The travel accounts of Raˁd to Venice (1656) and its Aleppo dialect, according to the Ms. Sbath 89

The aim of this study is to edit, translate, comment and analyse the linguistic features that are present in the unedited manuscript . Sbath 89, containing an account of the travel and journey made by an Aleppo Greek Orthodox, called Raʿd (R), from Aleppo to Venice in 1656. In selecting the linguistic features to be examined in the ms. Sbath 89, two main criteria were considered: their present diatopic relevance and their originality. When necessary, the selected features were compared with Sbath 254, containing an account of the travel and journey made by the Aleppo Maronite Hanna Diab (HD), hired in 1707 as a guide and interpreter by the French royal explorer Paul Lucas (1664-1737),2 during his voyage in the Near East, North Africa, Italy and France. Beside these manuscripts, three more recent surveys fully transcribed in Latin characters were consulted: 1) that collected in Aleppo (1842-1845) by the Russian Orientalist Elie Bérézine (EB)4; 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 (A.S.) doctoral thesis, published in (1980).