While a postdoctoral researcher the present reviewer well remembers struggling to decipher the system of dots in an early-eighth-century Syriac manuscript, with the limited aid provided by J.B. Segal's 1953 study The Diacritical Point and the Accents in Syriac, reviewed by the Hebraist G.R. Driver in BSOAS 17, 1955, 182, and now republished by Gorgias Press. At the time Driver remarked that Segal led the reader “with assured mastery of his subject, though perhaps not always with limpid lucidity, through schemes of ever-increasing complexity”. Other treatments of orthography and related topics such as the late-nineteenth-century German grammars of Nöldeke and Brockelmann were even sketchier.
Kiraz's volume has the lucidity that Segal's lacked, while also covering the various vocalization and orthographic systems more broadly. Trained in the Syrian Orthodox tradition but also holding a Cambridge doctorate in computational linguistics, Kiraz is ideally placed to tackle this complex subject from a modern scientific as well as a historical perspective. He covers a vast range of scholarship, both European and Middle Eastern, medieval to modern. (He also brought up his own children to speak “Kthobonoyo” or Classical Syriac, in the manner of Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, so can also speak knowledgeably about spelling conventions in modern Ṭuroyo children's books.)
There is a wealth of material contained in this volume. It commences with a definition of modern technical terms (graphs, graphemes and glyphs), before a description of praxis in the earliest manuscripts and of the major figures in Syriac grammatical study into the medieval period, followed by a chronology of developments in the representation of Syriac century-by-century to the present day. The second chapter surveys the consonantal graphemes and the role of matres lectionis. This leads naturally into the third chapter, a discussion of vowel graphemes and the history of different pointing systems used for the disambiguation of the numerous homographs that exist in Syriac. Statements are fully referenced to a wide range of earlier grammars or to actual practice in a particular manuscript (usually via Segal). The differences between Eastern and Western Syriac vocalization are noted.
The fourth and fifth chapters deal with the area that puzzles all non-expert readers of Syriac, namely the precise significance of grammatical and punctuation marks. Kiraz also adds common abbreviations and acronyms, and liturgical and musical markers.
Biblical manuscripts are often marked with prosodic accents (compare the accentuation marks in Hebrew scriptural texts). Here Kiraz draws on the work of predecessors, but as someone with first-hand experience of ecclesiastical recitation. The final section in the first part covers numbering systems (used especially for dates and for the ordering of quires), from early inscriptions onwards.
The second part of the volume covers “graphotactics”, patterns of formation of strings of letters, and also the development of the written script. (Kiraz has designed a number of computer fonts, so is well-versed in the various systems of scripts and their ligatures.) The diagrams provided would be of use to anyone teaching or learning how to write Syriac script.
The third section discusses the ways in which Syriac script has been used to write other languages (“alloglottography”), especially Arabic, a combination known as Garshuni; but also Armenian, Greek, Malayalam and Sogdian (a number of other scholarly experts have contributed to this chapter). Conversely, other scripts have sometimes been used to represent Syriac with mixed success, particularly in the case of Roman font, where a lack of a consistent transcription method has hampered the cataloguing of Syriac books in Western libraries.
Finally Kiraz briefly covers technological developments in printing, and the use of typewriters and computers for reproducing Syriac. He provides sixteen colour plates of noteworthy uses of Syriac script, including the earliest Syriac document, the oldest inscription, the famous Orpheus mosaic from Edessa, and various children's toys with the alphabet. There are indexes for general subjects; technical terms in both English and Syriac; Biblical references; graphs; authorities; and manuscripts.
Given the technical and complex nature of the subject, Kiraz has performed a minor miracle in providing Syriacists with a work that is both comprehensive and highly readable.
