Proto-Semitic language

Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus regarding the location of the linguistic homeland for Proto-Semitic: scholars hypothesize that it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa.

The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages.

Dating

The earliest attestations of any Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to around the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (see Sargon of Akkad) and the Eblaite language, but earlier evidence of Akkadian comes from personal names in Sumerian texts from the first half of the third millennium BC. One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur (–2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad.
The earliest text fragments of West Semitic are snake spells in Egyptian pyramid texts, dated around the mid-third millennium BC.

Proto-Semitic itself must have been spoken before the emergence of its daughters, so some time before the earliest attestation of Akkadian, and sufficiently long so for the changes leading from it to Akkadian to have taken place, which would place it in the fourth millennium BC or earlier.

Linguistic homeland

Since all modern Semitic languages can be traced back to a common ancestor, Semiticists have placed importance on locating the ''Urheimat'' of the Proto-Semitic language. The linguistic homeland 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 2nd millennium BC.

There is also evidence that Mesopotamia and adjoining areas of modern Syria were originally inhabited by a non-Semitic population. Non-Semitic toponyms preserved in Akkadian and Eblaite suggest this.

Levant hypothesis

A Bayesian analysis performed in 2009 suggests an origin for all known Semitic languages in the Levant around 3750 BC, with a later single introduction from South Arabia into the Horn of Africa around 800 BC. 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.

In another variant of the theory, the earliest wave of Semitic speakers entered the Fertile Crescent via the Levant and eventually founded the Akkadian Empire. Their relatives, the Amorites, followed them and settled Syria before 2500 BC. Late Bronze Age collapse in Israel led the South Semites to move southwards where they settled the highlands of Yemen after the 20th century BC until those crossed Bab-el-Mandeb to the Horn of Africa between 1500 and 500 BC.

Phonology

Vowels

Proto-Semitic had a simple vowel system, with three qualities *a, *i, *u, and phonemic vowel length, conventionally indicated by a macron: *ā, *ī, *ū. This system is preserved in Classical Arabic.

Consonants

The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic was originally based primarily on Arabic, whose phonology and morphology (particularly in Classical Arabic) 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 (as usually transcribed in Semitology):

The reconstructed phonemes *s *z *ṣ *ś *ṣ́ *ṯ̣, which are shown to be phonetically affricates in the table above, may also be interpreted as fricatives (), as discussed below. This was the traditional reconstruction and is reflected in the choice of signs.

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 (normally written *g *k *q)
* Dental sibilants *z *s *ṣ
* Interdental (written *ḏ *ṯ *ṯ̣)
* Lateral (normally written *l *ś *ṣ́)

The probable phonetic realization of most consonants is straightforward and is indicated in the table with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Two subsets of consonants, however, deserve further comment.

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.That explains the lack of voicing distinction in the emphatic series, which would be unnecessary if the emphatics were pharyngealized. Thus, *ṭ, for example, represents . See below for the fricatives/affricates.

In modern Semitic languages, emphatics are variously realized as pharyngealized (Arabic, Aramaic, Tiberian Hebrew (such as )), glottalized ( Ethiopian Semitic languages, Modern South Arabian languages, such as ), or as tenuis consonants ( Turoyo language of Tur Abdin such as ); Ashkenazi Hebrew and Maltese are exceptions and emphatics merge into plain consonants in various ways under the influence of Indo-European languages ( Sicilian for Maltese, various languages for Hebrew).

An emphatic labial *ṗ occurs in some Semitic languages, but it is unclear whether it was a phoneme in Proto-Semitic.
* The classical Ethiopian Semitic language Geʽez is unique among Semitic languages for contrasting all three of , , and . While and occur mostly in loanwords (especially from Greek), there are many other occurrences whose origin is less clear (such as ''hepʼä'' 'strike', ''häppälä'' 'wash clothes').
* According to Hetzron, Hebrew developed an emphatic labial phoneme ''ṗ'' to represent unaspirated in Iranian and Greek.

Fricatives

The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic has nine fricative sounds that are reflected usually as sibilants in later languages, but whether all were already sibilants in Proto-Semitic is debated:
*Two voiced fricatives that eventually became, for example, for both in Hebrew and Geʽez (/ð/ in early Geʽez), but and in Arabic respectively
* Four voiceless fricatives
** () that became in Hebrew (שׁ) but in Arabic and /s/ in Geʽez (/θ/ in early Geʽez)
** () that became in Hebrew (שׁ) but in Arabic and Geʽez
** () that became (שׂ, transcribed ''ś'') in Hebrew, in Arabic and /ɬ/ in Geʽez
** () that became in Hebrew, Arabic and Geʽez
* Three emphatic fricatives ()

The precise sound of the Proto-Semitic fricatives, notably of , , and , remains a perplexing problem, and there are various systems of notation to describe them. The notation given here is traditional and is based on their pronunciation in Hebrew, which has traditionally been extrapolated to Proto-Semitic. The notation , , is found primarily in the literature on Old South Arabian, but more recently, it has been used by some authors to discuss Proto-Semitic to express a noncommittal view of the pronunciation of the sounds. However, the older transcription remains predominant in most literature, often even among scholars who either disagree with the traditional interpretation or remain noncommittal.

The traditional view, as expressed in the conventional transcription and still maintained by some of the authors in the field is that was a voiceless postalveolar fricative (), was a voiceless alveolar sibilant () and was a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (). Accordingly, is seen as an emphatic version of () as a voiced version of it () and as an emphatic version of (). The reconstruction of as lateral fricatives (or affricates) is certain although few modern languages preserve the sounds. The pronunciation of as is still maintained in the Modern South Arabian languages (such as Mehri), 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'' (hence English "balsam"), and the 8th-century Arab grammarian Sibawayh explicitly described the Arabic descendant of , now pronounced in the standard pronunciation or in Bedouin-influenced dialects, as a pharyngealized voiced lateral fricative . (Compare Spanish ''alcalde'', from Andalusian Arabic ''al-qāḍī'' "judge".)

The primary disagreements concern whether the sounds were actually fricatives in Proto-Semitic or whether some were affricates, and whether the sound designated was pronounced (or similar) 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 (but partly orthogonal) 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 as an affricate . The "maximal affricate" position additionally posits that were actually affricates while 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 were . The "maximal affricate, maximal extension" position assumes not only the "maximal affricate" position for sibilants but also that non-emphatic were actually affricates.

Affricates in Proto-Semitic were proposed early on but met little acceptance until the work of Alice Faber (1981), who challenged the older approach. The Semitic languages that have survived often have fricatives for these consonants. However, Ethiopic languages and Modern Hebrew, in many reading traditions, have an affricate for .

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 (only was an affricate ) 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 (early centuries AD): ''ṣəyāmo'' rendered as Greek ''τζιαμω'' ''tziamō''.
* The Hebrew reading tradition of as clearly goes back at least to medieval times, as shown by the use of Hebrew () to represent affricates in early New Persian, Old Osmanli Turkic, Middle High German, Yiddish, etc. Similarly, in Old French

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