Semitic

Semitic is an adjective referring to the peoples who have traditionally spoken Semitic languages or to things pertaining to them. Genetic analysis suggests that the Semitic peoples share a significant common ancestry, despite important differences and contributions from other groups. This genetic commonality applies less in the Horn of Africa, however, where indigenous non-Middle Eastern populations may have adopted Semitic language(s) over time due to cultural influence from immigrants from Yemen. There is much debate about the scope of the word's "racial" use in the context of population genetics and history, but as a linguistic term it is well-defined, referring to a largely Middle Eastern family of languages — ancient and modern — including Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian (Syriac), Babylonian (Akkadian), Hebrew, Maltese, and Tigrigna. The Proto-Semitic peoples, ancestors of the Semites in the Middle East before the break-up of the hypothesized original (proto-)Semitic language into various modern Semitic languages, are thought to have been originally from the Arabian Peninsula.

Geography

Semitic peoples and their languages in modern and ancient historic times have covered a broad area bridging Africa, Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula -- although the earliest "homeland" of Semitic speakers did not apparently include Africa. The earliest historic (written) evidences of them are found in the Fertile Crescent, an area encompassing the Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, extending northwest into southern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant along the eastern Mediterranean. (Today this same region is populated by Arabic speakers except for Israel, where modern Hebrew was reintroduced in the 20th century as the national language.) Early traces of Semitic speakers are found, too, in South Arabian inscriptions in Yemen and later, in Roman times, in Nabataean inscriptions from Petra (modern Jordan) south into Arabia. (Here, too, Arabic has largely won out over the original Semitic tongues.) Later expansions of Semitic languages and peoples are found into the Horn of Africa, especially Ethiopia, the last great holdout of South Semitic languages, and into North Africa at two widely separated periods. The first expansion occurred with the ancient Phoenicians, the name given by the Greeks to the Canaanites, along the southern Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (colonies which included ancient Rome's nemesis Carthage). The second, a millennium later, occurred with the expansion of the Muslim armies and Arabic in the 7th-8th centuries AD, which, at their height, controlled the Hispanic Peninsula and Sicily. Arab Muslim expansion is also responsible for modern Arabic's presence from Mauretania, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, to the Red Sea in the northeastern corner of Africa, and it's reach south along the Nile River through traditionally non-Semitic territory, as far as the northern half of Sudan, where, as the national language, non-Arab Sudanese even farther south must learn it. Semitic languages today are also spoken in Malta (where an Italian-influenced dialect of North African Arabic is spoken) and on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean between Yemen and Somalia, where a dying vestige of South Arabian is spoken in the form of Soqotri.

Related Topics:
Fertile Crescent - Tigris - Euphrates - Asia Minor - Turkey - Levant - Israel - Modern Hebrew - Yemen - Nabataean - Petra - Jordan - Horn of Africa - Ethiopia - North Africa - Phoenician - Atlantic Ocean - Carthage - Hispanic Peninsula - Sicily - Mauretania - West Africa - Red Sea - Nile River - Sudan - Malta - Socotra - Indian Ocean - Somalia - Soqotri

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