Proto-Semitic language
Proto-Semitic is the hypothetical reconstructed proto-language ancestral to the Semitic languages. A 2009 study proposes that it was spoken from about 3750 BCE in the Levant during the Early Bronze Age. There is no consensus regarding the location of the Proto-Semitic Urheimat; scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Sahara, or the Horn of Africa.
The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages.
Dating
The earliest attestations of a Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to around the 23rd century BC and the Eblaite language, but earlier evidence of Akkadian comes from personal names in Sumerian texts around the 28th century BC. Researchers also claim to have discovered Canaanite snake spells: "The passages date from between 2400 to 3000 BC and appear to be written in Proto-Canaanite, a direct ancestor of Biblical Hebrew."Urheimat
Since all modern Semitic languages can be traced back to a common ancestor, Semiticists have placed importance upon locating the urheimat of the Proto-Semitic language. The Urheimat of the Proto-Semitic language may be considered within the context of the larger Afro-Asiatic family to which it belongs.The previously popular hypothesis of an Arabian urheimat has been largely abandoned, since the region could not have supported massive waves of emigration before the domestication of camels in the second millennium BC.
There is also evidence that Mesopotamia were originally inhabited by a non-Semitic population.
Levant hypothesis
A Bayesian analysis performed in 2009 suggests an origin for all known Semitic languages in the Levant around 3750 BCE, with a later single introduction from South Arabia into the Horn of Africa around 800 BCE. This statistical analysis could not, however, estimate when or where the ancestor of all Semitic languages diverged from Afroasiatic. It thus neither contradicts nor confirms the hypothesis that the divergence of ancestral Semitic from Afroasiatic occurred in Africa.Christopher Ehret has hypothesized that genetic analyses shows populations of proto-Semitic speakers may have moved from the Horn of Africa or southeastern Sahara northwards to the Nile Valley, northwest Africa, the Levant, and Aegean.
Some geneticists and archaeologists have argued for a back-migration of proto-Afroasiatic speakers from Western Asia to Africa as early as the 10th millennium BC. They suggest the Natufian culture might have spoken a proto-Afroasiatic language just prior to its disintegration into sub-languages. The hypothesis is supported by the Afroasiatic terms for early livestock and crops in both Anatolia and Iran.
North Africa hypothesis
believes that support for an African origin is provided by what he describes as a possible relationship between a pre-Semitic Afroasiatic language and the Niger–Congo languages, whose Urheimat probably lies in Nigeria–Cameroon. In support of this hypothesis, Lipiński points out that Proto-Semitic:- did not likely originate in the Arabian Peninsula, as previously hypothesized, since the region could not have supported massive waves of emigration before the domestication of the dromedary camel in the second millennium BCE.
- did not likely originate in Mesopotamia, since there is evidence the original inhabitants were a non-Semitic population
- shares more isoglosses and lexicostatistical convergences with the Berber languages than any other family, thereby showing signs of a link with Berber long after other Afroasiatic language families, such as Egyptian and the Chadic languages, and was still spoken during the middle of the African humid period.
The earliest wave of Semitic speakers entered the Fertile Crescent via Palestine and Syria and eventually founded the Akkadian Empire. Their relatives, the Amorites, followed them and settled Syria before 2500 BCE. Late Bronze Age collapse in Palestine led the southern Semites southwards, where they reached the highlands of Yemen after 20th century BC. Those crossed back to the Horn of Africa between 1500–500 BC.
Phonology
Vowel
Proto-Semitic had a simple vowel system, with three qualites *a, *i, *u, and phonemic vowel length, conventionally indicated ba a macron: *ā, *ī, *ū. This system is preserved in Akkadian, Ugaritic and Classical Arabic.Consonants
The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic was originally based primarily on Arabic, whose phonology and morphology is extremely conservative, and which preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes. Thus, the phonemic inventory of reconstructed Proto-Semitic is very similar to that of Arabic, with only one phoneme fewer in Arabic than in reconstructed Proto-Semitic, with and merging into Arabic and becoming Arabic . As such, Proto-Semitic is generally reconstructed as having the following phonemes :The fricatives *s *z *ṣ *ś *ṣ́ *ṯ̣ may also be interpreted as affricates, as is discussed below.
The Proto-Semitic consonant system is based on triads of related voiceless, voiced and "emphatic" consonants. Five such triads are reconstructed in Proto-Semitic:
- Dental stops *d *t *ṭ
- Velar stops *g *k *ḳ
- Dental sibilants *z *s *ṣ
- Interdental
- Lateral
Emphatics
The sounds notated here as "emphatic consonants" occur in nearly all Semitic languages as well as in most other Afroasiatic languages, and they are generally reconstructed as glottalization in Proto-Semitic. Thus, *ṭ, for example, represents. See below for the fricatives/affricates.In modern Semitic languages, emphatics are variously realized as pharyngealized, glottalized, or as tenuis consonants ; Ashkenazi Hebrew and Maltese are exceptions and emphatics merge into plain consonants in various ways under the influence of Indo-European languages.
An emphatic labial *ṗ occurs in some Semitic languages, but it is unclear whether it was a phoneme in Proto-Semitic.
- Hebrew developed an emphatic labial phoneme ṗ to represent unaspirated in Iranian and Greek.
- The classical Ethiopian Semitic language Geʽez is unique among Semitic languages for contrasting all three of,, and. While and occur mostly in loanwords, there are many other occurrences whose origin is less clear.
Fricatives
- Two voiced fricatives that *ð, *z eventually became, for example, for both in Hebrew, but and in Arabic, respectively
- Four voiceless fricatives
- **θ that became in Hebrew but in Arabic
- **š that became in Hebrew but in Arabic
- **ś that became in Hebrew but in Arabic
- **s that became in both Hebrew and Arabic
- Three emphatic fricatives
The traditional view, as expressed in the conventional transcription and still maintained by some of the authors in the field is that *š was a voiceless postalveolar fricative, *s was a voiceless alveolar sibilant and *ś was a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. Accordingly, *ṣ is seen as an emphatic version of *s *z as a voiced version of it and *ṣ́ as an emphatic version of *ś. The reconstruction of *ś ṣ́ as lateral fricatives is certain although few modern languages preserve the sounds. The pronunciation of *ś ṣ́ as is still maintained in the Modern South Arabian languages, and evidence of a former lateral pronunciation is evident in a number of other languages. For example, Biblical Hebrew baśam was borrowed into Ancient Greek as balsamon, and the 8th-century Arab grammarian Sibawayh explicitly described the Arabic descendant of *ṣ́, now pronounced in the standard pronunciation or in Bedouin-influenced dialects, as a pharyngealized voiced lateral fricative.
The primary disagreements concern whether the sounds were actually fricatives in Proto-Semitic or whether some were affricates and whether the sound designated *š was pronounced in Proto-Semitic, as the traditional view posits, or had the value of. The issue of the nature of the "emphatic" consonants, discussed above, is partly related to the issues here as well.
With respect to the traditional view, there are two dimensions of "minimal" and "maximal" modifications made:
- In how many sounds are taken to be affricates. The "minimal affricate" position takes only the emphatic *ṣ as an affricate. The "maximal affricate" position additionally posits that *s *z were actually affricates while *š was actually a simple fricative.
- In whether to extend the affricate interpretation to the interdentals and laterals. The "minimal extension" position assumes that only the sibilants were affricates, and the other "fricatives" were in fact all fricatives, but the maximal update extends the same interpretation to the other sounds. Typically, that means that the "minimal affricate, maximal extension" position takes all and only the emphatics are taken as affricates: emphatic *ṣ θ̣ ṣ́ were. The "maximal affricate, maximal extension" position assumes not only the "maximal affricate" position for sibilants but also that non-emphatic *θ ð ś were actually affricates.
The evidence for the various affricate interpretations of the sibilants is direct evidence from transcriptions and structural evidence. However, the evidence for the "maximal extension" positions that extend affricate interpretations to non-sibilant "fricatives" is largely structural because of both the relative rarity of the interdentals and lateral obstruents among the attested Semitic language and the even-greater rarity of such sounds among the various languages in which Semitic words were transcribed. As a result, even when the sounds were transcribed, the resulting transcriptions may be difficult to interpret clearly.
The narrowest affricate view is the most accepted one. The affricate pronunciation is directly attested in the modern Ethiopic languages and Modern Hebrew, as mentioned above, but also in ancient transcriptions of numerous Semitic languages in various other languages:
- Transcriptions of Ge'ez from the period of the Axumite Kingdom : ṣəyāmo rendered as Greek τζιαμω tziamō.
- The Hebrew reading tradition of ṣ as clearly goes back at least to medieval times, as shown by the use of Hebrew צ to represent affricates in early New Persian, Old Osmanli Turkic, Middle High German etc. Similarly, Old French c was used to transliterate צ: Hebrew ṣɛdɛḳ "righteousness" and ʼārɛṣ "land " were written cedek, arec.
- There is also evidence of an affricate in Ancient Hebrew and Phoenician ṣ. Punic ṣ was often transcribed as ts or t in Latin and Greek or occasionally Greek ks; correspondingly, Egyptian names and loanwords in Hebrew and Phoenician use ṣ to represent the Egyptian palatal affricate ḏ.
- Aramaic and Syriac had an affricated realization of *ṣ until some point, as is seen in Classical Armenian loanwords: Aramaic צרר 'bundle, bunch' → Classical Armenian crar.
- Akkadian cuneiform, as adapted for writing various other languages, used the z- signs to represent affricates. Examples include /ts/ in Hittite, Egyptian affricate ' in the Amarna letters and the Old Iranian affricates in Elamite.
- Egyptian transcriptions of early Canaanite words with *z, *s, *ṣ use affricates.
- West Semitic loanwords in the "older stratum" of Armenian reflect *s *z as affricates,.
- Greek borrowing of Phoenician ? *š to represent /s/, and ? *s to represent is difficult to explain if *s then had the value in Phoenician, but it is quite easy to explain if it actually had the value .
- Similarly, Phoenician uses ? *š to represent sibilant fricatives in other languages rather than ? *s until the mid-3rd century BC, which has been taken by Friedrich/Röllig 1999 as evidence of an affricate pronunciation in Phoenician until then. On the other hand, Egyptian starts using s in place of earlier ' to represent Canaanite s around 1000 BC. As a result, Kogan assumes a much earlier loss of affricates in Phoenician, and he assumes that the foreign sibilant fricatives in question had a sound closer to than.
Evidence for *š as also exists but is somewhat less clear. It has been suggested that it is cross-linguistically rare for languages with a single sibilant fricative to have as the sound and that is more likely. Similarly, the use of Phoenician ? *š, as the source of Greek Σ s, seems easiest to explain if the phoneme had the sound of at the time. The occurrence of for *š in a number of separate modern Semitic languages and Old Babylonian Akkadian is then suggested to result from a push-type chain shift, and the change from to "pushes" out of the way to in the languages in question, and a merger of the two to occurs in various other languages such as Arabic and Ethiopian Semitic.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that the initial merged s in Arabic was actually a "hissing-hushing sibilant", presumably something like , which did not become until later. That would suggest a value closer to or for Proto-Semitic *š since and would almost certainly merge directly to . Furthermore, there is various evidence to suggest that the sound for *š existed while *s was still. Examples are the Southern Old Babylonian form of Akkadian, which evidently had along with as well as Egyptian transcriptions of early Canaanite words in which *š s are rendered as š ṯ.
Diem suggested that the Canaanite sound change of *θ → *š would be more natural if *š was than if it was. However, Kogan argues that, because *s was at the time, the change from *θ to *š is the most likely merger, regardless of the exact pronunciation of *š while the shift was underway.
Evidence for the affricate nature of the non-sibilants is based mostly on internal considerations. Ejective fricatives are quite rare cross-linguistically, and when a language has such sounds, it nearly always has so if *ṣ was actually affricate, it would be extremely unusual if *θ̣ ṣ́ was fricative rather than affricate. According to Rodinson and Weninger, the Greek placename Mátlia, with tl used to render Ge'ez ḍ, is "clear proof" that this sound was affricated in Ge'ez and quite possibly in Proto-Semitic as well.
The evidence for the most maximal interpretation, with all the interdentals and lateral obstruents being affricates, appears to be mostly structural: the system would be more symmetric if reconstructed that way.
The shift of *š to h occurred in most Semitic languages in grammatical and pronominal morphemes, and it is unclear whether reduction of *š began in a daughter proto-language or in Proto-Semitic itself. Some thus suggest that weakened *š̠ may have been a separate phoneme in Proto-Semitic.
Correspondence of sounds with daughter languages
See Semitic languages#Phonology for a fuller discussion of the outcomes of the Proto-Semitic sounds in the various daughter languages.Correspondence of sounds with other Afroasiatic languages
See table at Proto-Afroasiatic language#Consonant correspondences.Grammar
Pronouns
Like most of its daughter languages, Proto-Semitic has one free pronoun set, and case-marked bound sets of enclitic pronouns. Genitive case and accusative case are only distinguished in the first person.For many pronouns, the final vowel is reconstructed with long and short positional variants; this is conventionally indicated by a combined macron and breve on the vowel.