copula. Although the language has some other varieties of the copula precedent to the verbal constituent, the common construction is with the infinitive and the basic copula cliticsed to it. In the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Urmia, the symmetrical order of the constituents is with the present perfect tense. This structure of the NENA dialects is to be compared with the present progressive in Kurdish and Turkish as well, where the enclitic follows the infinitive. Such construction is present in Kurdish, where it is frequently combined with the locative element "in, with", which is akin to the preposition bi- preceding the infinitive in Suret (as in "bi-ktawen" meaning 'I'm writing'). The similarities of the constituents and their alignment in the present progressive construction in Suret is clearly attributed to influence from the neighbouring languages, such as the use of the infinitive for this construction and the employment of the enclitic copula after the verbal base in all verbal constructions, which is due to the impinging of the Kurdish and Turkish speech. The morphology and the valency of the verb, and the arrangement of the grammatical roles should be noticed when it comes to the similarities with Kurdish. Unlike Old Persian, Modern Persian made no distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, where it unspecialised the absolutive type of inflection. Different handling of inflection with transitive and intransitive verbs is also nonexistent in the NENA dialects. In contrast with Persian though, it was the ergative type that was generalised in NENA.M. Chyet, Neo Aramaic and Kurdish. An Interdisciplinary Consideration of their Influence on Each Other, "Israel Oriental Studies" 1997, Vol. 15, pp. 219–252. Ergativity Although Aramaic has been a nominative-accusative language historically, split ergativity in Christian and Jewish Neo-Aramaic languages developed through interaction with ergative Iranian languages, such as Kurdish, which is spoken by the Muslim population of the region. Ergativity formed in the perfective aspect only (the imperfective aspect is nominative-accusative), whereas the subject, the original agent construction of the passive participle, was expressed as an oblique with dative case, and is presented by verb-agreement rather than case. The absolutive argument in transitive clauses is the syntactic object.A. Mengozzi, Neo-Aramaic and the So-called Decay of Ergativity in Kurdish, in: Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of Hamito-Semitic (Afroasiatic) Linguistics (Florence, 18–20 April 2005), Dipartamento di Linguistica Università di Firenze 2005, pp. 239–256. The dialects of Kurdish make a concordant distinction between transitive