Puneet Varma (Editor)

Canaanite languages

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Geographic distribution:
  
Levant, Carthage

Glottolog:
  
cana1267

Linguistic classification:
  
Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite

Subdivisions:
  
Phoenician (extinct) Hebrew: Biblical Hebrew (Israelite) / Moabite /Ammonite / Edomite

The Canaanite languages or Canaanite dialects are one of the two subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the other being the Aramaic language. They were spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, the Canaanites, broadly defined to include the Israelites, Phoenicians, Amorites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites.

Contents

All of them seem to have become extinct as native languages by the early 1st millennium CE, although distinct forms of Hebrew remained in continuous literary and religious use among Jews and Samaritans, while Punic remained in use in the Mediterranean.

This family of languages has the distinction of being the first historically attested group of languages to use an alphabet, derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, to record their writings.

The primary reference for extra-biblical Canaanite inscriptions, together with Aramaic inscriptions, is the German-language book "Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften", from which inscriptions are often referenced as KAI n (for a number n).

Comparison to Aramaic

Some distinctive typological features of Canaanite in relation to Aramaic are:

  • The prefix h- used as the definite article (Aramaic has a postfixed -a). That seems to be an innovation of Canaanite.
  • The first person pronoun being ʼnk (אנכ anok(i), versus Aramaic ʼnʼ/ʼny', which is similar to Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian and Berber.
  • The *ā > ō vowel shift (Canaanite shift).

    • Descendants

    Modern Hebrew as a spoken language is the result of a revival by Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries in an effort spearheaded by Eliezer Ben Yehuda. It is currently spoken as the colloquial language by the majority of the Israeli population.

    Various liturgical Hebrew languages survived into the modern era:

  • Tiberian Hebrew – Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in Palestine c. 750-950 CE.
  • Mizrahi Hebrew – Mizrahi Jews, liturgical
  • Yemenite Hebrew – Yemenite Jews, liturgical
  • Sephardi Hebrew – Sephardi Jews, liturgical
  • Ashkenazi Hebrew – Ashkenazi Jews, liturgical
  • Mishnaic Hebrew (Rabbinical Hebrew) – Jews, liturgical, rabbinical, any of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud.
  • Medieval Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, poetical, rabbinical, scientific, literary; lingua franca based on Bible, Mishna and neologisms forms created by translators and commentators
  • Haskala Hebrew – Jews, scientific, literary and journalistic language based on Biblical but enriched with neologisms created by writers and journalists, a transition to the later
  • Samaritan Hebrew – Samaritans, liturgical

    • The Phoenician and Carthaginian expansion spread the Phoenician language and its Punic dialect to the Western Mediterranean for a time, but there too it died out, although it seems to have survived slightly longer than in Phoenicia itself.

    References

    Canaanite languages Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA