http://www.nineveh.com/parpola_eng.pdf
.1 The Neo Assyrian Origin of Syriac and Modern Assyrian Sūryōyō/ Sūrāyā
The word Aššūrāyu is an adjective derived from the geographical and divine name
Aššur with the gentilic suffix -āyu. The name was originally pronounced [Aššūr], with a palato-alveolar fricative, but owing to a sound shift, its pronunciation was turned to [AӨӨūr] in the early second millennium BC. The common Aramaic word for Assyria, ĀӨūr, reflects
this pronunciation and in all probability dates back to the twelfth century BC, when the
Aramean tribes first came into contact with the Assyrians. Towards the end of the second
millennium, another sound shift took place in Assyrian, turning the pronunciation of the name
into [Assūr] (Parpola 1974; Fales 1986, 61-66). Since unstressed vowels were often dropped
in Neo-Assyrian at the beginning of words (Hameen-Anttila 2000, 37), this name form later
also had a shorter variant, Sūr, attested in alphabetic writings of personal names containing the
element Aššur in late seventh century BC Aramaic documents from Assyria .20 The word
Assūrāyu, "Assyrian", thus also had a variant Sūrāyu in late Assyrian
times.
This variant is hidden behind standard orthography in Assyrian cuneiform texts, but its
existence is confirmed by the classical Greek words for Assyrians and Assyria, which display
a corresponding variation between forms with initial A- (Assúrios/Assuría) and ones without it
(Súrios/Súros/Suría; see Table II). The Greeks, who were in frequent contact with Assyria in
the eighth and seventh centuries BC (Rollinger 2001), would not have borrowed the word
without the initial A-, had the Assyrians themselves not omitted it, since omission of initial
vowels is not a feature of classical Greek phonology. careful speech, since it instinctively sounds incorrect in view of the classical Syriac Sūryōyō (Yildiz 1999, 24; Frye 1997).
Since omission of initial vowels is not a feature of Aramaic
phonology, the lack of the initial A- in Sūrāyā/Sūr(y) ōyō cannot be due to internal Aramaic
development but must go back directly to Neo-Assyrian.
The phonology of Sūrāyā (Sūrōyō) thus implies that this term, which is crucial to the
identity of the present-day Aramaic-speaking peoples, entered the Aramaic language in the
seventh century BC, when the Arameans already were a fully integrated part of the Assyrian
nation. In contrast to the word ĀӨūr, which was borrowed into Aramaic when Assyria still
was an alien society, it cannot be regarded as a loanword but as an indigenous selfdesignation,
which the Aramaic-speaking Assyrians shared with their Akkadian-speaking fellow citizens.