The New Testament contains Syriac words transliterated in Greek, e.g. Abba, Ephphatha, Mammon, Raca, Talitha cumi; conversely, Syriac contains many words transliterated from Greek, and they occur frequently in St. Isaac’s homilies. When he uses Tartarus on p. 555, this is not an insertion by the Greek translators – the homily is found only in Syriac – but a Syriac transliteration of the Greek word.

In the entries at left from Payne Smith’s Compendious Syriac Grammar, the transliterated Greek word is given before the English translations.

It is not surprising to find technical terms, such as theoria, kontakion, and cenobium (at top), transliterated in Syriac, since we have done the same with them in English.

A deeper degree of integration of Greek into Syriac is shown with hule and kindynos (with an adjective and another variant noun), which are words for which Syriac has its own equivalents, and the incorporation of the Greek peisai into a functioning Syriac verb with the complement of verbal nouns and other forms.

But what is remarkable is that even small particles and conjunctions, such as de, gar, mallon, mallon-de, and the men-de opposition, are frequently used in Syriac like native terms and with more or less the same idiomatic force that they have in Greek.

For Payne Smith’s dictionary, see the bottom of the downloads page.