I agree with everything 7ayruta said. I'm not an expert either, but the differences are pretty much what you would expect in an ancient language. There are differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The classical language is actually based off of the dialect that they spoke in the city of Edessa (what we call
Orhaay, today it's Şanlıurfa in southern Turkey). The Western dialect might be directly descended from that dialect (or a version near to it), but the Eastern dialect probably isn't and, in some places, the modern Eastern dialect is actually older than the classical dialect. Overall though, the modern Eastern dialects descend from a dialect that was ultimately very similar to the classical dialect; the differences get bigger and bigger as time goes by, for obvious reasons.
In pronunciation, the biggest change for the Western dialect is the vowels: namely, the shift from "aa" to "o" (like
shlaamaa ->
shlomo) and the merger of "o" and "u" to "u." The Eastern dialect usually preserves vowels better than the Western dialect while the opposite is true for consonants: many Eastern dialect speakers have merged the pronunciation of the letter
xeth (originally "H") with a soft
kaaph so that they're both pronounced "kh" now. Many Eastern speakers don't pronounce the letter
`e. Also, the sounds "w," "v," and "f," all different in the classical dialect, have merged to "w" now, e.g.:
- "window" = kawthaa (classical and modern)
- "book" = kthaavaa (classical), kthaawaa (modern)
- "soul" = nafshaa (classical), nawshaa (modern)
I can't speak for the Western dialect, but grammar is fairly different too. For one, we've pretty much lost what are called "states." For example, "the house," "a house," and "house of" would be in three different states. We still have it in a few places in the modern language (left over from the old days); in
beth kreehe ("house of the sick," i.e. "hospital") the word "
beth" is in a different "state" from the usual "
bethaa." In the modern language, we would just say "
bethaa d-kreehe." Also,
bar naashaa ("son of man," i.e. "person") would be "
braa d-naashaa" or "
bronaa d-naashaa," again,
bar is in a different state from
braa and
bronaa. Even by the time of classical Syriac, states were being used less often than older Aramaic used them, but they didn't die out completely.
Also, another major thing we've completely lost are the two main verb tenses. In the classical dialect, the tenses weren't really focused on "time" (past, present, future) but on "aspect" (complete vs. incomplete, or "perfect" vs. "imperfect"). It goes a little something like this in the modern dialect:
- kaathiw = "he writes" or "he will write"
- kthiw-leh = "he wrote"
- ho leh kthaawaa = "he is writing"
- aaw kthaawaa waa = "he was writing"
So it's fairly focued on time, while in the classical dialect:
- kaathev = usually "he writes," sometimes "he will write" (general tense, not focused on completion)
- kthav = "he wrote" or "he has written" (perfect tense, i.e. complete)
- nekhtov = "he will write" or "he was writing" or "he is writing" or "he does write" (imperfect tense, i.e. incomplete)
See how the imperfect tense can be used in all three times (past, present, and future)? They all share one thing in common, though: they're all "incomplete," hence a greater focus on "aspect." Constructions like "
kthiw-leh" exist in the classical dialect too, but it literally means "it was written by him" instead of "he wrote." The above examples I used for the modern language were from my dialect, but there are dialects even further from the classical language like the ones that have "
bit" or whatever in the future tense.
In terms of vocabulary, like 7ayruta said, we've borrowed from a lot of languages over the years. You can't say that the classical language is "pure Aramaic," and saying the modern dialects are "Aramaic-influenced Akkadian" is like saying that Mexicans speak "Spanish-influenced Mayan," a ridiculous statement to make. The classical language has many borrowed words, including Akkadian ones and especially Greek. Akkadian started losing its status in favour of Aramaic even in 1000 BC, and it started dying out out as a spoken language around 612 BC. In the first century AD, right around the time classical Syriac was being formed from old Syriac, Akkadian died out even as a written language. For a few centuries after that, we had more or less one Syriac language with the dialect of Edessa being the standard literary language (what we today call
leshshaanaa `atteeqaa), and the dialects were firmly split into West and East by the time of the 7th century.
