For the investigative minds that are not easily satisfied... :D
Sumerian, the first script of the Middle East, emerged from the oral language spoken in Southern Mesopotamia. Like ancient Chinese and Egyptian, the initial form of presentation in Sumerian was pictorial graphs, which depended on visual positioning and concordance to accumulate vocabularies. It took Sumerians, like the Egyptians and Chinese, many centuries to abstract pictorial script into increasingly conventionalized symbols and evolve from pictorial to logo graphic and finally to graph syllabic script. During this process, Sumerian cuneiform substantially reduced its number of signs from more than 1,000 plus 500 variants to 600 signs by the 24th century BC, when the first written Akkadian record appeared.
Akkadian cuneiform transformed Sumerian from a logo graphic to a syllabic script,a transformation that had begun well before the beginning of the written Akkadian. Akkadian changed the fundamental structure of Sumerian cuneiform,which was built upon a chain of distinguishable words, prefixes and suffixes without any phonetic inflection. Akkadian gradually transformed cuneiform into a syllabic script. First, it established 3-consonant consonantal roots from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs were phonetically derived and organized. This not only substantially increased the size of vocabulary and created an inexhaustible repertoire of new words, but also established a phonetic foundation within the written language and built its grammatical form through the insertion of vowels,doubling consonants, and/or adding prefixes and suffixes.
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Semitic culture (poetry in various vernaculars and regional dialects and various forms of music) carried on in Middle Eastern towns after the disappearance of the great empires such as Babylonian-Assyrian. Amaraic, the oldest continuous
language of the Middle East became the common language before and after the demise of the Assyrian Empire. As a written language, Aramaic also survived Phoenician and overpowered Hebrew with its strength in oral form. However, as it began to spread in all directions, Aramaic lost much of its homogeneity.Different Aramaic dialects emerged in Mesopotamia, Babylon, the Levant and Egypt. The Aramaic of Assyrian inherited most Akkadian literary establishment and started to come to the fore. Aramaic became the official language of a Persian Empire from the 6th to the 4th centuries BC rather than that of Semitic middle east. It took Aramaic (Syriac later) another several centuries to became aliterary language for Middle Eastern Christians.Lacking a single common written language, the Semitics became further diversified and hybridized. Each of these languages became a multi-layered sum of locally accumulated and overlapped expressions. Semitic languages continuously diversified and moved further away from each other. Hebrew and Arabic, the two major descendants of Aramaic, which formerly shared almost fifty percent of their vocabularies and many common grammatical features, now went their separate ways.Hebrew and Arabic, the only continuous written languages in the Middle East exhibited two different tendencies of literary evolution and two different ways to reproduce rich Semitic heritage. This divergence derived from different timing and circumstances in which Hebrew and Arabic individually transformed from oral to written language. The best way to illustrate how this happened is through a comparative history of Hebrew and Arabic from their Aramaic roots until modern time.The first factor that determined the basic characteristics and historic tendencies of Hebrew and Arabic was the timing (up to seventeen centuries according to disputed chronology of Biblical writing) in which Hebrew and Arabic became written. Time alone made a world of difference in linguistic structure and characteristics as expressive variations accumulated, evolved, and crystallized.The Semitic heritage that each of them inherited and set about to carry on and reproduce was enormously different in degrees of maturity and refinement during the formative periods of Hebrew and Arabic. At the beginning of the first millennium BC, Hebrew was a young and vigorous language that had emerged from the periphery of the Sumer/Akkadian cultural center. Biblical Hebrew carried the rich narrative tradition of Sumer/Akkadian, as retold in Babylonian literature.Hebrew became written shortly (relative to the longer oral cultivation of Arabic poetry) after it began to be spoken as a distinct language that separated itself from Aramaic.Hebrew was the oldest surviving written language in the Middle East. But it did not invent the alphabetic writing; it utilized the alphabetic script from its northern Canaanite neighbors, the Phoenicians and Ugarite who arguably invented the world’s first alphabets. Both Phoenician and Ugarite died without producing an established literary tradition, Hebrew, using the template of the Phoenicians,became the fist surviving language that adopted the Semitic semi-alphabetic script. However, as a formative language evolving within a primitive vernacular,Hebrew needed many centuries to accumulate vocabulary and distil and polish expression and especially to cultivate phonetic precision; a difficult task to achieve in a semi-alphabetic language where phonetic precision was highly flexible and uncertain. Hebrew survived rather than other Semitic languages that were older and richer because it managed to establish a literary tradition that was cultivated and maintained by its religious writers.By the seventh century AD, when Arabic began to be written, Semitic language,especially the southern branch (from which Arabic emerged) had attained a mature poetic after several centuries of oral refinement. In this land of poetry,where storytellers were free from the shackles of written words, pre-Islamic poetry had flourished as the dominant mode of imagination and developed highly refined and polished forms .....
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Question --> what are the divisions within semitic languages?
Answer --> The Semitic languages are generally divided into three main groups: (1) Eastern Semitic; (2) Northwestern or Western Semitic; (3) Southwestern or Southern Semitic.
The East here refers to Mesopotamia, the Northwest (West) to the Middle East proper, i.e. Lebanon and Syria, and the Southwest (South) to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia. The Semitic languages are fairly closely interrelated -- approximately as closely as the various Germanic or Romance languages.
A) The East Semitic branch consists of only one language: Akkadian. This language is known from cuneiform inscriptions found in Mesopotamia dating from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC.
B)The Northwestern Semitic branch main groups are:
1) the ancient languages Amorite and Ugaritic, (2) the Canaanite languages and, (3) Aramaic
C) The southwestern Semitic branch include (1) the South Arabian languages, (2) Arabic and (3) the Ethiopian languages.
Sumerian, the first script of the Middle East, emerged from the oral language spoken in Southern Mesopotamia. Like ancient Chinese and Egyptian, the initial form of presentation in Sumerian was pictorial graphs, which depended on visual positioning and concordance to accumulate vocabularies. It took Sumerians, like the Egyptians and Chinese, many centuries to abstract pictorial script into increasingly conventionalized symbols and evolve from pictorial to logo graphic and finally to graph syllabic script. During this process, Sumerian cuneiform substantially reduced its number of signs from more than 1,000 plus 500 variants to 600 signs by the 24th century BC, when the first written Akkadian record appeared.
Akkadian cuneiform transformed Sumerian from a logo graphic to a syllabic script,a transformation that had begun well before the beginning of the written Akkadian. Akkadian changed the fundamental structure of Sumerian cuneiform,which was built upon a chain of distinguishable words, prefixes and suffixes without any phonetic inflection. Akkadian gradually transformed cuneiform into a syllabic script. First, it established 3-consonant consonantal roots from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs were phonetically derived and organized. This not only substantially increased the size of vocabulary and created an inexhaustible repertoire of new words, but also established a phonetic foundation within the written language and built its grammatical form through the insertion of vowels,doubling consonants, and/or adding prefixes and suffixes.
______________________________________________
Semitic culture (poetry in various vernaculars and regional dialects and various forms of music) carried on in Middle Eastern towns after the disappearance of the great empires such as Babylonian-Assyrian. Amaraic, the oldest continuous
language of the Middle East became the common language before and after the demise of the Assyrian Empire. As a written language, Aramaic also survived Phoenician and overpowered Hebrew with its strength in oral form. However, as it began to spread in all directions, Aramaic lost much of its homogeneity.Different Aramaic dialects emerged in Mesopotamia, Babylon, the Levant and Egypt. The Aramaic of Assyrian inherited most Akkadian literary establishment and started to come to the fore. Aramaic became the official language of a Persian Empire from the 6th to the 4th centuries BC rather than that of Semitic middle east. It took Aramaic (Syriac later) another several centuries to became aliterary language for Middle Eastern Christians.Lacking a single common written language, the Semitics became further diversified and hybridized. Each of these languages became a multi-layered sum of locally accumulated and overlapped expressions. Semitic languages continuously diversified and moved further away from each other. Hebrew and Arabic, the two major descendants of Aramaic, which formerly shared almost fifty percent of their vocabularies and many common grammatical features, now went their separate ways.Hebrew and Arabic, the only continuous written languages in the Middle East exhibited two different tendencies of literary evolution and two different ways to reproduce rich Semitic heritage. This divergence derived from different timing and circumstances in which Hebrew and Arabic individually transformed from oral to written language. The best way to illustrate how this happened is through a comparative history of Hebrew and Arabic from their Aramaic roots until modern time.The first factor that determined the basic characteristics and historic tendencies of Hebrew and Arabic was the timing (up to seventeen centuries according to disputed chronology of Biblical writing) in which Hebrew and Arabic became written. Time alone made a world of difference in linguistic structure and characteristics as expressive variations accumulated, evolved, and crystallized.The Semitic heritage that each of them inherited and set about to carry on and reproduce was enormously different in degrees of maturity and refinement during the formative periods of Hebrew and Arabic. At the beginning of the first millennium BC, Hebrew was a young and vigorous language that had emerged from the periphery of the Sumer/Akkadian cultural center. Biblical Hebrew carried the rich narrative tradition of Sumer/Akkadian, as retold in Babylonian literature.Hebrew became written shortly (relative to the longer oral cultivation of Arabic poetry) after it began to be spoken as a distinct language that separated itself from Aramaic.Hebrew was the oldest surviving written language in the Middle East. But it did not invent the alphabetic writing; it utilized the alphabetic script from its northern Canaanite neighbors, the Phoenicians and Ugarite who arguably invented the world’s first alphabets. Both Phoenician and Ugarite died without producing an established literary tradition, Hebrew, using the template of the Phoenicians,became the fist surviving language that adopted the Semitic semi-alphabetic script. However, as a formative language evolving within a primitive vernacular,Hebrew needed many centuries to accumulate vocabulary and distil and polish expression and especially to cultivate phonetic precision; a difficult task to achieve in a semi-alphabetic language where phonetic precision was highly flexible and uncertain. Hebrew survived rather than other Semitic languages that were older and richer because it managed to establish a literary tradition that was cultivated and maintained by its religious writers.By the seventh century AD, when Arabic began to be written, Semitic language,especially the southern branch (from which Arabic emerged) had attained a mature poetic after several centuries of oral refinement. In this land of poetry,where storytellers were free from the shackles of written words, pre-Islamic poetry had flourished as the dominant mode of imagination and developed highly refined and polished forms .....
_______________________________________________
Question --> what are the divisions within semitic languages?
Answer --> The Semitic languages are generally divided into three main groups: (1) Eastern Semitic; (2) Northwestern or Western Semitic; (3) Southwestern or Southern Semitic.
The East here refers to Mesopotamia, the Northwest (West) to the Middle East proper, i.e. Lebanon and Syria, and the Southwest (South) to the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia. The Semitic languages are fairly closely interrelated -- approximately as closely as the various Germanic or Romance languages.
A) The East Semitic branch consists of only one language: Akkadian. This language is known from cuneiform inscriptions found in Mesopotamia dating from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC.
B)The Northwestern Semitic branch main groups are:
1) the ancient languages Amorite and Ugaritic, (2) the Canaanite languages and, (3) Aramaic
C) The southwestern Semitic branch include (1) the South Arabian languages, (2) Arabic and (3) the Ethiopian languages.