SYRIAC LANGUAGE

is the Eastern dialect of Aramaic, which was prevalent in Me so pot am i a and the surrounding territory, and was used by many early Christian writers. The language is much more elastic than Hebrew, owing probably to the influence of the more flexible Gk. tongue, from which Syriac also borrows a large portion of its vocabulary; alphabet differs slightly from Hebrew; the accent shifts from last syllable to penultimate. S. is now dead, and remains chiefly in ecclesiastical writings.