modern dialects. New phonetic inventory. Modern dialects have borrowed sounds from the dominant surrounding languages. The most frequent borrowings are (as the first consonant in "azure"), (as in "jam") and (as in "church"). The Syriac alphabet has been adapted for writing these new sounds. Grammar As with other Semitic languages, Aramaic morphology (the way words are formed) is based on the consonantal root. The root generally consists of two or three consonants and has a basic meaning, for example, כת״ב k-t-b has the meaning of 'writing'. This is then modified by the addition of vowels and other consonants to create different nuances of the basic meaning: כתבה kṯāḇâ, handwriting, inscription, script, book. כתבי kṯāḇê, books, the Scriptures. כתובה kāṯûḇâ, secretary, scribe. כתבת kiṯḇeṯ, I wrote. אכתב eḵtûḇ, I shall write. Nouns and adjectives Aramaic nouns and adjectives are inflected to show gender, number and state. Aramaic has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. The feminine absolute singular is often marked by the ending ה- -â. Nouns can be either singular or plural, but an additional "dual" number exists for nouns that usually come in pairs. The dual number gradually disappeared from Aramaic over time and has little influence in Middle and Modern Aramaic. Aramaic nouns and adjectives can exist in one of three states. To a certain extent, these states correspond to the role of articles and cases in the Indo-European languages: The absolute state is the basic form of a noun. In early forms of Aramaic, the absolute state expresses indefiniteness, comparable to the English indefinite article a(n) (for example, כתבה kṯāḇâ, "a handwriting"), and can be used in most syntactic roles. However, by the Middle Aramaic period, its use for nouns (but not adjectives) had been widely replaced by the emphatic state. The construct state is a form of the noun used to make possessive constructions (for example, כתבת מלכתא kṯāḇat' malkṯâ, "the handwriting of the queen"). In the masculine singular, the form of the construct is often the same as the absolute, but it may undergo vowel reduction in longer words. The feminine construct and masculine construct plural are marked by suffixes. Unlike a genitive case, which marks the possessor, the construct state is marked on the possessed. This is mainly due to Aramaic word order: possessed[const.] possessor[abs./emph.] are treated as a speech unit, with the first unit (possessed) employing the construct state to link it to