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A Corpus-Based Swadesh Word List for Literary Christian Urmi (New Alphabet Texts)
The aim of this paper is to present a basic word list for Christian Urmi Neo-Aramaic provided with etymologies and a discussion of problematic positions in the list. This study, which uses a variant of Swadesh list of 110 basic words, is the first research outcome after creating an electronic corpus of literary Christian Urmi based on the texts published in Soviet Union in 1929 - 1938 (Novij Alfavit). With some exponents being uncertain (having two possible variants), the statistical results demonstrate that from 85,5 % to 87,3 % of the exponents have reliable Aramaic etymology. The percentage of loanwords derived from Persian is 3,6 % (or 4,5 %), from Kurdish — 1,8 % (or 2,7 %), from Azeri Turkish — 0,9 %. Six exponents have no clear etymology (5,5 %).