The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 6513–6520 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 6513 The Maaloula Aramaic Speech Corpus (MASC): From Printed Material to a Lemmatized and Time-Aligned Corpus Ghattas Eid, Esther Seyffarth, Ingo Plag Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany ghattas.eid@hhu.de, esther.seyffarth@hhu.de, ingo.plag@uni-duesseldorf.de Abstract This paper presents the first electronic speech corpus of Maaloula Aramaic, an endangered Western Neo-Aramaic variety spoken in Syria. This 64,845-word corpus is available in four formats: (1) transcriptions, (2) lemmatized transcriptions, (3) audio files and time- aligned phonetic transcriptions, and (4) an SQLite database. The transcription files are a digitized and corrected version of authentic transcriptions of tape-recorded narratives coming from a fieldwork trip conducted in the 1980s and published in the early 1990s (Arnold, 1991a, 1991b). They contain no annotation, except for some informative tagging (e.g. to mark loanwords and misspoken words). In the lemmatized version of the files, each word form is followed by its lemma in angled brackets. The time-aligned TextGrid annotations consist of four tiers: the sentence level (Tier 1), the word level (Tiers 2 and 3), and the segment level (Tier 4). These TextGrid files are downloadable together with their audio files (for the original source of the audio data see Arnold, 2003). The SQLite database enables users to access the data on the level of tokens, types, lemmas, sentences, narratives, or speakers. The corpus is now available to the scientific community at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6496714. Keywords: language documentation corpus, lemmatization, time alignment 1. Introduction Aramaic is a Semitic language that has been spoken in the Middle East for more than three millennia. It has survived, however, not as a single language but as a number of varieties collectively given the hypernym ‘Neo-Aramaic’. These Neo-Aramaic varieties fall into four groups: Western Neo-Aramaic, Central Neo-Aramaic, North-Eastern Neo- Aramaic (NENA), and Neo-Mandaic (Heinrichs, 1990, pp. x–xv; Khan & Noorlander, 2021, p. xvii). Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken in the three Syrian villages of Maaloula, Jubbaadin, and Bakhaa. In addition to the inhabitants of these villages, the native speakers who moved from these villages to bigger cities, such as Damascus and Beirut, still speak the language (Arnold, 2011, p. 685). Western Neo-Aramaic is now considered “definitely endangered” by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley, 2010). Similarly, Eberhard et al. (2021) report that the EGIDS level for Western Neo-Aramaic is 7 (Shifting).1 Level 7 is exactly between 6b (Threatened) and 8a (Moribund). Since each of these three villages has its own dialect, and since this paper focuses only on the dialect spoken in Maaloula, we will use the term ‘Maaloula Aramaic’ to refer specifically to the Western Neo-Aramaic dialect of Maaloula. Currently, neither a text corpus in electronic format nor a speech corpus with audio files and time-aligned transcriptions is available. This does not imply, however, that there is no well-documented written or audio material on Maaloula Aramaic. Transcriptions of authentic narratives coming from fieldwork trips have been published …

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