Related Research Articles
The Afroasiatic languages are a language family of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo. Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.
Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 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.
Akkadian was an East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement in common use by Old Aramaic among Assyrians and Babylonians from the 8th century BC.
Ugaritic is an extinct Northwest Semitic language known through the Ugaritic texts discovered by French archaeologists in 1928 at Ugarit, including several major literary texts, notably the Baal cycle.
The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language. It was discovered in Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
Old South Arabian (also known as Ancient South Arabian (ASA), Epigraphic South Arabian, Ṣayhadic, or Yemenite) is a group of four closely related extinct languages (Sabaean/Sabaic, Qatabanic, Hadramitic, Minaic) spoken in the far southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest preserved records belonging to the group are dated to the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. They were written in the Ancient South Arabian script. Ancient South Arabian scripts are not considered varieties of Arabic. Instead, they represent an independent branch of Central Semitic.
Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed proto-language common ancestor to the Semitic language family. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic Urheimat: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa.
South Semitic is a putative branch of the Semitic languages, which form a branch of the larger Afro-Asiatic language family, found in Africa and Western Asia. The grouping is controversial and several alternate classifications supplanting South Semitic have been proposed in recent decades.
Mehri is the most spoken of the Modern South Arabian languages (MSALs), a subgroup of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic family. It is spoken by the Mehri tribes, who inhabit isolated areas of the eastern part of Yemen, western Oman, particularly the Al Mahrah Governorate, with a small number in Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni and Omani borders. Up to the 19th century, speakers lived as far north as the central part of Oman.
The West Semitic languages are a proposed major sub-grouping of Semitic languages. The term was first coined in 1883 by Fritz Hommel.
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by Sutean and the Canaanite languages.
The Arabic language family is divided into several categories which are: Old Arabic, the literary varieties, and the modern vernaculars.
Ancient North Arabian (ANA) is a collection of scripts and a language or family of languages under the North Arabian languages branch along with Old Arabic that were used in north and central Arabia and south Syria from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. The term "Ancient North Arabian" is defined negatively. It refers to all of the South Semitic scripts except Ancient South Arabian (ASA) regardless of their genetic relationships.
Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA is a British linguist and philologist of Semitic languages. He has held the post of Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge since 2012. Considered one of the world's leading experts on Aramaic, he has published grammars for numerous Aramaic dialects and he leads the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic DatabaseArchived 8 February 2018 at the Wayback Machine. His other research has included Biblical Hebrew and medieval Arabic documents.
Samalian was a Semitic language spoken and first attested in Samʼal.
Razihi, originally known to linguists as "Naẓīri", is a Central Semitic language spoken by at least 62,900 people in the vicinity of Mount Razih in the far northwestern corner of Yemen. Along with Faifi, it is possibly the only surviving descendant of the Old South Arabian languages.
Old Arabic is the name for any Arabic language or dialect continuum before Islam. Various forms of Old Arabic are attested in scripts like Safaitic, Hismaic, Nabatean, and even Greek.
Yāfiʿī Arabic is a group of closely related Arabic dialects spoken in the Yāfiʿ district of the Lahij governate in Yemen, in the historical territories of the sheikhdoms of Upper (al-ʿUlyā) and Lower (al-Suflā) Yāfiʿ. Unlike most neighboring dialects the varieties of Yāfiʿ belong to the so-called "k-dialect" grouping, meaning that the second person perfect suffixes retain the /-k/ found in the Sayhadic, Afrosemitic, and Modern South Arabian languages as opposed to the /-t/ found in most Arabic dialects. Before the 1990's the dialects of historical Upper and Lower Yāfiʿ had not been described and thus a number if their features that are seen as distinct from neighboring varieties had been overlooked by previous surveys.
Ahmad Al-Jallad is a Jordanian-American philologist, epigraphist, and a historian of language. Some of the areas he has contributed to include Quranic studies and the history of Arabic, including recent work he has done on pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions written in Safaitic and Paleo-Arabic. He is currently Professor in the Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University at the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. He is the winner of the 2017 Dutch Gratama Science Prize.
References
- ↑ Huehnergard 2017, p. 11.
Works cited
- Huehnergard, John (2017). Al-Jallad, Ahmad (ed.). Arabic in Its Semitic Context. Arabic in context: celebrating 400 years of Arabic at Leiden University. Studies in Semitic languages and linguistics. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-34303-0.
