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The Afroasiatic languages, also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, 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, Semitic, and Omotic. The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. 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, Chad, 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.
Ugaritic is an extinct Northwest Semitic language, classified by some as a dialect of the Amorite language. It is known through the Ugaritic texts discovered by French archaeologists in 1929 at Ugarit, including several major literary texts, notably the Baal cycle. It has been used by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to clarify Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed ways in which the cultures of ancient Israel and Judah found parallels in the neighboring cultures.
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 Canaanite languages, sometimes referred to as Canaanite dialects, 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. The Canaanites are broadly defined to include the Hebrews, Amalekites, Ammonites, Amorites, Edomites, Ekronites, Hyksos, Phoenicians, Moabites and Suteans.
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Fritz Hommel was a German Orientalist.
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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.
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John Huehnergard is a Canadian-American specialist in Semitic languages, notable for his work on categorization, etymology, and historical linguistics.
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.
References
- ↑ The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, Chapter V, page 425
- ↑ Aaron D. Rubin (2008). "The subgrouping of the Semitic languages". Language and Linguistics Compass. Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2 (1): 61–84. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2007.00044.x.
P. Haupt (1878) first recognized that the qatala past tense found in West Semitic was an innovation, and that the Akkadian prefixed past tense must be archaic. It was F. Hommel, however, who recognized the implications of this for the subgrouping of Semitic; cf. Hommel(1883: 63, 442; 1892: 92–97; 1926: 75–82).
- ↑ Fritz Hommel, Die semitischen Volker und Sprachen als erster Versuch einer Encyclopadie der semitischen Sprach- und Alterthums-Wissenschaft, (1883)
- ↑ Hoftijzer, Jacob; Kooij, Gerrit Van der (January 1991). The Balaam Text from Deir ʻAlla Re-evaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Leiden, 21–24 August 1989. ISBN 9004093176.
- 1 2 3 4 Huehnergard, John; Pat-El, Na’ama (2013-10-08). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. p. 6. ISBN 978-1-136-11580-6.
- ↑ Weninger, Stefan (2011-12-23). The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook. Walter de Gruyter. p. 2. ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6.
- ↑ Huehnergard, John; Pat-El, Na’ama (2013-10-08). The Semitic Languages. Routledge. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-136-11580-6.
