| PLOWRIGHT WORLD Ancient History - Semitic Languages |
| The Semitic Language Family The Semitic language family has the longest recorded history of any linguistic group. The Akkadian language is first attested in cuneiform writing on clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from the mid-third millennium B.C., and Semitic languages continue to be spoken in the Middle East and in northeastern Africa today. 2 Modern Semitic languages include Arabic, spoken in a wide variety of dialects by nearly 200 million people as the official language of over a dozen nations, and in many other countries as well; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; Hebrew, one of the official languages of Israel; Tigrinya, the official language of Eritrea; Aramaic, the language of the Jewish Talmud and of Jesus, first attested in inscriptions written three thousand years ago and still spoken by several hundred thousand people in the Middle East and elsewhere. 3 Ancient Semitic languages include Akkadian, the language of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians; Phoenician and its descendant Punic, the language of Carthage, the ancient enemy of Rome; the classical form of Hebrew as recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures and later Jewish writings; the languages of the neighbors of the ancient Israelites, such as the Ammonites and Moabites; many early dialects of Aramaic; the classical Arabic of the Koran and other Muslim writings; Old Ethiopic texts of the Ethiopian Christian church; and South Arabian languages attested in inscriptions found in modern Yemen, such as Sabaean, the language of the ancient Sheba of the Bible. 4 In the same way that English is a member of the sub-family of Germanic languages within Indo-European, the Semitic languages constitute a sub-family of a larger linguistic stock, formerly called Hamito-Semitic but now more often called Afro-Asiatic. Other branches of Afro-Asiatic include ancient Egyptian (and its descendant, Coptic), the Berber languages of north Africa, the Cushitic languages of northern East Africa (such as Somali and Oromo), and the Chadic languages of western Africa (such as Hausa in Nigeria). 5 Various significant linguistic features allow us to classify the many Semitic languages in a way that shows the historical branching off of sub-groups. The ancient ancestor of all the Semitic languages, like Proto-Indo-European a prehistoric, unwritten language, is called Proto-Semitic or Common Semitic. The earliest branching, which includes most of the known Semitic languages, is called West Semitic; the part that remained after this branching, East Semitic, essentially includes only Akkadian. West Semitic comprises three branches: the modern South Arabian languages; the ancient and modern languages of Ethiopia; and Central Semitic. Central Semitic is further subdivided into the South Arabian inscriptional languages; classical, medieval, and modern forms of Arabic; and the Northwest Semitic languages, which include Hebrew and Aramaic. Source: |