Summary Linguistic History of the Middle East

Week 1 Introduction




Disciplines of linguistics:

Phonology: the study of sound systems in a language
Syntax: the study of the organization of words
Morphology: the study of the parts of words
Semantics: the study of meaning which is context independent
Pragmatics: the study of the purpose and result of a linguistic art  f.e. not
accepting food

Diachronic linguistics: the study of a language that changed over time
(stammbaumtheorie)

Synchronic linguistics: the study of languages at a particular stage in it’s
development (usually now).

Sociolinguistics: the meaning of language in society



Proto-semitic: the language where al semitic languages derive from.

,Week 2 The semitic languages I

Oldest Semitic language: Akkadian
It has two major dialects: Assyrian and Babylonian

The goal of ‘familytrees’: to reconstruct the missing steps and eventually find the
proto-language.
A language family has similarity in vocabulary and grammar.
We distinguish two types of vocabulary: cognate and loanword.

Proto-Semitic: the reconstructed origin of all Semitic languages.  Descends from
Proto-Afro-Asiatic.
Common theory: it started in the Levant.

Common features of the Semitic languages:
-Consonantal roots
-Templatic Morphology (prefixes, suffixes)
-Grammatical gender (masculine, feminine)



Akkadian
-Mesopotamia  Akkadian Empire

-Important literary language

Akkadian got heavily influenced by the non-
semitic language Sumerian.
Sumarian: a prestige language in the region
 also a liturgical language (important in religion)
They both influence each other a lot, due to the meeting of their speakers.



Writing systems
Scripts can be transmitted independently  it does not go together with the spoken
language.
Common froms of writing systems: cuneiform, hieroglyphic, runiform, etc.

Popular families of writing systems: Latin alphabet, Arabic script, Cyrillic



The emergence of writing: in trade deals had to be promised, and noted
somewhere
 bulla  pre-literate markings indicating property & transactions

, The emergence of writing:
Pictrogram: a symbol that represents the thing pictorally
Ideogram: a symbol which represents the idea of the thing abstractly
 The Rebus principle

Week 3 The semitic languages II

Arabian languages: languages whose early history has been mostly associated with
the Arabian Paeninsula.

 Arabic
 Old North Arabian
 Old/Epigraphic South Arabian
 Modern South Arabian

Pre-Islamic Arabic
Before islam: Jahiliyya = ignorance
Arabs were mostly isolated nomads  the more isolated the ‘purer’ the Arabic

Classified Pre-Islamic Arabian: Nabataean Arabic, Old Higazi, Safaitic ….
Pre-Islamic Arabic probably came from the Southern Levant, Northern Arabia

Arabic and the Qur’an
-Special status of the (classical) Arabic language
-The language of Qur’an differs slightly from Classical Arabic

Classical Arabic
Important texts in classical Arabic: hadit, fiqh

Diglossia: describes a situation in a society wherein there exist two very different
varieties of the same language at use simultaneously in different spheres within that
society. (Arabic)

Arabic dialects: Egyptian, Maghrebi, Gulf, Levantine, Iraqi

Mutual intelligibility depends on many factors:
-Level of education
-Experience with other dialects
-Exposure to media

White Arabic: the phenomenon where people who speak different dialects attempt
to minimize hard-to-understand dialectal features and so to understand each other.

Maltese: most closely resembles Tunesian  Maltese is written in Latin script.

Old/Epigraphic South Ararbian: Sabean, Hadramitic, Minaean, Qatabanian.
 No living descendents.