Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 250 million people across much of the Middle East, where they originated, and North and East Africa. They constitute the northeastern subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and the only family of this group spoken in Asia.

Grammar

The Semitic languages vary substantially in many aspects of their grammar. The original Verb Subject Object word order has given way in most languages to typologically commoner orders, sometimes, as in Ethiopia, under influence from other languages, while the proto-Semitic case system, fully preserved in classical Arabic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic, has disappeared everywhere. In the extreme case of Neo-Aramaic, even the verb conjugations have been entirely reworked under Iranian influence. The curious phenomenon of broken plurals, found most profusely in the languages of Arabia and northern Ethiopia, may be partly of proto-Semitic origin, but has been very substantially elaborated from its simpler origins in languages such as Arabic. Nonetheless, one typologically unusual feature is preserved almost everywhere: all Semitic languages exhibit a pattern of stems consisting of consonantal roots (usually consisting of 3 consonants), from which words are formed by imposing vowel changes, prefixes, suffixes, or infixes. For instance, in Hebrew:

Related Topics:
Verb Subject Object - Broken plural - Consonantal roots (usually consisting of 3 consonants)

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:gdl means "big" but is not a part of speech and not a word, just a root

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:gadol means "big" and is a masculine adjective

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:gdola means "big" (feminine adjective)

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:giddel means "he raised" (transitive verb)

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:gadal means "he grew" (intransitive verb)

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:higdil means "he magnified" (transitive verb)

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:magdelet means "magnifier" (lens)

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:spr is the root for "count" or "recount"

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:sefer means "book" (containing tales which are recounted)

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:sofer means "scribe" (Masoretic scribes counted verses), but also means "count" in the masculine singular present tense

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:mispar means "number".

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Other Afro-Asiatic languages show similar patterns, but more usually with biconsonantal roots; e.g. in Kabyle afeg means "fly!", while affug means "flight", and yufeg means "he flew".

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