Hoi, I've received a lengthy answer from Patrick R Bennett (Principal of the The Jerome Institute, and Prof. Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) who is the main linguistic consultant of the Aramaic Bible translation project in the U.S., with translations into five language varieties.
He starts with a disclaimer: "I will talk here only about the Christian Modern Aramaic – the Jewish Modern Aramaic is another thing altogether, and I am not at all sure of the present status of Modern Mandaic." So, Amir, you may want to continue your search for an Aramaic language expert in Israel.
Prof Bennett then continues to distinguish four languages varieties:
* Maaluli (Modern Western Aramaic) * Suryoyo / Turoyo * Chaldean * Assyrian
(He has longer explanation on each variety but I'll spare you the details unless you insist me posting them here.) To cut a long story short, he thinks that, in addition to Syriac which represents a classical proto-language (like Latin for Spanish, Italian etc), "for Suryoyo/Turoyo, Chaldean, and Assyrian there can be a case for independent wikipedias. [...] I do not think Chaldean and Assyrian can productively be combined – there are too many lexical and morphological differences."
On scripts, Prof Bennett suggests the following (NB: the Syriac wikipedia is written in Western Syriac script):
* Suryoyo – Western Syriac script * Chaldean – Arabic script * Assyrian – Eastern Syriac script
Again, I can forward more details from his original post, if necessary. He closes with "I hope this helps. More detail and further discussion of course can be provided if desired."
Fwiw, Oliver
On 24-Jan-17 12:50, Oliver Stegen wrote:
I've contacted the Aramaic BT team (http://www.aramaicbible.org/our-team.html) two of whom I know personally. I'll let you know when they respond on the question of dialect (i.e. possibly combinable into arc:wp) vs language (i.e. probably needing a distinct wp).
Fwiw, Oliver
On 19-Jan-17 16:13, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Maybe, I can think of a couple of names.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-01-19 7:06 GMT-08:00 Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com mailto:millosh@gmail.com>:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 3:59 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il <mailto:amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il>> wrote: > So we need an expert. Anyone in Israel? I mean, Israel seems to me like a good place to search for an expert in Aramaic languages.