Chairman

The presiding officer of an a embly, or public meeting; a president; as, the chairman of a Arabic, and some other minor dialects forming the southern branch. As the language of Babylonia at the time of the Jewish captivity, it was much used by that people after their return to their own land; but, indeed, as a written language it is now known to us only through the Jews, every trace of its literature having disappeared, though it is still spoken by some of the tribes inhabiting the mountains of Kurdistan. In the Hebrew canon, several chapters in Daniel and Ezra are written in this language. As a dialect, it is distinguished from the Syriac by its avoiding diphthongs and the vowel o, for which it generally has a ; by the use of dagesh forte and the general accentuation of the last syllable. The mode of writing is also much le defective than in Syriac, while in forms it is poorer than both the Hebrew and Syriac.