Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, Modern South Arabian languages and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 460 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa,^[a] the Horn of Africa,^[b][c] Malta,^[d] 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 (שם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.

Arabic is by far the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages with 411 million native speakers of all varieties,^[1] and it's the most spoken native language in Africa and West Asia, other languages include Amharic (35 million native speakers),^[5] Tigrinya (9.9 million speakers),^[6] Hebrew (5 million native speakers,^[7][8][9] Tigre (1 million speakers),^[10] and Maltese (570,000 speakers). Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, and Maltese are considered national languages with an official status.

Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date in West Asia, with East Semitic Akkadian (also known as Assyrian and Babylonian) and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from c. 2600 BCE in Mesopotamia and the northeastern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian and Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE), both language isolates, and Egyptian (c. 3000 BCE), a sister branch within the Afroasiatic family, related to the Semitic languages but not part of them. Amorite appeared in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant c. 2100 BC, followed by the mutually intelligible Canaanite languages (including Hebrew, Phoenician, Moabite, Edomite, and Ammonite, and perhaps Ekronite, Amalekite and Sutean), the still spoken Aramaic, and Ugaritic during the 2nd millennium BC.

Most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjads – a type of alphabetic script that omits some or all of the vowels, which is feasible for these languages because the consonants are the primary carriers of meaning in the Semitic languages. These include the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and ancient South Arabian alphabets. The Geʽez script, used for writing the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, is technically an abugida – a modified abjad in which vowels are notated using diacritic marks added to the consonants at all times, in contrast with other Semitic languages which indicate vowels based on need or for introductory purposes. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union.

The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. That is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants (usually three, making a so-called triliteral root). Words are composed from roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants, although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning "write" has the form k-t-b. From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding consonants, e.g. كِتاب kitāb "book", كُتُب kutub "books", كاتِب kātib "writer", كُتّاب kuttāb "writers", كَتَب kataba "he wrote", يكتُب yaktubu "he writes", etc or the Hebrew equivalent root K-T-B כתב forming words like כַתָב katav he wrote, יִכתוב yichtov he will write, כותֵב kotev he writes or a writer, מִכתָב michtav a letter, הִכתִיב hichtiv he dictated. The Hebrew Kaf alternatively becomes Khaf (as in Scottish "loch") depending on the letter preceding it.

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