...The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family, the only branch of that family spoken in Asia. Like the other branches, it is also spoken in Africa. Read full entry
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- 1.Semitic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with ... The term "Semitic" for these languages, after Shem, the son of Noah in the Bible, ...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S
emitic_languages
- 2.Proto-Semitic language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- 4 Reflexes of Proto-Semitic sounds in daughter languages. 4.1 Consonants. 4.2 Vowels ... In historic times, the Semitic languages spread throughout the region via ...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P
roto-Semitic
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What are the languages-aside |
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The other Semitic languages besides Arabic are: Amharic, Tigrinya and Hebrew Maltese also counts as a Semitic language besides using the Latin Alphabet |
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Can any1 tell me what are the Can any1 tell me what are the
Semitic languages? And who are
the Semites.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S emitic_languages The Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 200 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and East Africa. They constitute the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only branch of this group spoken in Asia. The most widely spoken Semitic language today is Arabic (206 million speakers), followed by Amharic (27 million speakers), Hebrew (7 million speakers), and Tigrinya (6.75 million speakers). Semitic languages were among the earliest to attain a written form, with Akkadian writing beginning in the middle of the third millennium BC. The term "Semitic" for these languages, after Shem son of Noah, is etymologically a misnomer in some ways (see Semitic), but is nonetheless standard. and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S emitic In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic (from the Biblical "Shem", he:שם, translated as "name") was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages. This family includes the ancient and modern forms of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Maltese, Syriac, Tigrinya, etc. As language studies are interwoven with cultural studies, the term also came to describe the extended cultures and ethnicities, as well as the history of these varied peoples as associated by close geographic and linguistic distribution. The late 19th century term "anti-Semitism" came to be used in reference specifically to anti-Jewish sentiment, further complicating the understood meaning and boundaries of the term. Such usage, as well as the advent of population genetics, against which other once-useful ethnic terms show a biasing imprecision, has led to much debate about its scope and usefulness in science. ETHNICITY AND RACE In Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendents of Shem. By the nineteenth century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who have historically spoken Semitic languages. These peoples were often considered to be a distinct race. However, some anti-Semitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as Semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau. The notion that Semitic identity was a product of racial "confusion" was later taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg. Modern science, in contrast, identifies an ethnic group's common physical descent through genetic research, and analysis of the Semitic peoples suggests that they share a significant common ancestry. Though no significant common mitochondrial results have been yielded, Y-chromosomal links between Near-Eastern peoples like the Palestinians, Syrians and ethnic Jews have proved fruitful, despite differences contributed from other groups (see Y-chromosomal Aaron). Although population genetics is still a young science, it seems to indicate that a significant proportion of these peoples' ancestry comes from a common Near Eastern population to which (despite the differences with the Biblical genealogy) the term Semitic has been applied. |
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Is Himyaritic the most ancient |
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No. It is not the proto-semitic dialect; we aren't certain what it was. But the Himyaritic language is far,far older than Hebrew or Arabic. |
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