It will be seen by what has been said that while the Urmi dialect is well known, the others have not been brought to light. The Gospels have indeed been printed by the American' Presbyterian Mission at Urmi in the Alqosh dialect, that of the plain of Mosul, but a very limited number of copies was issued, and it is now quite unobtainable indeed it may be doubted if any were ever seen in Europe. Dr Socin also, in his N euaramdischen Dialekte eon Urmi bis Mosul, has given us a few specimens (chiefly in Roman character) of the J ilu, Salémas, Alqosh, and Zakhu' dialects, besides several of that of Urmi. But no grammar has been written of these other dialects; and those of the great Ashiret, or semi-independent tribes of Kurdistan, and several others, have been entirely untouched. The present writer has therefore set himself during a five years' sojou among the Eastern Syrians, when engaged on the Archbishop of Canterbury's mission to them, to collect the materials for the present grammar'; The number of variations both in the vocabulary and in the grammatical forms used is extraordinarily great, and almost every village has its own way of speaking. It will be found that in this book a large number of variant forms have been added even in the Urmi dialect; but it is perhaps necessary to remind European readers that this is the speech of only a small proportion of the people. It has been chosen by the different Miss1ons as their basis for writing the vernacular, but this' choice has given it an exaggerated importance. It is therefore the object of this work to compare the other dialects, that is, those of nine-tenths of the Eastern Syrian people, with that of Urmi, which is already known. It is clear that a comparison of dialects will throw much light on etymology, and that one dialect will often supply a missing link which will remove a difficulty in the speech of another.

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