Borrowed adjectival inflection in the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects

Abstract Many North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects have an inflectional paradigm (MSG -a, FSG -e, CPL -e) restricted to a particular set of adjectives. These are usually loans belonging to the semantic fields of bodily characteristics and colours. While most of the words taking the inflection across NENA are borrowed from Kurdish, there is strong evidence that the non-inherited inflection (FSG -e) is borrowed from Arabic. While the inflection is not, in Arabic, found on adjectives of the class denoting these semantic fields, a motivation for adopting it could be that it enables a distinction between the MSG and FSG forms that might otherwise be lost. The inflection could have originated in dialects in closer contact with Arabic, before spreading to other dialects and being applied to loans of other origins. A possible motivation as to why a loan inflection -e was used for FSG may be the preservation of the syllable structure of loans.