Souag on Arabic Colloquial Folk Etymologies

 Scholars routinely lament the lack of a really good, scholarly, dictionary of etymology for Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. Even more wanting are decent studies of etymology for the spoken colloquials; there are many dictionaries, but few that are very helpful for etymology of distinctive dialectal terms. Instead there are many websites that offer assumptions with no sourcing cited, and many of these are popular folk etymologies. Linguistics blogger Lameen Souag has a very interesting post at Jabal al-Lughat on this theme: "Arabic Substrate Etymologies as Urban Legends."

As he notes:

In Arabic as in English, social networks have a constantly flowing undercurrent of poorly sourced, manipulative stories being shared and reshared by people who vaguely think they sound right. Over the past, say, five years, I've noticed the emergence of a linguistically interesting new subgenre within this miasma of lies and half-truths: etymological tables purporting to prove the massive contribution of Berber, or Syriac, or (more rarely) Coptic, or perhaps some other pre-Arab substrate to the local Arabic dialect. These tables, in my experience, never cite an academic source, and rarely cite anything at all; closer examination generally reveals a farrago of correct etymologies and bad guesses. 

He links (included in the post, and all in Arabic) to social media posts for Berber, Coptic, and Syriac, and then examines some of the assertions, finding some of them valid, others unsubstantiated, or just plain wrong, concluding:

The optimistic take on this is that it shows that there's a real public demand in the Arabic-speaking world for information on etymology and on substrate influence. The pessimistic take is that people just want "information" confirming what they want to believe - in this case, that they're not really that Arab after all. (The converse case also exists, of course - recall Othmane Saadi - but I haven't seen as much of it circulating on social media, though that may just reflect my own bubble.) The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

But read the whole thing, especially the case studies. I should note that Dr. Souag himself started a blog on the historical origins of Algerian colloquial (الأصول التاريخية للدارجة الجزائرية), but there have been no posts since last year.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part II

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy. Part I of this post appeared a week ago.

Other events having intruded, it has been a week since Part I of my discussion of the question of why Aramaic is still a spoken language (in limited islands) while Coptic is merely a liturgical language among the largest body of Middle Eastern Christians. Part I is here. I hope to get more into the meat of the "why" in this second part, and then in a third part early next week, to address a question that is itself controversial: when, exactly, did Coptic cease to be spoken on a daily basis? Even this has answers ranging from the 14th century on down to the 17th or even later.

Let's begin approximately where we left off. "Coptic" properly refers to that late version of the Egyptian language written in a variant of the Greek alphabet with some letters added from Demotic Egyptian. It emerged in the wake of the Roman conquest of Egypt and, over the next couple of centuries, became transformed in content by Egypt's transformation under Hellenistic culture, Roman administration, and the Christian religion.

Coptic was the spoken language of everyone in Egypt, other than members of the Helleno-Roman administrative elite, but it is worth noting that it was not the language of administration; that was Greek. (Ironically, it took the Muslim conquest for Coptic to become, for a while, the language of administration.) That would seem to have little to do with its survival as a spoken language, but Aramaic was the language of administration in several places, including places (like Iran) that were not even Semitic-speaking. Still, I'm not sure what this might have to do with its survival: people don't generally speak the language of bureaucracy, and this was the golden age of Coptic as a language of theological and religious discourse.

The role of  Greek was reinforced at the official level by the split with Rome and Constantinople over the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, but the Christological controversy actually reinforced the role of Coptic since the official imperial church was rejected by the Egyptian populace and the Coptic (non-Chalcedonian) patriarchs, sometimes from underground, represented the popular will.

The Arab conquest of Egypt in 632 AD did not at first have much impact on Coptic; in fact it began to replace  Greek in administration, though that was short-lived. In 706 AD the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik made Arabic the language of administration. The administration had been dependent on Coptic clerks and secretaries, and to keep their jobs, many Coptic clerks began to master Arabic. In the following Abbasid period, a series of taxpayer revolts by Coptic populations, especially in the central Delta region of Bashmur, led to deportation of the rebels to Iraq and the settlement of Arab tribesmen in the Delta. Up to this time most Arab/Muslims were located in Fustat or other cities, with some tribal groups settling in Upper Egypt. Arabic settlement in the Delta was an important factor in Islamization of the Delta. Or so I argued in a doctoral dissertation a long time ago.

Another major turning point came in Fatimid times with the rule of the bizarre Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996-1020), sometimes characterized as mad for his persecution of Christians but also his exactions on Muslims. Prior to his mysterious disappearance he banned the use of Coptic in public places and even forbade private conversations in the language. Though Hakim's restrictions were limited to a short period, they certainly deterred the daily use of Coptic. Declining education among the clergy, a problem only truly addressed in the 19th century, certainly contributed to the problem.

An external indication of the decline of Coptic is the increasing use of Arabic, even in works with a religious content. Though saint's lives and religious works continued to appear in Coptic, key works seeking a general audience increasingly had to appear in Arabic. The single most important work on church history (and a critical source for the history of Egypt as a whole), the History of the Patriarchs, a compilation of works by many hands, but with the compiling attributed to Sawirus ibn al-Muqaffa (Severus of Ashmunain) in the 10th century, is entirely in Arabic. Even the biographies of early patriarchs which must have originally been written in Coptic, often survive only in Arabic. Another major work, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt by Abu al-Maqarim (wrongly attributed to "Abu Salih the Armenian" and so translated into English), appeared only in Arabic, in the 13th century. Bilingual dictionaries and wordlists became common, implying that increasing numbers of the faithful no longer spoke or even understood Coptic; already in the 12th century Pope Gabriel II had permitted the use of Arabic in the liturgy and for reading the gospels, because of the decline of Coptic. There are complaints (sometimes attributed to saints of an earlier age) about the decline of Coptic, but little doubt about its reality.

But this is the decline of Coptic as a literary language. The spoken tongue certainly died out more gradually, but when? There is considerable dispute. That it was still spoken in many places in the 14th century seems pretty well established though even that has had its doubters; claims are made for the 16th and 17th centuries and even some outliers for the 19th century. When it died may not be as important as that it died (though as we'll see there were 19th century attempts at revival), but the "when" question will be addressed in Part III  early next week.

To the historical sketch above I'd like to add some comparisons with Aramaic which I think help address the  "why did one survive and the other is fossilized as a litrugical language?" question:

The Geography: Most of the survivals of Aramaic are found — or were preserved in — mountainous areas; it survived in Tur Abdin in Turkey, in parts of the Kurdish mountains, in the Anti-Lebanon north of Damascus, etc. When it survived in non-mountainous regions it was either a recent introduction (Assyrian refugees from Turkey to Iraqi cities) or there was another geographically isolating factor, such as the Iraqi marshes for the Mandaeans.There are exceptions, but geography was certainly a factor. While there were remote Coptic isolated communities such as the Wadi Natrun or Saint Anthony's in the Eastern Desert, monastic communities obviously cannot reproduce themselves. The Coptic population was located in the Nile Valley and the Fayyum, areas where they were integrated with their Muslim neighbors and the main geographical fact (the River) was a uniting factor.

The lack of speakers beyond the core area, or the broader "installed base". Despite the antiquity of the language and the fact that all Egyptians once spoke it, Egyptian and Coptic were not spoken outside Egypt except by Egyptians abroad, or in a few cases perhaps in  the Nubian kingdoms. Aramaic, by contrast, though initially only the native tongue in the Levant, was the lingua franca of the Iranian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and later Seleucid and other successor states across southwest Asia (and liturgically still among India's Saint Thomas Christians), and had currency as far as India and even (in the case of the "Nestorian stele") China. This greater "installed base" provided more speakers across a broader geography, if not more speakers total.

The broader liturgical base. Coptic is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and has some use in the liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches of Egypt. Aramaic is at least partly the liturgical language of Syrian Orthodox, Antiochian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Melkite Catholic, Maronite, Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic, Malankara Syriac Catholic, Syro-Malabar Catholic,  Malankara Syrian Orthodox, Mar Thoma Syrian Church, and perhaps some I've never heard of; in the Judaic realm it is used in some normative Jewish liturgies, by some Kurdish Jews, as well as in the liturgies of Middle Eastern Karaite Jews and Samaritans (who spoke it until recent centuries); and beyond the Judeo-Christian faiths, it is both the liturgical and to some extent the spoken language of the Mandaeans. For most of these faiths it is preserved only in a limited way in the liturgy and is not a spoken language, and none of the Christian groups rivals the Copts in number, but it is a reminder of how widespread Aramaic was.

Part III will appear early next week.

Aramaic vs. Coptic: Language Survival vs. Fossilization, Part I

I'm on vacation. As I did last year, I've prepared a series of posts in advance on historical, cultural, and linguistic topics that are not time-constrained. If events warrant, I will add current posts, but at least one new post will appear daily in my absence. Enjoy.
 

This is Part One of a multi-part post which, I hope, will be of interest not just to those interested in Coptic and Aramaic, but to anyone interested in the survival or non-survival of minority languages throughout the Middle East.  It seeks to answer, or explore the elements of an answer, to this question: Aramaic today still has over half a million speakers; Coptic, though one of the most ancient languages on earth, and the Copts being the largest Christian group in the Middle East, has been reduced to a liturgical language for centuries. Why?

During my vacation postings about this time last year, I had several posts about Aramaic and Syriac through the centuries, spoken Western Aramaic today, and spoken Eastern Aramaic today. Aramaic, once the lingua franca of the whole Middle East, with inscriptions found from Egypt to China and India, still lingers in a few islands of speakers — some 15,000 speakers of Western Aramaic, in Syria,  and perhaps half a million speakers of Eastern Aramaic in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and a Western Diaspora. Most of these speakers are Christian, but there are Muslim speakers in Syria, and others are Jewish, Samaritan, or Mandaean. It is also of course the liturgical language of several Eastern Christian denominations, Karaite Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeanism.  See last year's posts, linked above, for more.

When Coptic Pope Shenouda III died earlier this year, a commenter raised an interesting question: why does Aramaic still survive as a spoken language, however scattered, while Coptic is reduced to only a liturgical language? The Copts are by far the largest Christian community in the Middle East, and their language, which is merely the last form of Egyptian, has an unbroken lineage of some 4500 or more years. Yet it has been several centuries since anyone learned Coptic at their mother's knee; it is today a religious and scholarly, not a native, spoken tongue. Why did Aramaic survive (if hanging by a thread) as a spoken tongue while Coptic did not?

It's a great question. I'm not sure there's a single answer, and it also requires us to delve into some controversial debates (like, exactly when did Coptic cease to be spoken natively? 14th century? 17th century? 19th century? All have their advocates). And since my doctoral dissertation was on the ‘Abbasid period in Egypt, the eighth and ninth centuries,  a key period of Arabization and Islamization, it brings up some memories of my own historical research. (And contrary to my younger colleagues' claims, I did not write my dissertation during the ‘Abbasid period.)

Though perhaps too many of my posts tend to focus on Egypt, I think this one actually has considerable interest beyond that. What has preserved other non-Arabic languages across the Arab world, not just Aramaic but bigger languages like Kurdish and the Amazigh/Berber tongues, Nubian, Armenian, Circassian, Mehri and the other surviving South Arabian languages, etc?

This map from the Gulf 2000 site (click here or on the map to see an enlargeable version) doesn't even include North Africa, but is a reminder that the Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Hebrew image most of us carry in our heads is a gross oversimplification.

If the Caucasus, Sudan, and North Africa were included, the map would be even more colorful.

But these islands of minority languages, ranging from big ones like Kurdish to tiny enclaves like the three towns north of Damascus that speak Western Aramaic, all have survived, for various reasons, in the sea of Arabic.

Yet Coptic, with 4000 years of history and a cohesive minority that outnumbers many of those whose languages endure, is only a liturgical tongue today? Why?

Bear in mind that I don't know the answer, but I intend to spend several posts considering the evidence.

A Short History of Egyptian

The earliest evidence of proto-writing in the Nile Valley is gradually being pushed back, but seems to date from around 3200 BC or even a couple of centuries earlier. By the time a language can be discerned through the proto-writing, that language is Egyptian. That language, after millennia of evolution, is still used in parts of the liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and may have been in daily use as a spoken language as recently as three centuries ago. That is nearly 5000 years of a living, if changing, language. The earliest Chinese writing dates from the second millennium BC, and Hebrew was reduced to a liturgical language for some 1500 or more years before its revival; neither can approach Egyptian in terms of probable, documented endurance as a language. (Though, like Chinese, that language changed enormously through the millennia.) The hieroglyphic writing system had a simplified form known as hieratic, and eventually evolved a more cursive system called demotic, and the language evolved through multiple changes.

Coptic is merely Egyptian in its latest form. It was written in the Greek alphabet, with an additional six (or in one dialect, seven) characters taken from demotic. Coptic was Egyptian transformed through Hellenization and Christianization, and thus was influenced by external elements, while remaining Egyptian. Though it had a lengthy history of its own which I'll discuss next time, it also was very much the tongue of Egypt, and was spoken for more than a millennium in its own right. 

Check in after the weekend to see where I'm going with this. Since not everyone will be interested, other posts will be interspersed.

Lebanese Singer on Keeping Syriac Alive

Last summer in a series of posts on Syriac/Aramaic I talked about the survivals of the language today, both in the Western variety of "Neo-Aramaic" spoken in a few Syrian villages, and the eastern variety which survives in various communities in Iraq, Turkey and neighboring countries. Though linguists call these Neo-Aramaic they generally call themselves Syriac.

The current issue of World Policy Journal deals with issues relating to language, and has an essay by Lebanese singer Ghada Shbeir, who sings in Syriac, on efforts to keep the language alive.

So add this to my occasional posts on minority languages and on the rich legacies of Aramaic/Syriac. When  Pope Shenouda died, one of my commenters asked in a comment why spoken Coptic had disappeared except as a liturgical language, while other minority languages survived (like these islands of Syriac, or the larger blocs of Berber/Amazigh, Kurdish, Nubian, etc.). The short answer is that's a very good question and one that I've wrestled with occasionally. The long answer will show up one of these days in a blog post.

Turkey's Outreach to Eastern Christians: FM Meets with Greek and Armenian Patriarchs; Woos Syriac Return

The photograph above shows Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu meeting with his All-Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew, symbolic spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox churches. It would seem to be a typical political courtesy call with one exception: nothing of the sort has previously occurred since the foundation of the Turkish Republic. In the past week or so, Davutoglu has met with not only the Ecumenical Patriarch but with a senior Archbishop at the Armenian Patriarchate (the Patriarch is ailing) and other Christian leaders. and Turkey has expressed hope that two Syriac patriarchates of Antioch, now based outside Turkey, will return.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate, traditionally known as the Phanar in Greek (Fener in modern Turkish), today has primarily symbolic importance among the world's Eastern Orthodox, but the Ecumenical Patriarch under the Turkish Republic has largely been ignored when not being harassed. It has essentially been treated as one more local religious body.Thus the meeting is extraordinary.. That a basically Islamist-oriented government is reaching out to the Christian Patriarchates where the secular Kemalist regimes never did is of course of interest, though Kemalism's hostility to religious establishments is at least in part involved, along with historic nationalism and ethnic resentments. Turkey has traditionally rejected the title of "Ecumenical" in the Patriarchate's title, and a similar usage in the case of the Syriac Orthodox Church.

I doubt if I need to elaborate on the awkward position of the Armenian Patriarchate in modern Turkey.

In presumably related news, Turkey is reaching out to churches once based in Turkey but now headquartered in the Arab world. Last year in my discussion of the "Lost Cities of Northern Syria," I noted how Antioch, once the city where Christians were "first called Christians" and one of the powerful sees of the early church, had so declined. There are still five Christian prelates with the title Patriarch of Antioch, but not one resides in the ancient city, now Antakya in Turkey. The Orthodox (Antiochean) Patriarch, the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch, and the Melkite Catholic Patriarch all reside in Damascus; the Syriac Catholic Patriarch in Beirut and the Maronite Catholic Patriarch in Bkerke, Lebanon. (There will be a quiz.) Now, the Turks are apparently making a bid to persuade the Syriac Catholics and Syriac Orthodox to return to Turkey; Davutoglu has met with their officials inside Turkey.. (The Syriac Catholics split from the Syriac Orthodox and joined Rome in the 1700s. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate was in Mardin, Turkey, until 1933, when it was forced to relocate to Homs, Syria. In 1959 it moved to Damascus.) While neither church seems eager to jump at the offer (the Syriac Orthodox have some very unpleasant memories of their treatment in the early part of the last century), they are also extremely nervous about their future in a post-Asad Syria, which may be part of Turkey's calculus.

Aramaic Part 2b: Spoken Aramaic Today: Eastern Neo-Aramaics

This is the last of my pre-cooked vacation posts from my undisclosed location. Back to normal bloggery on Monday whether I have caught Qadhafi by then or not. Assuming Washington is still there. They've already had an earthquake and broken the Washington Monument, and have a Category 3 Hurricane waiting for the drive home. Was it something I said?

Yesterday's post dealt with the Western variety of spoken Aramaic today. Today I'm going to deal swith the eastern. They are not equal; although far better known to Western feature-writers and tour organizers as "the last speakers of the language Jesus spoke," Western Aramaic speakers today number only some 15,000 (generally bilingual in Arabic); speakers of the eastern variety (also usually bilingual in Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Hebrew, or a Western language depending on where they live) may number over half a million in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Israel, Georgia, and a diaspora in Europe, the US, Australia and beyond. Most are Christian, but there are Jewish and Mandaean speakers of Aramaic as well.(I'm using Wikipedia a lot here, which seems to depend heavily on Ethnologue, though I have some limited personal experience of these communities.) Nor do I deal here with Aramaic as a liturgical language, which it is in multiple forms of Christianity from the Middle East to India, normative Judaism, Karaite Judaism, Samaritanism, and Mandaeanism.

The largest number by far speak what is classed as "Northeastern Neo-Aramaic," a group of closely related languages usually calling themselves Suret, Surayt, Suroyo, or Suryoyo. All of these mean "Syriac." They are sometimes divided into Turoyo, Assyrian, and Chaldean. These are not linguistic divisions but sectarian ones. Turoyo, taking its name from Tur Abdin in Turkey, is mostly spoken by members of the Syriac Orthodox ("Jacobite") Church; Assyrian is applied to the language of followers of the Assyrian Church of the East (the "Nestorian" Church in Western Christian terminology, once the Church of Asia from Iran to India to China), while "Chaldean" refers to those Christians who, in 1830, left the Assyrian Church of the East and accepted the primacy of Rome, becoming an "Eastern Rite" of the Catholic Church.

These Christian languages, really minor variations of the same language, are all spoken by a people driven from their traditional homelands in eastern Turkey and dispersed int Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and usually subsumed under the term "Assyrian." Their complex and tragic history is a topic for another day. "Assyrian" and "Chaldean," of course evoke two great ancient Mesopotamian Empires, and modern adherents try to claim continuity (as the Copts do for Ancient Egypt). Neither the Assyrian nor Chaldean ("Neo-Babylonian") Empire spoke Aramaic as their native language, but both used it as their administrative language, so the claimed identities, if a bit fanciful, are not pure fantasy.

There are still some remnants of Jewish Aramaic speakers in the Middle East (particularly among Kurdish Jews, many now in Israel, but also in small, disappearing islands around the region and up into the Caucasus). There is also the outlier case of Mandaic. Most Mandaeans speak Arabic or Farsi, swith the Classical Mandaic liturgy used in their rituals, but there is a relic community still speaking it, mostly around Ahvaz in Iranian Khuzistan. It is not mutually intelligible with other forms of Eastern Neo-Aramaic.

To end this lecture, an interview with a man in northern Iraq who's been teaching "Assyrian" for 38 years. No, I don't know what he's saying, but if you wish to hear the sound:

Aramaic Part 2a: Spoken Aramaic Today: Western Neo-Aramaic

 I'm still on vacation but will make no more jokes about "if something dramatic happens," since it already did. Here's one of my pre-prepared posts.

Yesterday's post on the long and geographically vast history of Aramaic and Syriac treated it as a fascinating historical artifact. It is nearly that, but not quite yet. Both Western and Eastern forms of Aramaic are still spoken. The latter is spoken by far more people. The former is better publicized. Let's deal with it first.

Modern Western Neo-Aramaic, as the linguists call it, is spoken today in only three villages north and west of Damascus: Ma‘alula, Bakh‘a, and Jubba‘din. Ma‘alula is the best known, a dramatically situated town perched high on the slopes of the Anti-Lebanon range, with two ancient Greek Catholic monasteries; it does (at least when Syria is not in revolution) a brisk tourist business since it's scenic, near Damascus, and promotes itself as "still speaking the language of Jesus." Western Neo-Aramaic descends from a version of Christian Syriac that was probably rather different from the language of Jesus, which was doubtless closer to the Aramaic in which the Jerusalem Talmud was written a bit later, though both the Gospels (when Peter is accused in Matthew 26:73 of being Galilean because "even your speech betrays you") and the Talmud note that Galilee had a very distinctive dialect.) But yes, it's closer to the language of Jesus than any other spoken language today, since the more widely spoken varieties of Eastern Neo-Aramaic are very different, At best, 15,000 speakers of the Western variety survive.

Western Neo-Aramaic, despite its limited survival in only three towns, has a distinction that, so far as I know, none of the various Eastern survivals do. Many of the speakers are Muslim. Bakh‘a and Jubba‘din are overwhelmingly or completely Muslim towns. All speakers of Eastern Neo-Aramaic are non-Muslim: Christians of the Assyrian Church of the East or the Chaldean Catholic Church (in Turkey, Iraq, and the Diaspora, Jews (especially Kurdish Jews, though a few other groups exist), or Mandaeans (mostly in Ahvaz, Iran today; Iraqi Mandaeans speak Arabic).

Even odder, the Muslims of the three Aramaic-speaking towns apparently Islamized without Arabizing. Like other peoples in the core Middle East who became Muslim without adopting Arabic, such as Kurds and Berbers, their mountain fastnesses helped isolate and preserve their language. But unlike Kurds and Berbers, they were near the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, Damascus. (Other religious minorities such as the Samaritans retained Aramaic speech longer than their neighbors and still use it liturgically.)

Oddest of all, the linguists say the least-Arabized of the three villages, retaining the most conservative Aramaic of the three, is Bakh‘a — which is entirely Muslim in religion.

Eastern forms of surviving spoken Aramaic are less well known because they do not have Ma‘lula's claim of "speaking the language of Jesus" (though they do in the broader sense); there may be half a million or so speakers of Assyrian, Chaldean, Mandaic and other forms. They differ a lot among themselves. They're tomorrow's post.

Turkish University Completes First Syriac Language Course

Artuklu University in the Turkish :Province of Mardin in the southeast has just awarded certificates in what's described as Turkey's first Syriac language course. As the Hurriyet story notes:

 "This is a historic step both for us and the academia,” the rector said.

“After the Ottoman Empire fell apart, some pro-monoculture administrations tried to lock the Arabic language in mosques, Syriac in churches and Kurdish into houses. Now a significant tradition is coming back to life,” Omay said. “Our university will keep supporting it. In September we will start working to start a Syriac-language undergraduate program.”

The university also offers courses on Kurdish studies, once banned in Turkey. (I suppose I should note, since a commenter probably will anyway, that the rector said nothing about Armenian. But I'll only note it. No way I'm going to get into that.)

This presumably refers to the Eastern forms of Syriac, spoken by Assyrian Christians in the Tur Abdin region of Turkey and, since the post-World War I era, mostly in Iraq and among the Assyrian diaspora abroad.

Since this is my second post on Syriac in two weeks, I guess I'm going to have to devote a longer post to the surviving instances of Syriac/Aramaic still spoken in the Middle East one of these days.

Syriac Question Mark: Poor Journalism on Scholarly Subjects 101

Here's an interesting story poorly reported by Reuters. A Cambridge University scholar thinks he has identified the "world's first question mark" in a Syriac punctuation mark known as the zagwa elaya,   a double dot that looks a bit like a colon. (The punctuation mark, not the large intestine.) First, go read the Reuters account. At least in the online version, there is no illustration (well, I'm getting an "Early photos of the Beatles emerge" showing a young Paul McCartney, but I don't think Sir Paul is a Syriac punctuation mark).  Why not SHOW US A PICTURE? Secondly, we find such interesting data as the following

Syriac is thought to have appeared in the Middle East from the 1st Century and boasts a large Christian literature. It declined as a spoken language with the arrival of Islam and Arabic and today is only used in churches.

Thought to have appeared? Syriac is just the late form of Aramaic, the dominant language of the Middle East for close to a millennium, though written in a distinctive alphabet (two really) and it hardly just "appeared". It was written in everything from cuneiform to square letter Hebrew to the various varieties of Syriac scripts, and even occasionally in Arabic.

Nor is it only used in churches today: its  Western form is spoken in four villages north of Damascus, and its Eastern form among the Assyrian communities of Iraq and Turkey. Syriac was once one of the world's great literary languages, and isn't quite dead yet. I have only the slightest smattering (alphabet, basic verb) but the Reuters reporter could have done better than this.

Now, go to the Cambridge University website on the same purported discovery. Here's a nuanced account quoting the academic making the claim with all the nuances intact, and with an illustration, which I reproduce above, and which seems to include the mark in question. (I make no judgment on his claims, which I'm not qualified to address, but at least the Cambridge site doesn't misstate facts.)

Really, what's so hard about that?