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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.
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.
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 is an extinct 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.
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
A root is the core of a word that is irreducible into more meaningful elements. In morphology, a root is a morphologically simple unit which can be left bare or to which a prefix or a suffix can attach. The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family, which carries aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. However, sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word without its inflectional endings, but with its lexical endings in place. For example, chatters has the inflectional root or lemma chatter, but the lexical root chat. Inflectional roots are often called stems. A root, or a root morpheme, in the stricter sense, may be thought of as a mono-morphemic stem.
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.
Biblical Hebrew, also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the 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 ʿiḇrîṯ "Hebrew" was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַןśəp̄aṯ kənaʿan "language of Canaan" or יְהוּדִיתYəhûḏîṯ, "Judean", but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.
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.
Proto-Indo-European verbs reflect a complex system of morphology, more complicated than the substantive, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, using multiple grammatical moods and voices, and being conjugated according to person, number and tense. In addition to finite forms thus formed, non-finite forms such as participles are also extensively used.
Nonconcatenative morphology, also called discontinuous morphology and introflection, is a form of word formation and inflection in which the root is modified and which does not involve stringing morphemes together sequentially.
The roots of verbs and most nouns in the Semitic languages are characterized as a sequence of consonants or "radicals". Such abstract consonantal roots are used in the formation of actual words by adding the vowels and non-root consonants which go with a particular morphological category around the root consonants, in an appropriate way, generally following specific patterns. It is a peculiarity of Semitic linguistics that a large majority of these consonantal roots are triliterals.
Proto-Afroasiatic (PAA), also known as Proto-Hamito-Semitic, Proto-Semito-Hamitic, and Proto-Afrasian, is the reconstructed proto-language from which all modern Afroasiatic languages are descended. Though estimations vary widely, it is believed by scholars to have been spoken as a single language around 12,000 to 18,000 years ago, that is, between 16,000 and 10,000 BC. Although no consensus exists as to the location of the Afroasiatic homeland, the putative homeland of Proto-Afroasiatic speakers, the majority of scholars agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa.
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.
In linguistic morphology, a transfix is a discontinuous affix which is inserted into a word root, as in root-and-pattern systems of morphology, like those of many Semitic languages.
In Hebrew, verbs, which take the form of derived stems, are conjugated to reflect their tense and mood, as well as to agree with their subjects in gender, number, and person. Each verb has an inherent voice, though a verb in one voice typically has counterparts in other voices. This article deals mostly with Modern Hebrew, but to some extent, the information shown here applies to Biblical Hebrew as well.
Sesotho verbs are words in the language that signify the action or state of a substantive, and are brought into agreement with it using the subjectival concord. This definition excludes imperatives and infinitives, which are respectively interjectives and class 14 nouns.
Ugaritic is an extinct Northwest Semitic language. This article describes the grammar of the Ugaritic language. For more information regarding the Ugaritic language in general, see Ugaritic language.
In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, while the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. can be called declension.
The vav-consecutive or waw-consecutive is a grammatical construction in Biblical Hebrew. It involves prefixing a verb form with the letter waw in order to change its tense or aspect.
References
- ↑ McCarthy, John J. (1981-01-01). "A Prosodic Theory of Nonconcatenative Morphology". Linguistic Inquiry. 12 (3): 373–418. JSTOR 4178229.
- 1 2 Andrew Kingsbury Simpson (2009). "The Origin and Development of Nonconcatenative Morphology" (PDF). Retrieved 2 January 2014.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Bat-El, Outi. "Semitic Templates." The Blackwell Companion to Phonology. van Oostendorp, Marc, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Blackwell Reference Online.
- 1 2 Hoberman, Robert D. (1992). "Formal properties of the conjugations in modern Aramaic". Yearbook of Morphology 1991. Yearbook of Morphology. pp. 49–64. doi:10.1007/978-94-011-2516-1_5. ISBN 978-94-010-5110-1.
- ↑ Wehr, Hans (1979). A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: (Arab.-Engl.). Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 9783447020022.
- ↑ Ryding, Karin C. (2005). A reference grammar of modern standard Arabic. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 435. ISBN 978-0-521-77151-1.
- 1 2 3 4 R., Bennett, Patrick (1998). Comparative semitic linguistics : a manual. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-1575060217. OCLC 787653677.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Ussishkin, Adam P. (2000). The Emergence of Fixed Prosody (PDF) (Ph.D.). UC Santa Cruz.
- ↑ "המונח במילוני האקדמיה | מונחי האקדמיה". terms.hebrew-academy.org.il. Retrieved 2019-09-20.
- ↑ "'כִּתֵּב' on Morfix Dictionary". www.morfix.co.il. Retrieved 2017-04-13.
- ↑ Rubin, Aaron D. (2008-03-01). "The Paradigm Root in Hebrew". Journal of Semitic Studies. 53 (1): 29–41. doi:10.1093/jss/fgm043. ISSN 0022-4480.
- ↑ Wright, W. (1896). A grammar of the Arabic language: translated from the German of Caspari, and edited with numerous additions and corrections (PDF). Cambridge.
- ↑ M., Johnstone, Thomas (1991-01-01). Jibbali lexicon. Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0197136027. OCLC 612174986.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
