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West Semitic contains as one major subgroup Northwest Semitic, which includes Ugaritic, known from alphabetic cuneiform texts of c. 1400–1200 bce; the closely related Canaanite languages (including Moabite, Phoenician, and Ancient Hebrew); and Aramaic.
- Wider Background
- The Semitic Family
- Northwest Semitic
- East Semitic
- South Semitic
- The Divisions of Semitic
- Proto-Semitic
- Relation of Hebrew to Other Semitic Languages
- The Origin of Hebrew
- Bibliography
The Semitic family forms part of a wider grouping generally called Hamito-Semitic, but lately also known as Afroasiatic or Afrasian. This includes with certainty: (a) Ancient Egyptian and its descendant, Coptic; (b) the Cushitic languages, comprising a large number of mostly little-explored languages spoken in the northeast corner of Africa, the mo...
About 70 distinct forms of Semitic are known, ranging from important languages with large literatures to language forms used over a limited territory and either entirely unwritten or possessing but few preserved documents. It was usual, until a short time ago, to group all these into five great branches: Canaanite, Aramaic, Akkadian, Arabic, and Et...
This is the grouping to which Hebrew belongs. Starting from the north, there is Ugaritic, on the seacoast in the northwest corner of Syria, documented in the 14th–13th centuries b.c.e. by poetry, mainly epic, and by administrative lists and letters. While quite distinct from Hebrew as a language, it closely resembles Hebrew in its poetical style, a...
This is represented by the various branches of the Akkadian language and by Eblaitic. The former is divided into Old Akkadian (c. 2500–1950 b.c.e.), Babylonian (which also was used as a literary language in Assyria), and Assyrian. Akkadian was written in a script that expressed syllables, and hence also indicated the vowels, but on the other hand s...
The earliest attestation of South Semitic speech are a number of names borne by leaders of the Aribi tribes whom Assurbanipal and Sennacherib fought in the Syrian Desert and in northern Arabia. Their language seems to have belonged to a group of dialects now called Proto-Arabic or Ancient North Arabian. The chief one is Thamudic, attested along the...
The most widely accepted view is that the first division which Semitic underwent, probably before 3000 b.c.e., was between East Semitic (Akkadian) and all the rest. At a later date, but before 2000 b.c.e., West Semitic divided into a northern and a southern branch. Northwest Semitic then divided into Canaanite and Aramaic; Southwest Semitic into Ar...
sounds
Proto-Semitic probably had the sounds indicated in the following table. Recent studies have reconstructed ṭ, ṣ, and q as originally glottalic or ejective; s, ś, and sh as ts, ḻ, and s respectively; and ḍ as ḻˀ.
remarks on grammar
Proto-Semitic nouns had at least three cases: nominative ending in -u, genitive in -i, and an adverbial accusative case in -a. The feminine nouns ended mainly in -t, but there were other suffixes. There was no definite article. The plural of nouns seems to have been expressed in a number of different ways. There was also a dual. The most remarkable feature of the verb in Semitic and Hamitic is the possibility of varying the meaning of the verbal root by prefixes: sh, and perhaps also ʾ, to ex...
If the changes from the Proto-Semitic situation are taken as an index of the genetic relationship between languages it will be found that Hebrew shares important developments with different languages. Thus it shares with Phoenician, considered with Moabite to be closest to Hebrew, the development of original ā to ō. It appears that Phoenician, like...
The thoroughly "Hebraic" character of Tell el-Amarna Canaanite, as far as it can be discerned from the glosses (cf. para. 3a), demands an answer to the question how the Israelites, who came from outside the country, arrived at speaking a language so closely similar to that which had been spoken in Palestine before the conquest. Since the outstandin...
semitic and hamito-semitic: T.A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, 6 (1970), 237–527; A. Meillet and M. Cohen (eds.), Les langues du monde (21952), 82–181; I.M. Diakonoff, Semito-Hamitic Languages (1965); M. Cohen, Essai comparatif sur le… Chamito-Sémitique (1947); H. Fleisch, Introduction à l'étude des langues sémitiques (1947); G. Berg...
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Jul 2, 2010 · With a written history of nearly five thousand years, the Semitic languages comprise one of the world’s earliest and longest attested families. This volume provides an overview of this important language family, including both ancient and modern languages.
In the ancient world, Semitic languages were spoken from the western Mediterranean in the west to Iraq in the east, and from Ethiopia north to Anatolia. There are many Semitic languages still spoken today.
It uses transliteration and incorporates material from a large number of standard reference dictionaries. A few inscriptions in a separate Northwest Semitic language, Samalian, have been found in Turkey, some 220 km northeast of the city of Ugarit, alongside inscriptions in other Semitic languages.
- John Huehnergard, Na‘ama Pat-El
- 2019
The inscriptions that have been found there and in many other parts of the eastern Mediterranean date from about the tenth century BC until the first century AD; the forms of the language used in North Africa are known as Punic, and survived until the fifth century.
The languages of the world are grouped into perhaps 430 language families, based on their origin, as determined by comparing similarities among languages and deducing how they evolved from earlier ones.
