Northwest Semitic

Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family, comprising the ancient languages of today's Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, western Syria, and western Jordan, along with their modern descendants.

Traditionally Northwest Semitic is divided into two sub-groups: one of which is Aramaic, and the other comprises Canaanite (including Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Philistine) and Hebrew. In this reckoning Northwest Semitic itself is one of three divisions of Semitic along with East Semitic (Akkadian) and South Semitic (Arabic, South Arabian, and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia).

However revisions of both the larger Semitic divisions and the place of Northwest Semitic within them have been proposed in recent years.

Common elements are to separate Ugaritic from Canaanite within Northwest Semitic, and to group Northwest Semitic with Arabic (but not South Arabian) in a higher Central Semitic grouping. This Central Semitic may be a top-level division of Semitic, or itself a subdivision of a West Semitic.^[1]

The influential [1] As SIL only treats living languages, the position of the extinct Ugaritic is undefined.

Historical Development

The time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. The first attestation of a Northwest Semitic language is of Ugaritic in the 14th Century B.C.

During the early 1st Millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in today's Tunisia. The Phoenician alphabet is of fundamental importance in human history, as the source of the Greek alphabet and later Latin alphabet, and of the Aramaic/Square Hebrew and Arabic writing systems as well.

By the 6th Century B.C. the use of Aramaic spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region (see Imperial Aramaic), largely driving the other Northwest Semitic languages to extinction. The ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Old Testament are written in it. Hebrew was preserved, however, as a Jewish liturgical language and language of scholarship, and resurrected in the 19th Century, with modern adaptations, to become the Modern Hebrew language of today's Israel.

With the Muslim expansion in the 7th Century A.D., Arabic largely replaced Aramaic throughout the region. Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East.

Phonological Characteristics

Phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́, replacing it with /sˤ/ (ṣ) (the same shift occurred in Canaanite and Akkadian). That this same sound became /ʕ/ in Aramaic (although in Ancient Aramaic, it was written with qoph), suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group. An example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth: Ugaritic /ʔarsˤ/ (’arṣ), Hebrew /ʔɛrɛsˤ/ (’ereṣ) and Aramaic /ʔarʕaː/ (’ar‘ā’).

The vowel shift from *aː to /oː/ distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic. Also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants: *ð (ḏ), *θ (ṯ) and *θ̣ (ṱ) became /z/, /ʃ/ (š) and /sˤ/ (ṣ) respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the following words:

See also

• Aramaic language
• Hebrew language
• Ugaritic language
• Semitic languages
• Proto-Semitic language

Notes

Bibliography

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