“EAST SEMITIC”
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“SOUTH SEMITIC”
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(the semitic languages are a branch of the ‘afro-asiatic language’ family originating in the ‘middle east’)
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(‘semitic languages’ are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of ‘western asia’, ‘anatolia’, ‘north africa’, and the ‘horn of africa’, as well as in often large ‘expatriate communities’ in ‘north america’ and ‘europe’, with smaller communities in ‘south america’, ‘australasia’, ‘the caucasus’, and ‘central asia’)
(the ‘terminology’ was first used in the ‘1780s’ by members of the ‘göttingen school of history’, who derived the name from ‘shem’ (eldest?) 1 of the 3 sons of ‘noah’ in the ‘book of genesis’)
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(the most widely spoken ‘semitic languages’ today are) –>
‘arabic’
(~ 300 million speakers)
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‘amharic’
(~ 22 million speakers)
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‘tigrinya’
(~ 7 million speakers)
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‘hebrew’
(~ 5 million speakers)
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‘aramaic’
(~ ‘575,000’ – ‘1 million’ speakers)
.
‘maltese’
(~ 520,000 speakers)
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(NOTE: “numbers given are for ‘native speakers’ (aka ‘L1’) only”)
(is “fluency” a measure of ‘language comprehension / expressive ‘level’ only for ‘non-native speakers’?)
(how common is/was it for a human being to lack ‘fluency’ in any language?)
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(‘semitic languages’ occur in ‘written form’ from a very early historical date, with ‘east semitic akkadian’ and ‘eblaite’ texts (written in a script adapted from ‘sumerian cuneiform’) appearing from the ’29th century BCE’ and the ’25th century BCE’ in ‘mesopotamia’ and the ‘northern levant’ respectively)
(however, most ‘scripts’ used to write ‘semitic languages’ are ‘abjads’ (a type of ‘alphabetic script’ that omits some or all of the ‘vowels’) which is ‘feasible’ for these ‘languages’ because the ‘consonants’ in the ‘semitic languages’ are the “primary carriers of ‘meaning'”)
(among them are the ‘ugaritic’, ‘phoenician’, ‘aramaic’, ‘hebrew’, ‘syriac’, ‘arabic’, and ‘south arabian’ alphabets)
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(the ‘ge’ez script’ (used for writing the semitic languages of ‘ethiopia’ and ‘eritrea’) is technically an ‘abugida’…)
“ABUGIDA” –>
(a modified ‘abjad’ in which ‘vowels’ are notated using ‘diacritic marks’ added to the ‘consonants’ at all times…)
(…in contrast with other ‘semitic languages’ which indicate ‘diacritic (marks)’ based on ‘need’ or for ‘introductory purposes’)
X
(‘maltese’ is the only ‘semitic language’ written in the ‘latin script’ and the only ‘semitic language’ to be an ‘official language’ of the ‘european union’)
X
(the ‘semitic languages’ are notable for their ‘non-concatenative morphology’)
(that is, ‘word roots’ are not themselves ‘syllables’ or ‘words’, but instead are ‘isolated sets of ‘consonants” (usually ‘3’, making a so-called triliteral root))
(‘words’ are composed out of ‘roots’ not so much by adding ‘prefixes’ or ‘suffixes’, but rather by filling in the ‘vowels’ between the ‘root consonants’ (although ‘prefixes’ and ‘suffixes’ are often added as well))
(for example, in ‘arabic’, the root meaning “write” has the form k-t-b)
(from this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants, e.g. كتاب kitāb “book”, كتب kutub “books”, كاتب kātib “writer”, كتّاب kuttāb “writers”, كتب kataba “he wrote”, يكتب yaktubu “he writes”, etc)
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*👨🔬🕵️♀️🙇♀️*SKETCHES*🙇♂️👩🔬🕵️♂️*
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👈👈👈☜*“AFRO-ASIATIC LANGUAGES”* ☞ 👉👉👉
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💕💝💖💓🖤💙🖤💙🖤💙🖤❤️💚💛🧡❣️💞💔💘❣️🧡💛💚❤️🖤💜🖤💙🖤💙🖤💗💖💝💘
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*🌈✨ *TABLE OF CONTENTS* ✨🌷*
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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥*we won the war* 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥