The aleppo dialect according to the travel accounts of ibn raˁd (1656) ms. sbath 89 and hanna dyab (1764) ms. sbath 254

The aim of this study is to compare some linguistic markers that are present in the mss. Sbath 89, containing an account of the journey made by a Greek Orthodox, Ibn Raˁd (IR), from Aleppo to Venice (1656), and Sbath 254, containing an account written by the Maronite Ḥanna Dyāb (HD), who was hired in 1707 as a guide and interpreter by the French royal explorer Paul Lucas during his voyage in the Near East, North Africa, Italy and France. Both are autograph manuscripts and they currently belong to the Vatican Library. The authors were both Christians from Aleppo and their writing has a markedly colloquial tone. In selecting the linguistic features to be examined in the mss., two main criteria were considered: their present diatopic relevance and their originality. The selected features were compared with three more recent surveys fully transcribed in Latin characters: 1) that collected in Aleppo (1842-1845) by the Russian Orientalist Elie Bérézine (EB); 2) the corrections made by P. Léon Pourrière (LP), a native speaker of the Aleppo dialect questioned by Kampffmeyer (1901) over Bérézine’s reliability; and 3) Abdulghafur Sabuni’s (AS) doctoral thesis, published in (1980). Barthélmy’s Dictionnaire (1935) was also consulted to identify entries presented as belonging to the Aleppo dialect. Before starting the present study, I digitalized Sbath 89 (IR), Sbath 254 (HD) and EB in order to count the frequencies of the selected features. These frequencies may not be always correct and the absence of some elements from the sources considered here should not be taken to entail their absence in the habits of dialect speakers in Aleppo.