All of the Semitic languages exhibit two genders, masculine and femi-nine, and nearly all nouns are construed as one or the other; the feminine is usually marked by an ending *-t or *-at (the ending *-t is present in forms such as delet “door” < *dal-t; the ending *-at is still present in Hebrew in construct forms such as malkat “queen of” but otherwise has become -â, as in malkâ). As in Hebrew, three numbers may be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic: singular, dual, and plural; the evidence of some of the lan-guages suggests that the dual was originally more widespread than it is in Hebrew; that is, it was used for “two” of anything, not merely for the parts of the body and certain fixed expressions.
Several of the Semitic languages, such as Akkadian, classical Arabic, and Ugaritic, exhibit a threefold case system, each of the cases marked, on singular nouns, by one of the short vowels after the base: -u for nomina-tive, -i for genitive (used after constructs and after prepositions), -a for accusative (for the direct object and in various adverbial uses). In Hebrew as well as in other languages (such as Aramaic, modern Arabic dialects, and late dialects of Akkadian), the case system has disappeared, leaving very lit-tle trace (except as connecting vowels before some of the pronominal suffixes, as in malkeek “your [fs] king,” from the originally genitive *malk-i-ki; and malkô/malkooh “his king,” from the originally nominative
*malk-u-hu).
5.2.2. PERSONALPRONOUNS
As in Hebrew, other Semitic languages exhibit both independent per-sonal pronouns (such as )aanookî, hî) ) and enclitic forms that are suffixed
to prepositions and nouns (indicating possession) and to verbs (indicating objects). The fourfold distinction of number and gender in the second-per-son forms (ms, fs, mp, fp) is also found throughout the Semitic family.
5.2.3. VERBS
The verbal system is the most complicated part of the morphology of any Semitic language. The Hebrew distinction between suffix conjugation (“perfect”) and prefix conjugation (“imperfect”) forms is found in all of the West Semitic languages (whereas in Akkadian, the form that corre-sponds in its shape to the West Semitic suffix conjugation is essentially a conjugated adjective, an old feature that can also still be seen in certain Hebrew stative verbs, such as zaaqeen “he is old”). Internal reconstruction within Hebrew suggests that the prefix conjugation may reflect more than one earlier form: for example, yaaqûm “he will arise” and yibneh “he will build” versus yaaqoom/wayyaaqom “may he arise/and he arose” and yiben/
wayyiben “may he build/and he built.” Comparison with other languages, especially Arabic, Ugaritic, and evidence in the Amarna Canaanite texts, confirms this, showing that imperfective forms such as yaaqûm derive from earlier forms with a final -u (*yaquumu), while the jussive and “waw-consecutive” forms yaaqoom and wayyaaqom originally had no final vowel (*yaqum). By the same token yiktoob “he will write” and yiktoob “may he write” derive from two distinct paradigms originally, the former from an imperfective form *yaktubu and the latter from a perfective form *yak-tub. What we think of as the “waw-conversive” or “waw-consecutive” of the “imperfect,” as in wayyiktoob “and he wrote,” likewise in fact reflects the old perfective form *yaktub (which is also why, in verbs that have a distinct form of the jussive, the jussive and the “waw-consecutive” form are essentially the same).
Hebrew exhibits a considerable number of verbal roots with phono-logical peculiarities, such as verbs I–n, verbs I–guttural, verbs I–y, and geminate verbs. Comparative evidence indicates that, apart from roots with w and y, especially as the middle radical (“hollow verbs”), these root types can be reconstructed as regular in Proto-Semitic.
The derived conjugations of Hebrew also reflect a common Semitic inheritance. In the following chart, for reference, are names, terms, or sigla for some of the derived conjugations of the other major languages. (In Ara-bic philology, the conjugations are called “measures” or “forms” and referred to by numbers, as in “second form” [= II]. The Ethiopic and Akkadian derived conjugations are denoted in some works by a numerical system, in other works by letters that convey a significant feature: G for [German] Grund-stamm [“basic stem”], D for doubled middle radical; C for causative [in Ethiopic]; N for prefixed n and SS for prefixed ss [in Akkadian]. The form cor-responding to the nip(al has been lost in Aramaic and in Ethiopic.)
Forms corresponding to the pu(al and hop(al (and to the qal passive) are attested in early Aramaic inscriptions and in Arabic. Other conjugations are found in some of the languages: just as the hitpa(el corresponds to the pi(el, many of the languages have a t-form corresponding to the G or qal (Aramaic )etpé(el, Arabic form VIII, Ethiopic Gt or III,1, Akkadian Gt or I/2; rare Hebrew vestiges of this conjugation are found in forms such as yitpaaqeed in Judg 21:9; hitpaaqédû in Judg 20:15, 17); Arabic and Ethiopic exhibit a conjugation with a lengthened vowel in the first syllable (kaataba; Arabic form III, Ethiopic L or I,3), which has been compared by some scholars with Hebrew forms such as roomeem “to exalt” and ssooreess “to take root.”
5.3. SYNTAX
Biblical Hebrew is a verb-first language; the normative word order is verb-subject-object. This is also true of classical Arabic, classical Ethiopic, and the earliest Aramaic texts, and it is probably the original common Semitic word order as well. The verb-final order of Akkadian is undoubt-edly the result of Sumerian influence.
The distinctive construct chain so common in biblical Hebrew is also found in all other ancient Semitic languages. But the extensive phonolog-ical changes undergone by Hebrew construct forms as the result of the loss of stress (as in béraakâ~birkat “blessing [of]”) do not occur in most of the other languages; in classical Arabic, for example, there is simply the loss of a final n that appears on nonconstruct forms: baytun “house,” baytu malikin “king’s house.”
6. RESOURCES
The works cited in this section are listed in the subsequent bibliogra-phy. There are a great many introductory books on comparative and historical linguistics; among the best of those published recently are those by Arlotto, Bynon, Campbell, Crowley, Fox, Hock and Joseph, Lehmann, McMahon, and Sihler.
The standard reference work for the comparative grammar of the Semitic languages was written by Carl Brockelmann nearly a century ago;
although naturally outdated in some respects, it remains indispensible Hebrew
despite the appearance of a more recent reference work by Lipingski, which also contains much useful information but is somewhat idiosyncratic.
Another early work, which introduces both Proto-Semitic and most of the individual languages, with text samples, is that of Bergsträsser, which was published in an English translation by Daniels with updated notes and bib-liography and with an appendix on Semitic scripts. A still-useful introduction to comparative Semitic studies is a volume written by a num-ber of leading experts and edited by Moscati. Another introduction, both to Semitic linguistics and to comparative-historical linguistics more gener-ally, complete with a good number of exercises for the student, is that of Bennett. A survey of all of the Semitic languages, both ancient and mod-ern, by leading scholars, is the 1997 work by Hetzron; Izre’el’s 2002 book is a collection of articles on the “state of the art” in Semitic linguistics at the turn of the century. Two recent German works on comparative and his-torical Semitic linguistics are by Kienast and Stempel, and a recent Italian volume is that of Garbini and Durand.
A monumental historical grammar of biblical Hebrew was published by Bauer and Leander in 1922. Although some of their underlying assump-tions are no longer held to be valid by most scholars, this volume presents an enormous amount of information. A collection of articles on various aspects of the field of linguistics with reference to biblical Hebrew was edited by Bodine in 1992.
There is no complete comparative dictionary of the Semitic languages, although two series are in the process of being published. The first is the Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques ou attestées dans les langues sémitiques edited by Cohen, which arranges roots according to the order of the Hebrew alphabet. As of 2001, eight fascicles covering roots beginning ) through z have appeared. The second is the Semitic Etymological Dictio-nary, edited by Militarev and Kogan, which will be a series of volumes covering various semantic fields, the first of which, Anatomy of Man and Animals, appeared in 2000.
An overview of the Asiatic languages and of comparative Afro-Asiatic grammar was presented by Diakonoff in 1988. A recently published Afro-Asiatic dictionary by Orel and Stolbova has been much criticized in reviews.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arlotto, Anthony. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Repr., Washington: American University, 1981.
Bauer, Hans, and Pontus Leander. Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des Alten Testaments. Halle: Niemeyer, 1922.
Bennett, Patrick R. Comparative Semitic Linguistics: A Manual. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998.
Bergsträsser, Gotthelf. Einführung in die semitischen Sprachen: Sprach-proben und grammatische Skizzen. Munich: Max Hueber, 1928.
Translated with notes, bibliography, and an appendix on the scripts by Peter T. Daniels as Introduction to the Semitic Languages: Text Specimens and Grammatical Sketches. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisen-brauns, 1983.
Bodine, Walter, ed. Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew. Winona Lake, Ind.:
Eisenbrauns, 1992.
Brockelmann, Carl. Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitis-chen Sprasemitis-chen. 2 vol. Berlin: von Reuther, 1908–1913.
Bynon, Theodora. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Campbell, Lyle. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edin-burgh University Press, 1998; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Cohen, David. Dictionnaire des racines sémitiques ou attestées dans les langues sémitiques. The Hague: Mouton; Leuven: Peters, 1970–.
Crowley, Terry. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3d ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.
Fox, Anthony. Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Garbini, Giovanni, and Olivier Durand. Introduzione alle lingue semitiche.
Studia sul Vicino Oriente antico 2. Brescia: Paideia, 1994.
Hetzron, Robert, ed. The Semitic Languages. London: Routledge, 1997.
Hock, Hans Henrich. Principles of Historical Linguistics. 2d ed. Berlin: Mou-ton de Gruyter, 1991.
Hock, Hans Henrich, and Brian D. Joseph. Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.
Hurvitz, Avi. The Transition Period in Biblical Hebrew: A Study in Post Exilic Hebrew and Its Implications for the Dating of Psalms. (Hebrew) Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1972.
International Phonetic Association. Handbook of the International Pho-netic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International PhoPho-netic Alphabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Izre’el, Shlomo, ed. Semitic Linguistics: The State of the Art at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. IOS 20. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002.
Kienast, Burchart. Historische semitische Sprachwissenschaft. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 2001.
Lehmann, Winfred P. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. 3d ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1992.
Lipingski, Edward. Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar.
OLA 80. Leuven: Peeters/Departement Oosterse Studies, 1997.
Mankowski, Paul V. Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew. HSS 47.
Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2000.
McMahon, April M. S. Understanding Language Change. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1994.
Militarev, Alexander, and Leonid Kogan. Semitic Etymological Dictionary.
Vol. 1: Anatomy of Man and Animals. AOAT 278/1. Münster: Ugarit, 2000.
Moscati, Sabatino, ed. An Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages: Phonology and Morphology. Wiesbaden: Harras-sowitz, 1964.
Nebes, Norbert. “Zur Form der Imperfektbasis des unvermehrten Grund-stammes im Altsüdarabischen.” Pp. 59–81 in Semitische Studien unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Südsemitistik. Vol. 1 of Festschrift Ewald Wagner zum 65. Geburtstag. Edited by W. Heinrichs and G. Schoeler. Beirut and Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994.
Orel, Vladimir E., and Olga V. Stolbova. Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dic-tionary: Materials for a Reconstruction. Leiden: Brill, 1995.
Polzin, Robert. Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Bib-lical Hebrew Prose. HSM 12. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976.
Porkhomovsky, Victor. “Modern South Arabian Languages from a Semitic and Hamito-Semitic Perspective.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Ara-bian Studies 27 (1997): 219–23.
Rooker, Mark F. Biblical Hebrew in Transition: The Language of the Book of Ezekiel. JSOTSup 90. Worcester: Sheffield, 1990.
Sihler, Andrew L. Language History: An Introduction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000.
Stempel, Reinhard. Abriß einer historischen Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen. Nordostafrikanisch/Westasiatische Studien 3. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999.
Voigt, Rainer. “The Classification of Central Semitic.” JSS 32 (1987): 1–21.
Wagner, M. Die lexikalischen und grammatikalischen Aramaismen im alttestamentlichen Hebräisch. BZAW 96. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966.
David Marcus