Semitic Languages

I

Introduction

Semitic Languages, one of the seven subfamilies or branches of the Afro-Asiatic or Hamito-Semitic language family. Of the Semitic languages, Arabic was carried beyond its original home in the Arab Peninsula throughout the Arab Empire and is spoken across North Africa to the Atlantic coast, and Arabic and Hebrew are used by Muslims and Jews in other parts of the world. The other Semitic languages are centred in a region bounded on the west by Ethiopia and on the north by Syria and extending south-east through Iraq and the Arab Peninsula, with some “islands” of Semitic speech farther east in Iran.

II

Linguistic Groups

Linguists usually divide the Semitic languages into two main sub-groups (Central and South) each with two further sub-divisions. The first group (Central) includes an Aramaic sub-group that consists of the Assyro-Babylonian language, or Akkadian. The oldest attested Semitic language, with the oldest Semitic literature, Akkadian was spoken in Mesopotamia between about 3000 bc and 600-400 bc and used as a literary language until the 1st century ad. Also in this group are Mandaic and the Aramaic language, including Syriac, or Christian Aramaic.

The South group (of the Central sub-group) includes the ancient and modern Hebrew language in the Canaanite subset, and, in the Arabic subset of this group, all the Arabic languages including literary or Standard Arabic and the modern spoken Arabic languages. Maltese, an offshoot of Arabic, is spoken on the island of Malta and, because of its location, has been heavily influenced by Italian.

In the other main group (South) are the two sub-groups Ethiopian and South Arabian. The former includes Ge'ez, or classical Ethiopic, now surviving only as a literary and liturgical language; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; and regional Ethiopian languages such as Tigré, Tigrigna, and Gurage. The South Arabian group consists of five languages, now spoken in parts of the southern Arab Peninsula, in particular Oman and Yemen (and in ancient times by peoples such as the Minaeans and Sabaeans).

III

Characteristics

In Semitic languages, words are typically based on a series of three consonants; this series, called the root, carries the basic meaning. Superimposed on the root is a pattern of vowels (or vowels and consonants) that signifies variations in the basic meaning or that serves as an inflection (such as for verb tense and number). For example, in Arabic the root ktb refers to writing, and the vowel pattern -ā-i- implies “one who does something”; thus, kātib means “one who writes”. Other derivatives of the same root include kitāb, “book”; maktub, “letter”; and kataba, “he wrote”. The close relationship of the Semitic languages to one another can be seen in the persistence of the same roots from one language to another (slm, for example, means “peace” in Assyro-Babylonian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and other languages). In Semitic languages, related consonants typically fall into three subtypes: voiced, unvoiced, and emphatic; an example is the series transliterated g, k, and q from Arabic and Hebrew (the q is pronounced farther back in the throat than k).

IV

Writing

Except for two undeciphered scripts used by the ancient Canaanites, and the Latin alphabet as used for Maltese, Semitic languages have historically been written in three scripts. Assyro-Babylonian was written in cuneiform signs, and Ugaritic used a cuneiform alphabet. North Semitic, the early Semitic script, was an alphabetic script; one of its earliest examples is inscribed on the Moabite stone (9th century bc, discovered in 1868 and now in the Louvre, Paris). From the Aramaic variant of North Semitic, the modern Arabic and square Hebrew alphabets developed; North Semitic also gave rise to the Greek alphabet. Like ancient North Semitic, the Hebrew and Arabic scripts are alphabets of consonants only; special marks for vowels apparently came into use in about the 8th century ad. The third script, South Semitic or South Arabic, may or may not have been another variant of early North Semitic script. Also a consonantal alphabet, it was taken to Ethiopia in the 1st millennium bc and gave rise to the syllabic scripts used for modern Ethiopian languages.

See also Alphabet.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.