Syriac rose to importance as a literary language of early Christianity in the 3rd to 5th centuries.
With the emergence of Islam, the ascent of Aramaic was dealt a fatal blow by the Arab conquests, which made another Semitic language — Arabic — the official language of an empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia. With the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, it rapidly became one of the world's main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer; however, as natives abandoned their tongues for Arabic and as Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the main language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen,[1] the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt. Most of the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilal's incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language even of many inhabitants of Spain. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt; soon after, the Beni Hassan brought Arabization to Mauritania. The spread of Arabic continues even today in Sudan and Chad, both by peaceful sociolinguistic processes, and by wars such as the Darfur conflict.
Meanwhile, Semitic languages were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic and Tigrinya. With the expansion of Ethiopia under the Solomonic dynasty, Amharic, previously a minor local language, spread throughout much of the country, replacing languages both Semitic (such as Gafat) and non-Semitic (such as Weyto), and replacing Ge'ez as the principal literary language (though Ge'ez remains the liturgical language for Christians in the region); this spread continues to this day, with Qemant set to disappear in another generation.
Present situation
Arabic is spoken natively by majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan; as the language of the Qur'an and as a lingua franca, it is widely studied in much of the Muslim world as well. Its spoken form is divided into a number of dialects, some not mutually comprehensible, united by a single written form. Maltese, genetically a descendant of Arabic, is the principal exception, having adopted a Latin orthography in accordance with its cultural situation.
Despite the ascendancy of Arabic in the Middle East, other Semitic languages are still to be found there. Hebrew, long extinct outside of Jewish liturgical purposes, was revived at the end of the 19th century by the Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, owing to the ideology of Zionism, and has become the main language of Israel, while remaining the liturgical language of Jews worldwide. Several small ethnic groups, especially the Assyrians, continue to speak Aramaic in the mountains of northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and Syria, while an older descendant of Aramaic, Syriac, is used liturgically by many Iraqi Christians. In Yemen and Oman, a few tribes continue to speak "Modern South Arabian" languages such as Soqotri, very different both from Arabic and from the languages of the Old South Arabian inscriptions.
Ethiopia and Eritrea contain a substantial number of Semitic languages, of which Amharic in Ethiopia, and Tigrigna in Ethiopia and Eritrea, are the most widely spoken. Both are official languages of their respective countries, while Ge'ez remains the liturgical language for Christians there. A number of Gurage languages are to be found in the mountainous center-south of Ethiopia, while Harari is restricted to the city of Harar; Tigre, spoken in the northern Eritrean lowlands, has over a million speakers.
Grammar
The Semitic languages share a number of grammatical features, although variation has naturally occurred - even within the same language as it evolved through time, such as Arabic from the 6th century AD to the present.
Word order
The reconstructed default word order in Proto-Semitic is Verb Subject Object (VSO), possessed — possessor (NG), and noun — adjective (NA). In Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, this is still the dominant order: ra'ā muħammadun farīdan. (Muhammad saw Farid.) However, VSO has given way in most modern Semitic languages to typologically more common orders (e.g. SVO); in many modern Arabic dialects, for example, the classical order VSO has given way to SVO, and the same happened in Hebrew (due to Europeanisation). Modern Ethiopian Semitic languages are SOV, possessor — possessed, and adjective — noun, probably due to Cushitic influence; however, the oldest attested Ethiopian Semitic language, Geez, was VSO, possessed — possessor, and noun — adjective[4].
Cases in nouns and adjectives
The proto-Semitic three-case system (nominative, accusative and genitive) with differing vowel endings (-u, -a -i), fully preserved in Qur'anic Arabic (see i`rab), Akkadian, and Ugaritic, has disappeared everywhere in the many colloquial forms of Semitic languages, although Modern Standard Arabic maintains such case endings (somewhat artificially) in literary and broadcasting contexts. An accusative ending -n is preserved in Ethiopian Semitic. Additionally, Semitic nouns and adjectives had a category of state, the indefinite state being expressed by nunation.
Number in nouns
Semitic languages originally had three grammatical numbers: singular, dual, and plural. The dual continues to be used in contemporary dialects of Arabic, as in the name for the nation of Bahrain (baħr "sea" + -ayn "two"), and sporadically in Hebrew (šana means "one year", šnatayim means "two years", and šanim means "years"). The curious phenomenon of broken plurals - e.g. in Arabic, sadd "one dam" vs. sudūd "dams" - found most profusely in the languages of Arabia and Ethiopia, may be partly of proto-Semitic origin, and partly elaborated from simpler origins.
Verb aspect and tense
The aspect systems of West and East Semitic differ substantially; Akkadian preserves a number of features generally attributed to Afro-Asiatic, such as gemination indicating the imperfect, while a stative form, still maintained in Akkadian, became a new perfect in West Semitic. Proto-West Semitic maintained two main verb aspects: perfect for completed action (with pronominal suffixes) and imperfect for uncompleted action (with pronominal prefixes and suffixes). In the extreme case of Neo-Aramaic, however, even the verb conjugations have been entirely reworked under Iranian influence.
Morphology: triliteral roots
All Semitic languages exhibit a unique pattern of stems consisting of "triliteral" or consonantal roots (normally consisting of three consonants), from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed by inserting vowels with, potentially, prefixes, suffixes, or infixes (consonants inserted within the original root).
For instance, the root K-T-B, "write", yields in Arabic:
- kataba means "he wrote"
- kutiba means "it was written"
- kitāb means "book"
- kutub means "books"
- kitāba means "writing"
- kātib means "writer"
- kuttāb means "writers"
- maktab means "desk"
- maktaba means "library"
- maktūb means "written"
and in Hebrew (where it appears as K-T-V):
- katav means "he wrote"
- katav means "writer" or "correspondent"
- katvu means "they wrote"
- katava means "article"
- michtav means "postal letter"
- ktav means "writing"
- ktovet means "address"
- miktava means "writing desk"
- kotev means "writes" or "writer"
- katuv means "written"
- hichtiv means "he dictated"
- hitkatev means "he corresponded (exchanged letters)"
This root survives in Amharic only in the noun kitab, meaning "amulet", and the verb "to vaccinate". Ethiopic-derived languages use a completely different root (ṣ-ḥ-f) for the verb "to write".
Some such roots are found throughout most Semitic languages, while others are more restricted in their distribution.
Verbs in other Afro-Asiatic languages show similar radical patterns, but more usually with biconsonantal roots; e.g. Kabyle afeg means "fly!", while affug means "flight", and yufeg means "he flew".
Common vocabulary
- Main article: List of Proto-Semitic stems.
Due to the Semitic languages' common origin, they share many words and roots in common. For example:
| Akkadian |
Aramaic |
Arabic |
Hebrew |
English translation |
| zikaru |
dikrā |
ḏakar |
zåḵår |
Male |
| maliku |
malkā |
malik |
mĕlĕḵ |
King |
| imêru |
ḥamarā |
ḥimār |
ḥămōr |
Donkey |
| erṣetu |
ʔarʿā |
ʔarḍ |
ʔĕrĕṣ |
Land |
Sometimes certain roots differ in meaning from one Semitic language to another. For example, the root b-y-ḍ in Arabic has the meaning of "white" as well as "egg", whereas in Hebrew it only means "egg". The root l-b-n means "milk" in Arabic, but the color "white" in Hebrew. The root l-ḥ-m means "meat" in Arabic but "bread" in Hebrew and "cow" in Ethiosemitic languages; the original meaning was most probably "food". The word medina has the meaning of "city" in Arabic, and "metropolis" in Amharic, but in Hebrew it means "state".
Of course, there is sometimes no relation between the roots. For example, "knowledge" is represented in Hebrew by the root y-d-ʿ but in Arabic by the roots ʿ-r-f and ʿ-l-m and in Ethiosemitic by the root ʿ-w-q.
Classification
The classification given below, based on shared innovations - established by Robert Hetzron in 1976 with later emendations by John Huehnergard and Rodgers as summarized in Hetzron 1997 - is the most widely accepted today, but is still disputed. In particular, several Semiticists still argue for the traditional view of Arabic as part of South Semitic, and a few (e.g. Alexander Militarev) see the South Arabian languages as a third branch of Semitic alongside East and West Semitic, rather than as a subgroup of South Semitic. At a lower level, there is still no general agreement on where to draw the line between "languages" and "dialects" - an issue particularly relevant in Arabic, Aramaic, and Gurage below - and the strong mutual influences between Arabic dialects render a genetic subclassification of them particularly difficult. It is widely recognised in Ethiopia that Amharic inherited its basic vocabulary directly from Giiz, in which case it belongs in Ethiopic rather than North Ethiopic.
The traditional grouping of the Semitic languages (prior to the 1970s), based partly on non-linguistic data, differs in several respects; in particular, Arabic was put in South Semitic, and Eblaite had not been discovered yet.
Arabic languages
- Arabic language
- Fusha (literally "eloquent"), the written language, divided by specialists into:
- Classical Arabic — the language of the Qur'an and early Islamic Arabic literature, extinct
- Middle Arabic, a generic term for premodern post-classical efforts to write Classical Arabic, characterized by frequent hypercorrections and occasional lapses into more colloquial usage. Not a spoken language.
- Modern Standard Arabic — modern literary (non-native) language used in formal media and written communication throughout the Arab World, differing from Classical Arabic mainly in numerous neologisms for concepts not found in medieval times, as well as in occasional calques on idioms from Western languages.[citation needed]
- Numerous Modern Arabic spoken dialects, roughly divided by the Ethnologue into:
Several Jewish dialects, typically with a number of Hebrew loanwords, are grouped together with classical Arabic written in Hebrew script under the imprecise term Judeo-Arabic.
- Old South Arabian languages — extinct, formerly believed to be the linguistic ancestors of modern South Arabian Semitic languages (for which see below)
- Ethiopic languages (Ethio-Semitic, Ethiopian Semitic):
- North
- South
- Transversal
- Amharic-Argobba
- Harari-East Gurage
- Outer
Eastern South Semitic
These languages are spoken mainly by tiny minority populations on the Arabian peninsula in Yemen and Oman.
Living Semitic languages by number of speakers
- Arabic — 206,000,000
- Amharic — 27,000,000
- Hebrew — 7,500,000
- Tigrinya — 6,750,000
- Silt'e – 830,000
- Tigre — 800,000
- Neo-Aramaic — 605,000
- Sebat Bet Gurage — 440,000
- Maltese — 410,000
- Syriac — 400,000
- South Arabian languages — 360,000
- Inor – 280,000
- Soddo — 250,000
- Harari-21 283
See also
Bibliography
- Patrick R. Bennett. Comparative Semitic Linguistics: A Manual. Eisenbrauns 1998. ISBN 1-57506-021-3.
- Robert Hetzron (ed.) The Semitic Languages. Routledge: London 1997. ISBN 0-415-05767-1. (For family tree, see p. 7).
- Edward Lipinski. Semitic Languages: Outlines of a Comparative Grammar. 2nd ed., Orientalia Lovanensia Analecta: Leuven 2001. ISBN 90-429-0815-7
- Sabatino Moscati. An introduction to the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages: phonology and morphology. Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden 1969.
- William Wright & William Robertson Smith. Lectures on the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages. Cambridge University Press 1890. [2002 edition: ISBN 1-931956-12-X]
External links