Semitic Languages Language and Civilization Whereas the study of all human languages is important, scholars have traditionally attached special importance to the study of languages that represent the most ancient civilizations. This approach is understandable. Through a better understanding of its language, a civilization can be more deeply penetrated, better understood and appreciated, and superficial observations can be avoided. Semitic languages occupy a significant position in world civilization and recorded human history. In its day, the Assyro-Babylonian culture (about 3,000-500 B.C.E.) was among the most remarkable, and many subsequent cultures are indebted to it. The Phoenicians (first millenium B.C.E.) played an extraordinary role in making the Mediterranean world a single cultural area. They founded cities, and their script was adopted and utilized by the Greeks and the Romans. The Aramaeans gave India its major writing system. The Hebrews produced the Bible, perhaps the most influential book in history and the fundamental text of three of the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The Syrians and Ethiopians wrote and copied many ancient manuscripts, preserving them for posterity. It is only through the intensive study of Semitic languages that this amazing array of cultures can be properly understood. Traditionally, Semitic linguistics has been studied as a field of interest of specialists in a given branch or language, but we are ready now for finer research into the Semitic family as a group, endeavoring to identify common features and, beyond that, by using general linguistic methods, examining the underlying similarities between this group and all other languages of mankind, including the related ancient Egyptian, the language of another most splendid ancient civilization. Semitic Languages, Writing, and World Literature The Semitic languages are among the earliest written languages of the world. More importantly, however, they are the first languages to use the alphabetic form of writing, a “computerization” of human sounds, representing the most revolutionary ancient step taken in the history of writing. Semitic languages are among the richest languages of the world in the preservation and transmission of ancient documents, the most famous being the Hebrew Bible. What is a Semitic language? The term “Semitic” has been conventionally used to designate a group of languages spoken by the Hebrews, the Arabs, the Ethiopians, and other ancient and modern peoples of the Near East (Mesopotamia, eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula) and the Horn of Africa. In their morphology, phonology, lexicon, and syntax, the Semitic languages manifest a great many common elements and features. Hence, scholars set them apart as a linguistic group having a remarkable degree of internal unity. They are now believed to be a subdivision of a major family of languages called Hamito-Semitic or Afroasiatic, which includes ancient Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and Tehadic. The striking similarities among Semitic languages cannot be accounted for by borrowings in historic times, but only by the hypothesis of a common origin. Moreover, the strong organic unity of the Semitic dialects would be very hard to explain without reference to the close relationship between the peoples who spoke them. How are Semitic languages related? Semitic languages may be divided into certain main groups. The earliest of which we have documentary evidence is Akkadian, the language of the peoples of Mesopotamia, which include the Babylonians and the Assyrians. A second group is formed by the languages called Canaanite, because they were spoken in the eastern Mediterranean (Canaan in the Bible); this group includes Hebrew. A third group is Aramaic, a set of dialects first attested to in Upper Syria, but later becoming widespread. A fourth group is Arabic, known to us from before the time of Muhammad from a series of inscriptions, principally those of the Nabataeans, but having as its “classical” form the dialect of the Qu’ran and subsequent Islamic literature. The fifth and last group is Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic) and Sabaean, spoken respectively by the peoples of Ethiopia and Yemen in ancient times. Today there are about fifteen living Semitic languages spoken in Ethiopia. Alphabet About the Alphabet Writing is second nature to most of us who live in literate societies; so we hardly ever stop and think about what the alphabet is, the tool with which we write. If we do so, however, we would realize that the alphabet is one of the most widespread and powerful tools of communication ever invented. The alphabet is a device; in many respects it is the mother of many other advanced inventions that have enhanced the speed of human progress. Over two billion people throughout the world today use one form or another of the alphabet for reading, writing, recording, various forms of art and communication, and expressing ideas and emotions. The Invention of the Alphabet If writing is an important human tool, how much more is the alphabet, which makes writing easier and more accessible. What is the alphabet and how is it different from other forms of writing? When, how, and by whom was it invented? How was it transmitted from its birthplace in the ancient Near East to the West? Even though the modes of writing have evolved from the age of manuscript copying to the age of printing and typing to modern word processing, why does the alphabet remain the unchangeable instrument of literacy and communication? What is the Ethiopic/Geez alphabet, which we use today, and how is it related to the original Semitic alphabet? These are the ideas that we shall consider here. Every word that we utter can be written individually and separately with pictographs and ideographs. But imagine how many pictures and idea-pictures we would have to draw to write! Ancient Egyptian (c.3000 BCE), Sumerian (c.3000 BCE), Proto-Indic (c.2200 BCE), Hittite, (c.1500 BCE), Chinese (c.1300), Mayan, and other ancient forms of writing were based on word-pictures, idea-pictures, or word-syllabic-pictures. To write or read ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, the oldest known forms of organized writing, a person has to know about 700 or 600 symbols respectively (signs representing both words and syllables.) In Chinese, one has to know about 3000 symbols. Not only is the process of democratic education and literacy practically difficult with such forms of writing, but also even systematic and efficient functions of writing can become tedious, time consuming, and cumbersome for the brave few who become literate after years of learning and practicing. Imagine reading the Bible, Tolstoys War and Peace, or Victor Hugos Les Miserables in hieroglyphs in bed, on the bus or the train. I understand that finding a persons name in a Chinese telephone book, without additional oral information and assistance, could take up to one week. As compared to the burdensome pictographic and ideographic forms of writing, the alphabet is a breathtakingly simple system of symbols for phonetic sounds. And all scholars agree that it was invented only once! Humans talk endlessly-- speak and lecture, chatter and gossip, argue or admonish, pray or preach, whisper, shout or sing. To do so we use several thousand words, but, amazingly, only a limited number of phonemes or sound units-- about thirty more or less in most known languages! No matter how much or how long we speak in any language, our vocal systems-- our mouths, tongues, vocal chords-- repeat the same thirty or so sounds over and over and over again. The inventors of the alphabet were the first to harness this amazing phenomenon. The ancient Egyptians might have been the first to recognize the phonetic phenomenon. In fact, they had what some call a pseudo-alphabet. They used signs representing consonants. But, they never used the signs independent of bilateral and trilateral pictographic or ideographic signs. Egyptian writing remained always a word-syllabic system. In other words, the Egyptians never freed their writing system from pictographs and ideographs. The inventors of the alphabet did exactly that: they freed writing from multilateral pictographs and ideographs. To be sure, they must have been knowledgeable with the Egyptian hieroglyphic system of writing from which they seem to borrow some of their pictographic symbols on which they built the alphabet. Instead of using pictures directly for writing words, ideas, or syllables, the inventors of the alphabet selected about twenty-seven pictures and designated them as symbols for writing acrostically the phonemes (speech sounds) of their Semitic language. The invention of the system took place no later than the 18th BCE. The system was a wholly phonetic one, each sign representing a single consonantal phoneme. To achieve this they organized the pictures acrophonically, that is, according to their initial phonemes (sounds) or tones. For example, they selected alf meaning ox in their Semitic language to designate the sound a and bet meaning house to represent the sound b. That is why our Ethiopia a or the Roman capital A look like the head of an ox, especially if we turn it upside down; and Ethiopic b or Roman capital B a hut. We call our writing system alphabet after the first two Semitic words for ox and house. Interestingly the fixed order that the inventors created survives to this day with little change in almost all the languages that adopted the alphabet, including the Roman script from which the English script evolves. About the Alphabet: The Invention of the Alphabet In 1905, Sir Flinders Petrie found at Serabit el Khadem in the Sinai Peninsula a dozen short texts inscribed in an unknown pictographic script now called Proto-Sinaitic. He dated them to about 1500 BCE. The Harvard Expeditions in 1927, 1930, and 1935 greatly expanded the corpus of Proto - Sinaitic texts. Sir Alan Gardner took the first steps of decipherment in 1971. He noted a recurrent series of signs going - oxgoad-house-eye-oxgoadcross, followed by and acrophonic principle. Gardiners decipherment and the other attempts to do so have more or less settled the 40 years debate - for instance, were the names primary, part of the invention of the alphabet or secondary mnemonic devices -- as to how the alphabet was devised. Some questions still exist however. Other important discoveries bearing on the alphabetic origins have been made. It is thought that an alphabetic system based on old Canaanite pictographic alphabet also existed. Beginning in 1929, a series of magnificent epigraphic inscriptions were discovered in Ugarit, on the coast of Syria. The main group of texts contained epic and mythological works inscribed in a cuneiform alphabet in an early Canaanite dialect of the 14th century BCE. Scholars now believe that this alphabet, called the Canaanite-cuneiform alphabet, was used throughout Syria-Palestine. This was shown when an Ugaritic abcdiaris were discovered, first published 1957. One group lists alphabetic signs following precise order that survives in Hebrew and Aramaic, and Greek. Another abcdiary lists the signs of the Ugaritic alphabet in order and adds Babylonian signs, which allows us to reconstruct the names of the letters of the alphabet in the 14th century BCE. These names alp, bet, gaml are ancestral to the Phoenician and Greek names. The Ugaritic texts confirm other evidence that the names of the old Canaanite signs and their order are at least as old as the 14th century BCE. The acrophonic principle, integral to the names of the signs, went back to the invention of the script. In sum, we have a steady accumulation of early alphabetic inscriptions which now can be classified under two headings: Old Canaanite, transparently pictographic in origin, found in Syria-Palestine, belonging to the same genre as the pictographic script of Sinai; and Linear Phoenician inscriptions, easily read, an alphabetic script which is an ancestor of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek scripts. We now recognize clearly for the first time certain features of the two styles of alphabetic writing. The Old Canaanite alphabets were multidirectional: horizontally right to left, left to right, and vertically, and boustrophedon. In Linear Phoenician the direction was fixed: right to left horizontal writing was standardized and the stance of letters becomes fixed. On the El-Khader arrowheads and the older Canaanite system letter/pictographic faced out from the direction of writing. The Greek script was borrowed from before the standardization of direction and stance. Early Greek was multi-directional and indeed standardized in horizontal left to right writing. Generally therefore Greek letters face in the opposite direction from Phoenician. Languages Akkadian Preserved in cuneiform tablets, is the language of the Semitic peoples who dominated the Mesopotamian civilization from about 2300 B.C.E Although the fundamentals of the decipherment of these syllabic clay tablets were achieved in the mid-nineteenth century, the cuneiform writing system is so complex that the reading of cuneiform texts remains a painstaking task. Our knowledge of Akkadian and its principal phases is continually evolving, and reference works such as dictionaries are still in the process of compilation. Yet, even as basic research continues, archaeological excavations keep bringing to light new Mesopotamian texts. There are presently some 150,000 tablets in Istanbul and 30,000 at the University of Pennsylvania (to name only two of the major collections outside Iraq, the geographic area corresponding by and large to ancient Mesopotamia). Probably no more than five percent of excavated texts have ever been published. The extraordinary richness of the Mesopotamian corpus of writings is evident. Preserved documents include administrative and economic records and accounts; legal texts (law codes, contracts, court records); personal and royal correspondence; treaties; annals; chronicles; building and votive inscriptions; literature (myths, epics, philosophical disputations, and tales); treatises on mathematics, astronomy, divination, magic and medicine; lexicons and bilingual dictionaries; exercise texts from the scribal schools; even maps. Aramaic Aramaic is perhaps the most widely diffused of the ancient languages - we have materials dating from the tenth century B.C.E. down to modern times; texts and inscriptions have been found from Gibraltar to India. When the Persians conquered their semitic-speaking neighbors toward the end of the sixth century B.C.E., the stage was set for the spread of Aramaic, for the Persian monarchs adopted it as their administrative language; and from there it spread throughout the whole region, becoming the lingua franca of the numerous subjugated peoples. The Aramaic of the later period is usually divided into two geographic groups, Western and Eastern. The former includes the language of numerous Jewish documents, notably the Targum, the Aramaic versions of the Hebrew Bible, and the Jerusalem Talmud, as well as the languages of other non-Jewish peoples in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean area. The latter is chiefly known from its major Jewish text, the Babylonian Talmud, and its major Christian contributions, the vast literature written in that dialect of Aramaic known as Syriac. Syriac The language of the Eastern Christians, Syriac united large parts of the ancient world, from Cyprus to China, from southern Russia to southern India. Many documents of early Judaism are extant in Syriac (and sometimes only in Syriac), hence its importance for the study of the Hebrew Bible and the development of Christianity. In addition, Syriac literature includes hagiographies, chronicles, prose works (often translated from Arabic), and numerous theological works. Some dialects of Aramaic, usually called “Neo-Aramaic”, “Neo-Syriac”, or “Assyrian” are still spoken today, primarily in villages in southern Russia, Lebanon, and Iraq, and now in Israel (by immigrant Jews from Iraq). Theses dialects are rapidly disappearing under pressure from the surrounding local languages. Sabaean From the age of the fabled Queen of Sheba to the ill-fated expedition of Aelius Gallus and the collapse of the great Marib Dam, Yemen was an inaccessible land of wealth, power and mystery to which the epigraphic texts of Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian and Hadramitic are the key. Preserving many archaic structural features and a large vocabulary, the Old Yemeni dialects provide a valuable and often neglected resource for the history of South Semitic, while the texts themselves reveal an exciting world of rival kingdoms, tribal wars, large-scale agricultural projects supported by impressive architectural achievement, and a polytheistic religion constituting the cultural and cultic background against which Islam was to rise. Recent scholarship has begun to provide basic tools - dictionaries and grammars as well as careful editions of the texts - to render this hitherto little-studied material available for research. Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic) Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), an ancient Semitic language found in Ethiopia, is one of the first seven languages of the world to receive the Bible. Hence, like Syriac, Ge’ez is also of paramount importance for Bibilical studies. Thus, scholars often turn to it not only to illuminate obscure expressions and idioms of the Bible, but also to discover unusual variant readings which Ge’ez manuscripts have preserved against other known ancient versions of the Bible. This alone could have made Ge’ez an important scholarly language. But of special interest to the learned world is also the extensive body of literature found in Ethiopia and written in Ge’ez. This literature includes not only commentaries on many books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament bust also practically all of the Jewish Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic works. In addition, there exists in Ge’ez an extensive array of hagiographies, chronicles, homilies, and most of the early Christian apocrypha, as well as theological, liturgical, calendaric, and religio-magical works. These works represent an invaluable source of information not only for the understanding of Ethiopian culture and history, but also for the study of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and “traditional” African religions. Probably, no more than 10 percent of existing Ge’ez manuscripts are known to the scholarly world, the majority still remain hidden away in distant monastic and church libraries and scriptoria in Ethiopia. Arabic Molded by the oral poetry of the century before Islam, Classical Arabic emerged as the literary language of the speakers of several closely related dialects in northern and central Arabia. Islam carried it far beyond its original frontiers. Muslims believe God’s last and most perfect revelation to be contained in the Qur’an (written down in Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, in the first third of the seventh century). With the rise of the Islamic empire, in which the Arabs were at first predominant, Arabic became one of the great vehicles in the transmission of human thought and knowledge. Arabic literature and historiography are vast. From the powerful heroic verse of the pre-Islamic century to the delicate and stylized court poetry of Baghdad or Cordoba, there stretches a poetic tradition without whose influence pre-modern Persian and Turkish poetry, or Hispano-Hebrew poetry would not be as we know them. Largely because of the importance of understanding accurately the sacred text and the narratives of the Prophet Muhammad’s acts and sayings (a basic source of Islamic law), philological and rhetorical studies flourished already in the Islamic Middle Ages. On the other hand, since philologists were only interested in texts they considered true to the Qur’anic and poetic models, much work still needs to be done by scholars of this immensely rich and subtle language. Hebrew Hebrew is the language in which are written the Bible, known as the Old Testament by Christians, and a portion of the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic writings, as well as a great part of later Jewish literature, including the Mishnah. It is generally assumed that Biblical Hebrew, to the extent that it is linguistically homogeneous, is a close approximation of the language of the Israelite monarchic periods preceding the Babylonian Exile (about 587 B.C.E.), during which time a major portion of Biblical literature was compiled and composed. The Hebrew Bible is the ultimate foundation of the supreme religious and moral authority for the numerous nations who have professed the Jewish, Christian and Moslem faiths. The moral codes of the Western world have drawn heavily on the ethical teachings of the Bible, particularly on the concepts of social justice which the prophets so forthrightly and dramatically expressed. instituteofsemiticstudies.org/ISS_Site/Home.html
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 07:11:17 +0000
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