
Liturgical use of Mandaic or Classical Mandaic is found in Iran (particularly the southern portions of the country), in Baghdad, Iraq and in the diaspora (particularly in the United States, Sweden, Australia and Germany). It is an Eastern Aramaic language notable for its abundant use of vowel letters (mater lectionis with aleph, he only in final position, ‘ayin, waw, yud)) in writing, so-called plene spelling (Mandaic alphabet) and the amount of Iranian and Akkadian language influence on its lexicon, especially in the area of religious and mystical terminology. Mandaic is influenced by Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Samaritan Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, in addition to Akkadian and Parthian.
Classical Mandaic belongs to the Southeastern group of Aramaic and is closely related to the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic dialect in the major portions of the Babylonian Talmud, but less to the various dialects of Aramaic appearing in the incantation texts on unglazed ceramic bowls (incantation bowls) found mostly in central and south Iraq as well as the Khuzestan province of Iran. It is less related to the northeastern Aramaic dialect of Syriac.
This southeastern Aramaic dialect is transmitted through religious, liturgical, and esoteric texts, most of them stored today in the Drower Collection, Bodleian Library (Oxford), and in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris), the British Library (London) and in the households of various Mandaeans as religious texts.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.