12.4 The missionaries, and why the language got written down
12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar
From the 1830s western missions arrived: American Protestants in 1835, a Lazarist Catholic mission in 1839, and an Anglican one in 1886. They opened schools for children and adults across the plain, and provided medical care.
One aim was to get Assyrians reading the Bible in their own spoken language, and to do that they had to invent a written form of it. They brought printing presses. The American Protestants finished a vernacular New Testament in 1846 and the Old Testament in 1852, and printed a great deal else — including a magazine, Zāhīri d-Bāhrā ("Rays of Light"), from 1849. Assyrian speakers did much of the translating and wrote many of the original works.
They chose the Urmi dialect as the basis, which is why this guide exists. Urmi was the region's centre of commerce and education, so its speech was the most widely understood — and the standard built on it became literary Assyrian, read far beyond Urmi. After the First World War, writers in Iraq adopted a written language full of literary Urmi features that were not in their own dialects at all.
And this is where the spelling problem starts. They wrote it in Syriac script deliberately, because a community already using that script in its liturgy would accept it — but Classical Syriac orthography came with the script, so the written form often spells the classical word rather than the one people said. The Anglicans pushed it further that way, partly for prestige and partly because a classicizing spelling papered over regional differences — and the Americans agreed, going back for their 1893 Bible to replace Azeri and Persian loanwords with Classical Syriac ones so Assyrians outside Urmi could use it.
So when the written word and your relatives disagree, this is usually why. It is also why this guide spells things plainly, as they are said.
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