Semitic Languages
the languages spoken by the Semitic nations. One characteristic feature of them is triconsonantal roots from which by prefixed or affixed letters, but mostly by internal vowel changes, the other words are formed.
Thus in Arabic kátăba " he wrote," bâtib ="a scribe,” kitab ="a book," maktûb- "an epistle." Another characteristic feature is that, though personal pronouns are affixed to nouns, verbs, and prepositions, there is an almost total absence of derivative nouns, adjectives, and verbs.
Thus, while in Arabic beitî="my house," qatalahu "he killed him," minha "from her," there are no such derivatives as pro-motion, dread-ful, frati -fy. The most highly developed, and on the whole the most characteristic (probably also the oldest of the group), is Arabic, which, with its ancient Sabæan, and Minæan , and Minean dialects of southern, western , and northern Arabia, and with Ethiopic, forms the S. division of Semitic languages, marked by the use of "broken plurals," in which the consonants of the singular are presented, while the vowels are as much altered as possible. Thus from the Arabic kitâb, "a book," comes the plural kutub. Another mark is the universal use of a before the third radical letter of the active preterites; thus Arabic has qáttala, áqtala, for which Hebrew has qittêl and hiqtîl.
Hebrew, though a characteristically Semitic speech, shows many marks of linguistic decadence; ancient Hebrew is a more modern type of language than modern Arabic. Phoenician differs little Phœnician differs little in grammar and dictionary from Hebrew. from Hebrew .
In the African territory of Carthage this language was spoken 400 years after the Christian era; a century before that era in Phœnicia itself it yielded to Aramæan or to Greek. Moabitic, as the Moabite Stone of the 9th century B. C. shows, was Hebrew. Aramæan had its home in Aram of Damascus and Aram of Mesopotamia.
It was the language of Assyria from early times, as we may see in II Kings xviii., and of Babylonia, even while Assyrian was used there for official purposes. It SEMMERING was the official language of the provinces of the Persian empire W. of the Euphrates. Its W. branch was the language of Palmyra and of the N. part of the Arabian kingdom of the Nabatheans, and is seen in the Biblical books of Ezra and Daniel, where it has been erroneously named Chaldee. Later developments of this branch are the officially recognized "Targums" by Onkelos on the Pentateuch, and Jonathan on the Prophets, the Prophets , which were finally edited and fixed in the 4th or 5th century A. D. in Babylonia.
Somewhat later are some "Midrashes," the Jerusalem "Targums," and the Jerusalem "Talmud." Of the 4th or 5th century are Palestinian translations of the Gospel. Samaritan is another branch of western Aramæan, written in a Hebrew alphabet older than the Captivity, and spoken about 432 B. c. by an Aramæan people with Israelitish blood in them, who were desirous of conforming in speech as in religion to the Hebrew usage of northern Palestine, Arabic soon expelled western Aramæan after the Mohammedan conquest, though a faint echo of it still lingers in the Anti -Libanus. The Babylonian Talmud shows the common eastern Aramæan of Babylonia from the 4th to the 6th century. The language of the Mandæan sect resembles it. In the 2d century the Edessan dialect of Aramean, which we call Syriac, began to be the language of eastern Christendom for all purposes; but for popular use it was slowly supplanted by Arabic after the Mohammedan conquest, becoming a dead and almost entirely ecclesiastical language. In the mountain regions of ancient Assyria Aramæan is still represented by several local dialects among Christians and even Jews. Assyrian, so called by us moderns because discovered by us in Assyria, is more correctly named Babylonian. It is written in the difficult, cumbrous, and inadequate cuneiform character received from the Turanian natives. It shows scarcely any sign of a preterite tense. In popular use it early gave way to Aramæan.
Ethiopic, a sister tongue to Arabic, in some respects resembles more closely Hebrew and Aramæan even in the most ancient form of the language known to us.