Conclusion
The ensemble of the features described above suggest that the grammar of Neo-Mandaic is remarkably conservative in comparison with that of Classical Mandaic, and that most of the features that distinguish the former from the latter (in particular, the restructuring of the nominal morphology and the verbal system) are the result of developments already attested in Classical and Postclassical Mandaic. Unlike the other Neo-Aramaic dialects (apart from Western Neo-Aramaic), Neo-Mandaic alone preserves the old Semitic suffix conjugation (the Neo-Mandaic perfective). Apart from the imperative forms, the prefix conjugation (the Classical Mandaic imperfect) has been replaced by the Neo-Mandaic imperfective, which was already anticipated in Classical Mandaic as well. Even the lexicon preserves the vocabulary of Classical Mandaic to a large degree; in a list of 207 of the most common terms in Neo-Mandaic collected by Häberl, over 85% were also attested in the classical language, the remaining 15% deriving primarily from Arabic and Persian. As the latest stage of a classical Aramaic dialect with a long and fairly continuous history of attestation, Neo-Mandaic is potentially of great value for elucidating the typology of the Aramaic dialects as well as the study of the Semitic languages in general.
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