MANDAEAN LANGUAGE
PRONUNCIATION
MANDAIC RECORDINGS
The Thousand and Twelve Questions (Alf Trisar Suialia)
Edited in transliteration and translation By E.S. Drower
Akademie Verlag: Berlin: 1960
"I managed to get recordings in Baghdad, in ‘Amara, and in Basra. In the latter town it was Shaikh Nejm whose voice was recorded, and as he was initiate in Persia in a district where Mandaic is still a living speech and the community more segregated than in ‘Iraq. I incline to think that where difference exists between his pronunciation of words and that of the priests further north, his may not be the more traditional. It was he who had made his son a priest and he himself is a sincere priest, punctual in his duties as pastor, and meticulous in his performance of ritual.
At every Mandaean religious ceremony numerous prayers are recited, many of them lengthy and the result is that they are gabbled. I was reluctant to slow down recitation in case the result should be a self-consciousness, or at least in an attempt to be super-accurate, words should be pronounced as written, e.g. a “b”, normally pronounced “w” or ”v” being rendered “b” for my benefit. With book in hand it was comparatively easy for me to follow the words at the time and afterwards on the machine. There was carelessness: a word was sometimes slipped or pronounced like another slightly resembling it or a line omitted altogether, but, on the whole pronunciation began to take shape as a fairly consistent system.
I attempt here to tabulate some of my impression, although conscious that these are from the standpoint of a professional phonetician, inadequate and amateurish. I took some eleven hours of recordings on my machine, and if I can get these produced in a more durable form, future students of the pronunciation better equipped than myself may be able to make phonetically scientific study of results. To preserve thus the surviving pronunciation of the fast disappearing priesthood so ancient a religion and tongue should surely be worth while."
