Semitism (linguistics)

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In paleolinguistics, a Semitism is a grammatical or syntactical behaviour in a language which reveals that the influence of a Semitic language is present. The most common example is the influence of Aramaic on some texts written in Jewish Koine Greek. [1]

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Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.

The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic, are a sub-group of the Semitic languages containing many varieties that originated among the Arameans in the ancient region of Syria. For over three thousand years, Aramaic varieties served as a language of public life and administration of ancient kingdoms and empires and also as a language of divine worship and religious study. Several varieties are still spoken in the 21st century: the Neo-Aramaic languages.

Matres lectionis are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing down of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are alephא‎, heה‎, wawו‎ and yodי‎, and in Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalifا‎, wāwو‎ and yāʾي‎. The 'yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.

<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 are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T</span> Letter of the Latin alphabet

T, or t, is the twentieth letter in the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is tee, plural tees. It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most commonly used letter in English-language texts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Semitic people</span> Obsolete term for an ethnic group in the Middle East

Semites, Semitic peoples or Semitic cultures is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lionel Groulx</span> Canadian historian

Lionel Groulx was a Canadian Roman Catholic priest, historian, and Quebec nationalist.

Semitism may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ugaritic alphabet</span> Cuneiform consonantal alphabet of 30 letters

The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.

The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. Most or nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic proto-alphabet. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their Egyptian surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew and later Aramaic, four closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Racial antisemitism</span> Prejudice and discrimination against Jews based on race or ethnicity

Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race that has inherent traits or characteristics that appear in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from the traits or characteristics of the rest of a society. The abhorrence may find expression in the form of discrimination, stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as a threat in some way to the values or safety of a society. Racial antisemitism can seem deeper-rooted than religious antisemitism, because for religious antisemites conversion of Jews remains an option and once converted the "Jew" is gone. In the context of racial antisemitism Jews cannot get rid of their Jewishness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biblical languages</span> Languages used in the original writings of the Bible

Biblical languages are any of the languages employed in the original writings of the Bible. Partially owing to the significance of the Bible in society, Biblical languages are studied more widely than many other dead languages. Furthermore, some debates exist as to which language is the original language of a particular passage, and about whether a term has been properly translated from an ancient language into modern editions of the Bible. Scholars generally recognize three languages as original biblical languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek.

Antisemitic incidents escalated worldwide in frequency and intensity during the Gaza War, and were widely considered to be a wave of reprisal attacks in response to the conflict.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Telesio Interlandi</span> Italian journalist and propagandist (1894—1965)

Telesio Interlandi was an Italian journalist and propagandist. He was one of the leading advocates of antisemitism in Fascist Italy.

Koine Greek grammar is a subclass of Ancient Greek grammar peculiar to the Koine Greek dialect. It includes many forms of Hellenistic era Greek, and authors such as Plutarch and Lucian, as well as many of the surviving inscriptions and papyri.

Jewish Koine Greek, or Jewish Hellenistic Greek, is the variety of Koine Greek or "common Attic" found in a number of Alexandrian dialect texts of Hellenistic Judaism, most notably in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and associated literature, as well as in Greek Jewish texts from Palestine. The term is largely equivalent with Greek of the Septuagint as a cultural and literary rather than a linguistic category. The minor syntax and vocabulary variations in the Koine Greek of Jewish authors are not as linguistically distinctive as the later language Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek, spoken by the Romaniote Jews in Greece.

Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a name used since the 1770s to refer to the language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta.

Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were people who lived throughout the ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Happy Merchant</span> Antisemitic caricature

The Happy Merchant is a common name for an image that depicts an antisemitic caricature of a Jewish man. The Happy Merchant is common on imageboards such as 4chan where it is frequently used in a hateful or disparaging context.

The criterion of contextual credibility, also variously called the criterion of Semitisms and Palestinian background or the criterion of Semitic language phenomena and Palestinian environment, is a tool used by Biblical scholars to help determine whether certain actions or sayings by Jesus in the New Testament are from the Historical Jesus. Simply put, if a tradition about Jesus does not fit the linguistic, cultural, historical and social environment of Jewish Aramaic-speaking 1st-century Palestine, it is probably not authentic. The linguistic and environmental criteria are treated separately by some scholars, but taken together by others.

References

  1. Jonathan T. Pennington Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew - Page 105 - 2007 "This nuanced difference between a “Semitic enhancement” and a “Semitism” enables us to reconsider whether an apparent linguistic anomaly in Greek (such as plural) is truly a "Semitism" and not merely an "enhancement".