- 1敘利亞。首都大馬士革（Damascus）。台灣新聞常見「敘利亞內戰」「敘國」；注意大陸譯名同樣是「敘利亞」，這個並無兩岸差異。
Syria is a country in the Middle East. Turkey is to its north, Iraq to its east, Jordan to its south, and Lebanon, Israel and the Mediterranean Sea to its west. Its capital is Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the world that people have lived in without stopping. Most people there speak Arabic. The land is old in a way that is hard to imagine: ancient trade roads crossed it, and cities like Aleppo and Palmyra have been famous for thousands of years. The population was about 22 million around 2014, but that number is now unreliable — since the war started in 2011, millions have left the country or moved inside it, so any figure you read depends on when it was counted and who was counting. That war is the reason the name appears in the news so often. It began in 2011 with protests, turned into a long and terrible civil war with many sides and several foreign countries involved, and it destroyed much of the country's cities. When your students hear 'Syria' in English news, this is almost always the context. In writing, remember the country is 'Syria' and the people and the adjective are 'Syrian'.
Syria 是中東的一個國家，首都是大馬士革。北邊是土耳其，東邊是伊拉克，南邊是約旦，西邊則是黎巴嫩、以色列和地中海。那裡的人大多說阿拉伯語，古老的商路曾經穿過這片土地。
2014 年左右的人口約有 2,200 萬，但現在這個數字已經不太可靠。2011 年戰爭開始後，有好幾百萬人離開國家或搬到國內別處，所以看到的數字要看是什麼時候統計、誰統計的。
新聞裡提到 Syria，幾乎都是因為那場戰爭。它一開始只是抗議，後來演變成很長、很慘烈的內戰，牽涉很多派系和幾個外國。寫作上，國家是 Syria，人或形容詞則是「Syrian」，要分清楚。
組成The name came into English through Latin Syria, from Ancient Greek Syria, which was a shortened form of Assyria, from Akkadian Ashshur — the name of the ancient city of Assur. Before the Greeks, the people living there, the Arameans, called their land Aram. After Assyria conquered the region, Greek writers used 'Syria' for this western land and kept 'Assyria' for Mesopotamia further east; the Greek historian Herodotus, in the 400s BCE, was among the first to keep the two names apart.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Syrianame/ˈsɪɹi.ə/
- 1
A country in West Asia in the Middle East. Official name: Syrian Arab Republic. Capital: Damascus.
- Representatives of the Syrian National Council and the National Coordination Body for Democratic Change in Syria signed an agreement late Friday in Cairo for a transition in a post-Assad era, the NCB said on its Facebook page.
- 2
historicalA historical region of West Asia, extending from modern-day southeast Turkey to the north, the Euphrates and Arabian Desert to the east, the Sinai Peninsula to the south, and the Mediterranean sea to the west.
- The belt which runs along the eastern frontier from north to south, traversing all Syria from the extreme limits of the Taurus to the Sinai desert, is not remarkable for any marked grandeur in its physical features, and is tolerably uniform in its characteristics, being made up to a considerable extent of a broad plateau of steppe land, rock and sand and debris being freely intermingled in its formation, and forming an immeasurable succession of high plains, whose effect is manifest in the course of the Euphrates, which has been driven to the eastward thereby, and removed from the immediate neighbourhood of the Mediterranean Sea.
- 3
historicalAn ancient Roman province between 64 BCE and 198 CE.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。