Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic,
Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, Modern South Arabian languages and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 460 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Arabic is by far the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages with million native speakers of all varieties, and it is the most spoken native language in Africa and West Asia. Other Semitic languages include Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Tigre, and Maltese. Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, and Maltese are considered national languages with an official status.
Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts appearing from in Mesopotamia and the northeastern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian and Elamite, both language isolates, and Egyptian, a sister branch within the Afroasiatic family, related to the Semitic languages but not part of them. Amorite appeared in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant, followed by the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages, the still spoken Aramaic, and Ugaritic during the 2nd millennium BC.
Most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjadsa type of alphabetic script that omits some or all of the vowels, which is feasible for these languages because the consonants are the primary carriers of meaning in the Semitic languages. These include the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and ancient South Arabian alphabets. The Geʽez script, used for writing the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, is technically an abugida a modified abjad in which vowels are notated using diacritic marks added to the consonants at all times, in contrast with other Semitic languages which indicate vowels based on need or for introductory purposes. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union.
The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. That is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants. Words are composed from roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants, although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning "write" has the form k-t-b. From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding consonants, e.g. كِتاب kit'āb "book", كُتُب ku'tub "books", كاتِب kāt'ib "writer", كُتّاب ku'ttāb "writers", كَتَب kat'aba "he wrote", يكتُب yaktu'bu "he writes", etc or the Hebrew equivalent root K-T-B כתב forming words like כַתָב ka'tav "he wrote", יִכתוב yichto'v "he will write", כותֵב kot'ev "he writes" or "writer", מִכתָב michtav "letter", הִכתִיב hichti'v "he dictated", etc.. The Hebrew Kaf alternatively becomes Khaf depending on the letter preceding it.
Name and identification
The similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages has been accepted by all scholars since medieval times. The languages were familiar to Western European scholars due to historical contact with neighbouring Near Eastern countries and through Biblical studies, and a comparative analysis of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic was published in Latin in 1538 by Guillaume Postel. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethio-Semitic languages. However, neither scholar named this grouping as "Semitic".The term "Semitic" was created by members of the Göttingen school of history, initially by August Ludwig von Schlözer, to designate the languages closely related to Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew. The choice of name was derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the genealogical accounts of the biblical Book of Genesis, or more precisely from the Koine Greek rendering of the name,. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn is credited with popularising the term, particularly via a 1795 article "Semitische Sprachen" in which he justified the terminology against criticism that Hebrew and Canaanite were the same language despite Canaan being "Hamitic" in the Table of Nations:
Previously these languages had been commonly known as the "" in European literature. In the 19th century, "Semitic" became the conventional name; however, an alternative name, "", was later introduced by James Cowles Prichard and used by some writers.
History
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
Semitic languages were spoken and written across much of the Middle East and Asia Minor during the Bronze Age and Iron Age, the earliest attested being the East Semitic Akkadian of Mesopotamia from the third millennium BC.The origin of Semitic-speaking peoples is still under discussion. Several locations were proposed as possible sites of a prehistoric origin of Semitic-speaking peoples: Mesopotamia, the Levant, Ethiopia, the Eastern Mediterranean region, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. According to a 2009 study, the Semitic languages originated in the Levant, and were introduced to the Horn of Africa c. 800 BC from the southern Arabian Peninsula. Others assign the arrival of Semitic speakers in the Horn of Africa to a much earlier date. According to another hypothesis, Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa; desertification led to emigration in the fourth millennium BC to both what is now Ethiopia and northeast out of Africa into West Asia.
The various extremely closely related and mutually intelligible Canaanite languages, a branch of the Northwest Semitic languages included Edomite, Hebrew, Ammonite, Moabite, Phoenician, Samaritan Hebrew, and Ekronite. They were spoken in what is today Israel and the Palestinian territories, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the northern Sinai Peninsula, some northern and eastern parts of the Arabian Peninsula, southwest fringes of Turkey, and in the case of Phoenician, coastal regions of Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, and parts of Morocco, Spain, and possibly in Malta and other Mediterranean islands. Ugaritic, a Northwest Semitic language closely related to but distinct from the Canaanite group was spoken in the kingdom of Ugarit in north western Syria.
File:Tablet_XI_or_the_Flood_Tablet_of_the_Epic_of_Gilgamesh,_currently_housed_in_the_British_Museum_in_London.jpg|thumb|Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature, written in Akkadian.
A hybrid Canaano-Akkadian language also emerged in Canaan during the 14th century BC, incorporating elements of the Mesopotamian East Semitic Akkadian language of Assyria and Babylonia with the West Semitic Canaanite languages.
Aramaic, a still living ancient Northwest Semitic language, first attested in the 12th century BC in the northern Levant, gradually replaced the East Semitic and Canaanite languages across much of the Near East, particularly after being adopted as the lingua franca of the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire by Tiglath-Pileser III during the 8th century BC, and being retained by the succeeding Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Empires.
The Chaldean language was a Northwest Semitic language, possibly closely related to Aramaic, but no examples of the language remain, as after settling in south eastern Mesopotamia from the Levant during the 9th century BC, the Chaldeans appear to have rapidly adopted the Akkadian and Aramaic languages of the indigenous Mesopotamians.
Old South Arabian languages were spoken in the kingdoms of Dilmun, Sheba, Ubar, Socotra, and Magan, which in modern terms encompassed part of the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and Yemen. South Semitic languages are thought to have spread to the Horn of Africa circa 8th century BC where the Geʽez language emerged.
First century to twentieth century CE
, a 200 CE Eastern Middle Aramaic dialect, used as a liturgical language in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Kerala, India, rose to importance as a literary language of early Christianity in the third to fifth centuries and continued into the early Islamic era.The Arabic language, although originating in the Arabian Peninsula, first emerged in written form in the 1st to 4th centuries CE in the southern regions of The Levant. With the advent of the early Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, Classical Arabic eventually replaced many of the indigenous Semitic languages and cultures of the Near East. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The previously dominant Aramaic dialects maintained by the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians gradually began to be sidelined, however descendant dialects of Eastern Aramaic survive to this day among the Assyrians and Mandaeans of northern and southern Iraq, northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey, with up to a million fluent speakers. Syriac is a recognized language in Iraq, furthermore, Mesopotamian Arabic is one of the most Syriac influenced dialects of Arabic, due to Syriac, the dialect of Edessa specifically, having originated in Mesopotamia. Meanwhile Western Aramaic is now only spoken by a few thousand Christian and Muslim Arameans in western Syria. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa, where it gradually replaced Egyptian Coptic and many Berber languages, and for a time to the Iberian Peninsula and Malta.
File:AndalusQuran.JPG|thumb|right|upright=0.9|Page from a 12th-century Quran in Arabic
With the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the world's main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many of the native populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the main language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt. Most of the Maghreb followed, specifically in the wake of the Banu Hilal's incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan; soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. A number of Modern South Arabian languages distinct from Arabic still survive, such as Soqotri, Mehri and Shehri which are mainly spoken in Socotra, Yemen, and Oman.
Meanwhile, the Semitic languages that had arrived from southern Arabia in the 8th century BC were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic and Tigrinya. With the expansion of Ethiopia under the Solomonic dynasty, Amharic, previously a minor local language, spread throughout much of the country, replacing both Semitic and non-Semitic languages, and replacing Geʽez as the principal literary language ; this spread continues to this day, with Qimant set to disappear in another generation.