Canaanite languages

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Canaanite
Geographic
distribution
Levant, Carthage
Linguistic classification Afroasiatic
Subdivisions
Glottolog cana1267

The Canaanite languages, sometimes referred to as Canaanite dialects, [1] are one of three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Amorite. These closely related languages originate in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and were spoken by the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of an area encompassing what is today Israel, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, as well as some areas of southwestern Turkey (Anatolia), western and southern Iraq (Mesopotamia) and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia.

Contents

The Canaanites are broadly defined to include the Hebrews (including Israelites, Judeans and Samaritans), Amalekites, Ammonites, Amorites, Edomites, Ekronites, Hyksos, Phoenicians (including the Carthaginians), Moabites, Suteans and sometimes the Ugarites.

The Canaanite languages continued to be everyday spoken languages until at least the 2nd century AD. Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language today. It remained in continuous use by many Jews well into the Middle Ages and up to the present day as both a liturgical and literary language and was used for commerce between disparate diasporic Jewish communities. It has also remained a liturgical language among Samaritans. Hebrew as a secular language in daily use was revived by Jewish political and cultural activists, particularly through the revitalization and cultivation efforts of Zionists throughout Europe and in Palestine, as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the mid-20th century, Modern Hebrew had become the primary language of the Jews of Palestine and was later made the official language of the State of Israel.

Classification

Analogous to the Romance languages, the Canaanite languages operate on a spectrum of mutual intelligibility with one another, with significant overlap occurring in syntax, morphology, phonetics, and semantics. This family of languages also has the distinction of being the first historically attested group of languages to use an alphabet, derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, to record their writings, as opposed to the far earlier Cuneiform logographic/syllabic writing of the region, which originated in Mesopotamia and was used to record Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian and Hittite.

They are heavily attested in Canaanite inscriptions throughout the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the East Mediterranean, and after the founding of Carthage by Phoenician colonists, in coastal regions of North Africa and Iberian Peninsula also. Dialects have been labelled primarily with reference to Biblical geography: Hebrew (Israelian, Judean/Biblical, Samaritan), Phoenician/Punic, Amorite, Ammonite, Moabite, Sutean and Edomite; the dialects were all mutually intelligible, being no more differentiated than geographical varieties of Modern English. [2]

The Canaanite languages or dialects can be split into the following: [1] [3]

North Canaan

South Canaan

Other

Other possible Canaanite languages:

Comparison to Aramaic

Some distinctive typological features of Canaanite in relation to the still spoken Aramaic are:

Descendants

Modern Hebrew, revived in the modern era from an extinct dialect of the ancient Israelites preserved in literature, poetry, liturgy; also known as Classical Hebrew, the oldest form of the language attested in writing. The original pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew is accessible only through reconstruction. It may also include Samaritan Hebrew, a variety formerly spoken by the Samaritans. The main sources of Classical Hebrew are the Hebrew Bible and inscriptions such as the Gezer calendar and Khirbet Qeiyafa pottery shard. All of the other Canaanite languages seem to have become extinct by the early first millennium AD except Punic, which survived into late antiquity (or possibly even longer).

Slightly varying forms of Hebrew preserved from the first millennium BC until modern times include:

The Phoenician and Carthaginian expansion spread the Phoenician language and the Punic variety spoken in the antique-era colonies in Western Mediterranean for a time, but there too it died out, although it seems to have survived longer than in Phoenicia itself.

Sources

The primary modern reference book for the many extra-biblical Canaanite inscriptions, together with Aramaic inscriptions, is the German-language book Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften , from which inscriptions are often referenced as KAI n (for a number n). [6]

See also

Related Research Articles

Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hebrew language</span> Northwest Semitic language

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semitic languages</span> Branch of the Afroasiatic languages

The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, 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.

The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.

Phoenician is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon. Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age. The Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece during this period, where it became the source of all modern European scripts.

The Moabite language, also known as the Moabite dialect, is an extinct sub-language or dialect of the Canaanite languages, themselves a branch of Northwest Semitic languages, formerly spoken in the region described in the Bible as Moab in the early 1st millennium BC.

Ammonite is the extinct Canaanite language of the Ammonite people mentioned in the Bible, who used to live in modern-day Jordan, and after whom its capital Amman is named. Only fragments of their language survive—chiefly the 9th century BC Amman Citadel Inscription, the 7th–6th century BC Tel Siran bronze bottle, and a few ostraca. As far as can be determined from the small corpus, it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, with some possible Aramaic influence including the use of the verb ‘bd (עבד) instead of the more common Biblical Hebrew ‘śh (עשה) for 'make'. The only other notable difference with Biblical Hebrew is the sporadic retention of feminine singular -t Ammonite also appears to have possessed largely typical correspondences of diphthongs, with words such as ywmt both preserving /aw/ and showing a shift to /o/, and other words such as yn exhibiting a shift of /ay/ to ē much like Hebrew.

Edomite was a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language, very similar to Biblical Hebrew, Ekronite, Ammonite, Phoenician, Amorite and Sutean, spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE. It is extinct and known only from an extremely small corpus, attested in a scant number of impression seals, ostraca, and a single late 7th or early 6th century BCE letter, discovered in Horvat Uza.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biblical Hebrew</span> Archaic form of the Hebrew language

Biblical Hebrew, also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term "Hebrew" (ivrit) was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן or יְהוּדִית, but the name was used in Ancient Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.

The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in inscriptions of Canaanite languages from the region of Southern Canaan, also known as biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Hebrew Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script, as the Talmud stated that the Hebrew ancient script was still used by the Samaritans. The Talmud described it as the "Libona'a script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script.

Ancient Semitic religion encompasses the polytheistic religions of the Semitic peoples from the ancient Near East and Northeast Africa. Since the term Semitic itself represents a rough category when referring to cultures, as opposed to languages, the definitive bounds of the term "ancient Semitic religion" are only approximate, but exclude the religions of "non-Semitic" speakers of the region such as Egyptians, Elamites, Hittites, Hurrians, Mitanni, Urartians, Luwians, Minoans, Greeks, Phrygians, Lydians, Persians, Medes, Philistines and Parthians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philistine language</span> Ancient language spoken by the Philistines

The Philistine language is the extinct language of the Philistines. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survived as cultural loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine five cities, or the ’argáz receptacle, which occurs in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else, or the title padî.

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.

Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, known from the Aramaic inscriptions discovered since the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Israelian Hebrew</span> Proposed northern dialect of biblical Hebrew

Israelian Hebrew is a northern dialect of biblical Hebrew (BH) proposed as an explanation for various irregular linguistic features of the Masoretic Text (MT) of the Hebrew Bible. It competes with the alternative explanation that such features are Aramaisms, indicative either of late dates of composition, or of editorial emendations. Although IH is not a new proposal, it only started gaining ground as a challenge to older arguments to late dates for some biblical texts since about a decade before the turn of the 21st century: linguistic variation in the Hebrew Bible might be better explained by synchronic rather than diachronic linguistics, meaning various biblical texts could be significantly older than many 20th century scholars supposed.

Biblical Hebrew orthography refers to the various systems which have been used to write the Biblical Hebrew language. Biblical Hebrew has been written in a number of different writing systems over time, and in those systems its spelling and punctuation have also undergone changes.

Samalian was a Semitic language spoken and first attested in Samʼal.

The earliest known precursor to Hebrew, an inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, is the Khirbet Qeiyafa Inscription, if it can be considered Hebrew at that early a stage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples</span> Residents of the ancient Near East until the end of antiquity

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions</span> Inscriptions in the ancient Canaanite and Aramaic languages

The Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, also known as Northwest Semitic inscriptions, are the primary extra-Biblical source for understanding of the society and history of the ancient Phoenicians, Hebrews and Arameans. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts. The older inscriptions form a Canaanite–Aramaic dialect continuum, exemplified by writings which scholars have struggled to fit into either category, such as the Stele of Zakkur and the Deir Alla Inscription.

References

  1. 1 2 Rendsburg 1997, p. 65.
  2. Rendsburg 1997, p. 66.
  3. Waltke & O'Connor (1990 :8): "The extrabiblical linguistic material from the Iron Age is primarily epigraphic, that is, texts written on hard materials (pottery, stones, walls, etc.). The epigraphic texts from Israelite territory are written in Hebrew in a form of the language which may be called Inscriptional Hebrew; this 'dialect' is not strikingly different from the Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic text. Unfortunately, it is meagerly attested. Similarly limited are the epigraphic materials in the other South Canaanite dialects, Moabite and Ammonite; Edomite is so poorly attested that we are not sure that it is a South Canaanite dialect, though that seems likely. Of greater interest and bulk is the body of Central Canaanite inscriptions, those written in the Phoenician language of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and in the offshoot Punic and Neo-Punic tongues of the Phoenician colonies in North Africa. "An especially problematic body of material is the Deir Alla wall inscriptions referring to a prophet Balaam (c. 700 BC), these texts have both Canaanite and Aramaic features. W. R. Garr has recently proposed that all the Iron Age Canaanite dialects be regarded as forming a chain that actually includes the oldest forms of Aramaic as well."
  4. Sivan, D. (2001). A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language: Second impression with corrections. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East. Brill. pp. 2–3. ISBN   978-90-474-2721-6.
  5. Lipiński, Edward (2001). Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar. Peeters Publishers. p. 50. ISBN   978-90-429-0815-4.
  6. For example, the Mesha Stele is "KAI 181".

Bibliography

Further reading