Joseph (Yawsep) Hūzāyā (fl. c. 530) was a

Nestorian Nestorianism is a term used in Christian theology and Church history to refer to several mutually related but doctrinarily distinct sets of teachings. The first meaning of the term is related to the original teachings of Christian theologian ...

teacher and author. His name indicates that he hailed from Khuzestan. Joseph was a disciple of

Narsai Narsai (sometimes spelt ''Narsay'', ''Narseh'' or ''Narses''; syc, ܢܪܣܝ, ''Narsai'', name derived from Pahlavi ''Narsēh'' from Avestan ''Nairyō.saȵhō'', meaning 'potent utterance', the name of a yazata; ) was one of the foremost of Assy ...

. He was the ''maqryānā'' (

reader A reader is a person who reads. It may also refer to: Computing and technology * Adobe Reader (now Adobe Acrobat), a PDF reader * Bible Reader for Palm, a discontinued PDA application * A card reader, for extracting data from various forms of ...

) of the

School of Nisibis The School of Nisibis ( syr, ܐܣܟܘܠܐ ܕܢܨܝܒܝܢ, for a time absorbed into the School of Edessa) was an educational establishment in Nisibis (now Nusaybin, Turkey). It was an important spiritual centre of the early Church of the East, and ...

at the end of the 5th and in the first half of the 6th century. His position involved the teaching of reading and interpretation. Later accounts make him the second director of the school, but this is an error. According to a note on the last page (folio 312v) of the only surviving manuscript of the Nestorian '' Mašlmonutho'' (

British Library, Add. 12138 British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...

), Joseph invented the nine accents or points of

Syriac Syriac may refer to: *Syriac language, an ancient dialect of Middle Aramaic *Sureth, one of the modern dialects of Syriac spoken in the Nineveh Plains region * Syriac alphabet ** Syriac (Unicode block) ** Syriac Supplement * Neo-Aramaic languages a ...

ekphonetic notation.See ''Grove''. These punctuation marks indicate tone and rhythm for recitation. According to the Jacobite historian

Bar Hebraeus Gregory Bar Hebraeus ( syc, ܓܪܝܓܘܪܝܘܣ ܒܪ ܥܒܪܝܐ, b. 1226 - d. 30 July 1286), known by his Syriac ancestral surname as Bar Ebraya or Bar Ebroyo, and also by a Latinized name Abulpharagius, was an Aramean Maphrian (regional primat ...

, Joseph merely altered a preexisting system from Edessa into the one that prevailed in the Nestorian churches. The truth may lie somewhere between these interpretations. Joseph's system was in widespread use by 600. Bar Hebraeus also records that Joseph wrote a work on

homograph A homograph (from the el, ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also ...

s, which may have been the first in the history of the Syriac language. Since the Syriac alphabet is purely consonantal, homographs are words with the same consonants but different vowels and different meanings. According to the Nestorian manuscripts and the work of the Nestorian literary historian ʿAbdishoʿ bar Brikha, the Syriac translation of

Dionysius Thrax Dionysius Thrax ( grc-gre, Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the G ...

's '' Art of Grammar'' was the work of Joseph. The Jacobite manuscript tradition, however, leaves the translation anonymous. This translation may better be called an adaptation. Joseph omits those part of the ''Art'' that are specific only to

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

(such as those on orthography and phonology), while adapting others (e.g., diathesis) with Syriac examples.

Notes

Bibliography

* * * * * * * * * 6th-century scholars Syriac writers Church of the East writers Christians in the Sasanian Empire People from Khuzestan Province {{Sasanian-bio-stub