Editing Aramaic (section)

===Historical sound changes===
Six broad features of sound change can be seen as dialect differentials:
* '''Vowel change''' occurs almost too frequently to document fully, but is a major distinctive feature of different dialects.
* '''Plosive/fricative pair reduction'''.  Originally, Aramaic, like [[Tiberian vocalization|Tiberian Hebrew]], had fricatives as conditioned [[allophone]]s for each plosive. In the wake of vowel changes, the distinction eventually became phonemic; still later, it was often lost in certain dialects. For example, [[Turoyo language|Turoyo]] has mostly lost {{IPA|/p/}}, using {{IPA|/f/}} instead, like Arabic; other dialects (for instance, standard [[Assyrian Neo-Aramaic]]) have lost {{IPA|/θ/}} and {{IPA|/ð/}} and replaced them with {{IPA|/t/}} and {{IPA|/d/}}, as with Modern Hebrew. In most dialects of Modern Syriac, {{IPA|/f/}} and {{IPA|/v/}} are realized as {{IPA|[w]}} after a vowel.
* '''Loss of emphatics'''. Some dialects have replaced emphatic consonants with non-emphatic counterparts, while those spoken in the [[Caucasus]] often have [[Ejective consonant|glottalized]] rather than [[pharyngealization|pharyngealized]] emphatics.
* '''Guttural assimilation''' is the main distinctive feature of Samaritan pronunciation, also found in [[Samaritan Hebrew]]: all the gutturals are reduced to a simple glottal stop. Some Modern Aramaic dialects do not pronounce ''h'' in all words (the third person masculine pronoun ''hu'' becomes ''ow'').
* Proto-Semitic */θ/ */ð/ are reflected in Aramaic as */t/, */d/, whereas they became sibilants in Hebrew (the number three is שלוש ''šālôš'' in Hebrew but תלת ''tlāṯ'' in Aramaic, the word gold is זהב zahav<ref>{{Cite web|title=Strong's Hebrew: 2091. זָהָב (zahab) – gold|url=https://biblehub.com/hebrew/2091.htm|access-date=2020-07-31|website=biblehub.com}}</ref> in Hebrew but דהב dehav<ref>{{Cite web|title=Strong's Hebrew: 1722. דְּהַב (dehab) – gold|url=https://biblehub.com/hebrew/1722.htm|access-date=2020-07-31|website=biblehub.com}}</ref> in Aramaic). Dental/sibilant shifts are still happening in the modern dialects.
* '''New phonetic inventory'''. Modern dialects have borrowed sounds from the dominant surrounding languages. The most frequent borrowings are {{IPA|[ʒ]}} (as the first consonant in "azure"), {{IPA|[d͡ʒ]}} (as in "jam"), and {{IPA|[t͡ʃ]}} (as in "church"). The [[Syriac alphabet]] has been adapted for writing these new sounds.