# What is the closest language to Arabic?



## Ali.h

Is it Farsi or Urdu or Daari or another language? My own guess would be Farsi. What do you guys think?


----------



## arsham

Hebrew and various Syriac/Assyrian dialects!


----------



## Masjeen

> is it farsi or urdu or daari or another language? my own guess would be farsi what do you guys think?


 
Urdu is Amazing its Full of Arabic words and also Farsi wich I learn it by myself in less than a month


----------



## Mahaodeh

Upt to my knowledge, Hebrew is the closest language to Arabic with Aramaic a close runner up.

While Urdu and Persian have a lot of Arabic loan words, the languages are so different that most of the time comparing between them does not make sense.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Ugaritic was also very close to Arabic in many respects, although extinct now.


----------



## berndf

Arabic is classified together with Northwest Semitic langaues as a Central Semitic language (see this recent discussion in this forum on Central Semitic languages). Members of the Northwest-Semitic have been named above. Other close relatives are South Arabian and Ethiopic (notably Ge`ez) languages. None of the languages you mentioned (Farsi, Urdu and Daari) is a Semitic language.


----------



## Masjeen

berndf said:


> Arabic is classified together with Northwest Semitic langaues as a Central Semitic language (see this recent discussion in this forum on Central Semitic languages). Members of the Northwest-Semitic have been named above. Other close relatives are South Arabian and Ethiopic (notably Ge`ez) languages. None of the languages you mentioned (Farsi, Urdu and Daari) is a Semitic language.



Well, who cares about the classifications. As long as 30% of the Persian words is a Arabic words.  Languages are words per se.​


----------



## Abu Rashid

> well who cares about the Classifications




Is English a Romance language because much of its vocabulary is of Romance-origin??




> Languages are words per se




No they are not. Without grammar syntax etc. you've got no idea what's going on in a language. You may get a vague idea of the meaning of a text/conversation, or the topics it touches on but you will not really understand.


----------



## Masjeen

Abu Rashid said:


> Is English a Romance language because much of its vocabulary is of Romance-origin??
> No they are not. Without grammar syntax etc. you've got no idea what's going on in a language. You may get a vague idea of the meaning of a text/conversation, or the topics it touches on but you will not really understand.


 
Here in Kuwait we are also studying French in our schools and I was understand French quickly even without Explanation because it is so similar to English So who cares about the classifications.

And yes the words are so important If you understand the whole speech you will understand gradually the grammars as you did when you was a child.


----------



## relativamente

Masjeen said:


> Well, who cares about the classifications. As long as 30% of the Persian words is a Arabic words. Languages are words per se.​


Another language with a lot of Arabic words is Swahili. Even the noun Swahili is from Arabic origin meaning the language of the coast,سَاحِل since was used in the coast of Kenia Tanzania and other East african countries. But Swahili is a Bantu language, and the words taken from Arabic are treated like Bantu words. Nothing to do with Arabic apart from a lot of lexic borrowings.


----------



## Frank06

Masjeen said:


> Well, who cares about the classifications. As long as 30% of the Persian words is a Arabic words. Languages are words per se.​


First, one should understand the criteria used in the classification of languages and language families. 
Secondly, it's rather naive to say that "languages are words per se". 
Thirdly, the lexicon is only one of the parameters used in language classification, and not necessarily the most important one. Both Arabic and Persian have a long history and we can classify them (mainly in these cases) on historical (and obviously grammatical) grounds. The role of the lexicon of a language in this classification should not be overrated. Neither should the historical aspects (as far as they can be studied) be underestimated. The presence of an overwhelming amount of Arabic words in Persian (or, as mentioned earlier, the amount of Romance words in English) is not a reason to classify Persian as Arabic or Semitic (or English as Romance).

But I do agree with you in one respect and up to a certain degree: although I am 100% sure that the classification of a language can be a very handy tool (or rather, a shortcut), its importancy shouldn't be exaggerated.

And no, for the average student studying this or that language, the classification isn't that important. As a topic for discussion on this forum, however, it is. I hope you notice the different context (the clue is in the name of this forum).

I do realise it's not a very good comparison, but I think one could look at e.g. "Central Semitic" as the coordinates of a place on a map. The coordinates are very handy to find back the location very quickly, maybe give a first impression of what the location looks like (what to expect and what not to expect), but that's it.
Of course that classification doesn't tell us anything about how the people at that location interact(ed) with its neighbours economically and culturally.
*[Edit*]And in the case of Arabic and Persian, the classification, the whole branch/tree indeed reflects their history, albeit very very partially. *[/Edit]*

This relative importancy is quite well reflected in the average Wikipedia article (to give just one very accessible example), where the bulk of the article is about the language itself. The classification can often be found somewhere on the right (or left) in small print.

Frank


----------



## Ellis91

Masjeen said:


> Here in Kuwait We are also studying French in our schools and i was understand French quickly even without Explanation because it is so similar to English So who cares about the Classifications..
> 
> and yes the words are so important If you understand the whole speech you will understand gradually the grammars as you did when you was a child


There's more to it than just classification. Farsi didn't evolve from Proto-Semitic or Afro-Asiatic and so it's not related to Arabic. English didn't evolve from Latin so it's not Romance.


----------



## Hulalessar

Masjeen said:


> Well, who cares about the classifications. As long as 30% of the Persian words is a Arabic words.  Languages are words per se.​



Any system of classification to be used in a discipline has to be scientific. You could classify animals according to the number of legs they have, but that would not be scientific; zoologists classify animals according to how they are related genetically. It is the same with languages. Like any system of classification it can produce results that appear to the non-specialist to be odd.

The English language is a prime example. It is classified as Germanic. However any monolingual English speaker is going to find almost any text in a Germanic language other than English opaque to the point of being virtually incomprehensible. On the other hand, presented with a text in a Romance language he is likely to recognise many words, the number depending on the subject matter of the text; in some cases he may even get a fairly good idea of what the text is about even if he is uncertain of what is being said. None of that makes English a Romance language.


----------



## koniecswiata

Good point made by Frank06.  But, I think, for a learner, or a non-linguist, the lexicon is more important at the end of the day than the grammar.
Languages are classified as belonging to groups of languages with whom the share a "genetic" relationship, yet, the whole issue of "borrowing" (a stupid term, I think) confuses things.  So, you can end up with a situation where Farsi is classified as being more related to English, yet, for all practical purposes, especially in the lexis, it is more similar to Arabic.
What's at the root of things:  Lexicalized grammar or grammaticalized lexis?


----------



## Frank06

*Hi,*

*We think that the issue of genetic classification in itself, and questions like why, how, what's its use, for whom (and for whom not) deserves a thread on its own.*

*So, we'd like to ask to concentrate upon the main topic of this thread (though I think the original question has been answered) and we'd like to invite people to open a new thread on the topic of genetic classification.*

*The moment such a new thread has been started, we cross-link to this thread (and probably to a dozen of other threads in which this issue popped up).*

*Groetjes,*

*Frank*
*Moderator EHL*


----------



## Outsider

Maltese is also close to Arabic.


----------



## clevermizo

Outsider said:


> Maltese is also close to Arabic.



Good point! Actually, Maltese is *the* closest, since it is a daughter of Arabic and hasn't strayed too far . Some however may not accept this because some consider Maltese an Arabic dialect, in which case it simply is Arabic.


----------



## arbelyoni

I'd say that the closest living relative of Arabic is Aramaic (or in its modern form: Syriac), with Hebrew right after it.

Farsi, Turkish and Urdu may have some loanwords and similar script, but they originate from different groups of languages.


----------



## Riyadh1974

Maltese of course!!


----------



## JGreco

I agree that technically, by far Maltese is the closest. I also can understand some who point out the same situation with my experience with monolingual speakers of English that especially exist in The United States. There was a survey done at my school that took different texts from Germanic languages (German, Dutch, and Danish), Romance texts (Spanish, French, and Italian) and made the monolingual students try to cold read and figure out what each text was saying. Furthermore, they made the students listen to the spoken form of each language. The texts and spoken verse were completely different to keep the students from logically deducing the texts and so that they would simply try to figure out the texts and recordings using their general knowledge of English. . Overwhelmingly, the texts that came out as the most understandable were the Spanish and French texts while in spoken form, the Spanish and Italian recordings came out way ahead of every other recording. The least understandable both spoken and written were German and Danish with Dutch fairing pretty well, but below all the Romance languages. We studied this for two semesters in are Language and Culture classes. It was fascinating to hear the results, but it also reveals that close genetic relationship has no relation to intelligibility. 

Sorry I strayed but here is my complete point as it relates to the discussion. Like one has pointed just because Maltese maybe the closest to Arabic, but it does not mean that at a colloquial level, they can understand each other. I have spoken to a few Maltese that say they can understand Italian, English, and Spanish far better than they can understand Arabic simply because of the distant cultural relationship they have with the Arab world versus the close ties the Maltese have with Europe especially with Italy and The U.K, and the influx of Telenovelas that they receive in the country that closes ties to Europe furthering the distance from the Arab world.

weeew...long post


----------



## Mahaodeh

arbelyoni said:


> I'd say that the closest living relative of Arabic is Aramaic (or in its modern form: Syriac), with Hebrew right after it.



I'm no linguist and I don't speak Aramaic, Syriac or Hebrew, but I would vote for Hebrew from personal experience. I live in the region and I commonly hear people speaking Hebrew as well as several dialects or descendants of Aramaic, although I never really fully understand but as a native Arabic speaker I always find that I can understand more out of a Hebrew conversation than the other Semitic languages. Now while there are some loan words between all the languages but they are not so much. I think it's simply the similarity (rather than borrowing) of the languages in lexicon as well as in grammar.


----------



## clevermizo

JGreco said:


> Sorry I strayed but here is my complete point as it relates to the discussion. Like one has pointed just because Maltese maybe the closest to Arabic, but it does not mean that at a colloquial level, they can understand each other. I have spoken to a few Maltese that say they can understand Italian, English, and Spanish far better than they can understand Arabic simply because of the distant cultural relationship they have with the Arab world versus the close ties the Maltese have with Europe especially with Italy and The U.K, and the influx of Telenovelas that they receive in the country that closes ties to Europe furthering the distance from the Arab world.
> 
> weeew...long post




Well in writing, if Tunisians or Algerians adopted Maltese orthographic style to write their dialect, they would be able to have very fluid pen conversations with Maltese, especially if everyone used mostly Arabic words and less Italian or French loan-words.

However, part of the issue with saying "Maltese is closest to Arabic" is that Arabic is a macrolanguage, and though Maltese is now considered a language in its own right, it is within the variation of other Arabic dialects. So in a way, Maltese is part of the umbrella that we call "Arabic." In a different world, Arabic dialects might also be called separate languages.

Maltese is as close to Iraqi Arabic or Egyptian Arabic as Tunisian or Algerian is. The only difference is that the Maltese do not maintain the legacy of Classical Arabic, which other Arabic speaking peoples share. This legacy of Classical Arabic also serves to minimize regional colloquial differences, especially among urban speakers. These differences might be much greater without this common "glue".

I think when it comes to Maltese it's more productive to speak of which Arabic dialect it is most similar to, rather than all of Arabic as a whole. In that case, we must look to other Semitic systems like Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, Tigrinya, etc. and see what we regard as "closest to Arabic."

However, if what we call a language is something sociologically recognized as a separate language, then yes I'd have to agree that Maltese is closest to Arabic.

After that I'm not sure. I wonder how similar Modern South Arabian is to Arabic in the Arabian Peninsula, in terms of intelligibility.

To me Hebrew and Arabic sound quite distant from one another, but I'm not a native speaker of either. I think if someone was speaking Hebrew, an Arabic speaker who was unfamiliar with Hebrew would only be able to pick out isolated words. Which leads me to:



Mahaodeh said:


> I'm no linguist and I don't speak Aramaic, Syriac or Hebrew, but I would vote for Hebrew from personal experience. I live in the region and I commonly hear people speaking Hebrew as well as several dialects or descendants of Aramaic, although I never really fully understand but as a native Arabic speaker I always find that I can understand more out of a Hebrew conversation than the other Semitic languages. Now while there are some loan words between all the languages but they are not so much. I think it's simply the similarity (rather than borrowing) of the languages in lexicon as well as in grammar.



If you hear Hebrew (spoken at moderate speed of course), can you pick out more than isolated words? Can you understand whole phrases even?


----------



## berndf

clevermizo said:


> To me Hebrew and Arabic sound quite distant from one another, but I'm not a native speaker of either. I think if someone was speaking Hebrew, an Arabic speaker who was unfamiliar with Hebrew would only be able to pick out isolated words. Which leads me to:





clevermizo said:


> If you hear Hebrew (spoken at moderate speed of course), can you pick out more than isolated words? Can you understand whole phrases even?



Mutual ineligibility by untrained speakers is in *extremely* poor measure of closeness of languages. I think it is almost meaningless. Simple systematic sound shifts can already prevent mutual intelligibility. E.g. for a untrained German understanding Swiss German is almost impossible. I remember, when I first came to Graubünden in my life, I sat in a train next to two people talking their rural dialect. It took me 15 minutes only to find out they were talking German and not e.g. Rumantsch – not that I understood a single word. When I came, many years later, to live in the country, I watched the local Swiss German news on TV, though I never lived in the German speaking area of the Country, just to get used to the dialect. After a few weeks just watching a TV program for 20min two or three times a week, I understood almost everything (except a handful of hard-core dialect expressions) and wondered what problems I ever had with it.


----------



## clevermizo

berndf said:


> Mutual ineligibility by untrained speakers is in *extremely* poor measure of closeness of languages. I think it is almost meaningless. Simple systematic sound shifts can already prevent mutual intelligibility.



Yes that's actually a good point. I've asked here because it seems to have been brought up in this thread.

I am curious now of course, if an Arabic speaker who has become habituated with Hebrew could understand much of it. Of course we know on paper that Hebrew and Arabic are not grouped together taxonomically.

Systematic sound changes are the major reason why Eastern Arabic speakers have trouble understanding Western dialects (like Moroccan). This gets commonly attributed to "French loan-words" but the primary reasons for the lack of intelligibility are differences in vowel quality, vowelization of words and position of stress.


----------



## Mahaodeh

clevermizo said:


> If you hear Hebrew (spoken at moderate speed of course), can you pick out more than isolated words? Can you understand whole phrases even?



Mostly isolated words but sometimes I can pick out two or three consecutive words; however, there are never enough words to actually understand the conversation.


----------



## Faylasoof

I think Chaldean Neo-Aramaic also shares quite a lot with Arabic but can’t say how it compares with Maltese in its closeness to Arabic.


----------



## WadiH

As Clevermizo has explained, Maltese is at most a daughter language of Arabic.  Sure, we can take the fact that Maltese is the only descendant of Arabic to be fully recognized as a separate language and conclude from that that it is the closest language to Arabic, but that does not tell us anything really interesting about either Arabic or Maltese.

I think this thread should be restricted to languages that are NOT descended from Arabic.

The Ancient North Arabian dialects (in the Safaitic, Hasaitic, Thamudic, etc. scripts) are the closest to Arabic (though, again, as with Maltese, some argue that these were simply older dialects of Arabic).  I know that linguists nowadays class Hebrew, Canaanite, Aramaic and Arabic (or "North Arabian") together as "Central Semitic" (?) languages, with the former three forming one sub-branch and North Arabian (Arabic and Ancient North Arabian) forming the other.  So, I presume the answer would be either Hebrew, Canaanite or Aramaic.  I don't think Arabic-speakers can understand any Hebrew at all through listening.  But when transcribed in Arabic letters (with the sound shifts like ش > س explained), I think some words can come through.

I'm no linguist, but I suspect Hebrew to be closer to Arabic than Aramaic because Hebrew has a definite article "ha-" that is not present in Aramaic but exists in Ancient North Arabian (along with "hal-" and "han-"), and I have seen plausible theories for a common origin for Arabic "al-" and Hebrew "ha-" from an older "hal-."

Regarding the question about Mehri, the answer is 'no,' Mehri is not mutually intelligible with Arabic in any way and does not appear to have any closer relationship with Arabic than any other Semitic language, dead or living.


----------



## k8an

As a speaker of Hebrew, I can say that there are many Arabic words and phrases that can be understood - especially basic body parts and simple verbs.

Upon first listening, Arabic is very hard for a Hebrew speaker to understand (actually impossible). However, after some brief consideration of the shifts in phonology and grammatical shifts, there is quite a bit which can be understood without any further explanation (in writing). Also, many verb conjugations are similar or identical. For example:

Hebrew - Arabic

Lev - Qalb (Heart)
Ahava - Hob (Love)
Ktb - Ktb (root consonants of words relating to the concept of "writing")
Ayin - Ayin (Eye)
Rosh - Ras (Head)
Shem - Esm (Name)
Shemesh - Shams (Sun)
Lechem - Lahme - [Ethiopian - cow] (In Hebrew this means "bread" an in Arabic it means "meat" - I have heard theories that all derived from a common word meaning "food")
Av - Ab (Father)
Bayit - Bayt (House)
Shalom - Salam (Peace)

I acknowledge that to people who cannot speak a Semitic language that these words may not look very similar - however once you understand the root system of Semitic languages and identify a few phonological shifts (s-sh, b-v etc) and see them written in their own alphabet, the similarities are very clear.

There are countless others. The verb conjugation (prefixes and suffixes) is also very similar - although Modern Hebrew seems to have changed a bit more in this regard. 

The orthography is also similar in some regards, although definitely not mutually intelligible.


----------



## rayloom

k8an said:


> As a speaker of Hebrew, I can say that there are many Arabic words and phrases that can be understood - especially basic body parts and simple verbs.
> 
> Upon first listening, Arabic is very hard for a Hebrew speaker to understand (actually impossible). However, after some brief consideration of the shifts in phonology and grammatical shifts, there is quite a bit which can be understood without any further explanation (in writing). Also, many verb conjugations are similar or identical. For example:
> 
> Hebrew - Arabic
> 
> Lev - Qalb (Heart)
> Ahava - Hob (Love)
> Ktb - Ktb (root consonants of words relating to the concept of "writing")
> Ayin - Ayin (Eye)
> Rosh - Ras (Head)
> Shem - Esm (Name)
> Shemesh - Shams (Sun)
> Lechem - Lahme - [Ethiopian - cow] (In Hebrew this means "bread" an in Arabic it means "meat" - I have heard theories that all derived from a common word meaning "food")
> Av - Ab (Father)
> Bayit - Bayt (House)
> Shalom - Salam (Peace)
> 
> I acknowledge that to people who cannot speak a Semitic language that these words may not look very similar - however once you understand the root system of Semitic languages and identify a few phonological shifts (s-sh, b-v etc) and see them written in their own alphabet, the similarities are very clear.
> 
> There are countless others. The verb conjugation (prefixes and suffixes) is also very similar - although Modern Hebrew seems to have changed a bit more in this regard.
> 
> The orthography is also similar in some regards, although definitely not mutually intelligible.



Certainly the cognates are endless, with some varying in meanings and most varying in vocalization. However, it still needs someone educated in the other language to fully realize them (in speech or in writing).


----------



## k8an

rayloom said:


> Certainly the cognates are endless, with some varying in meanings and most varying in vocalization. However, it still needs someone educated in the other language to fully realize them (in speech or in writing).



This is true. 

After having some of these shifts and basic grammar explained to me, I was able to recognise quite a few words in Arabic when written (especially Levantine Arabic). The pronunciation is very different, however.


----------



## Abu Rashid

k8an said:
			
		

> As a speaker of Hebrew, I can say that there are many Arabic words and phrases that can be understood - especially basic body parts and simple verbs.



There are thousands of cognate words between Arabic and Hebrew. Some of them more obvious than others. As Hebrew has lost about 5 or 6 letters before it was ever written by merging them into others it is often very difficult to spot. For instance, the word for 3 is shalosh in Hebrew and thalatha in Arabic. As the letter 'tha' merged into shin very early on in the development of Hebrew such a similarity is easily overlooked. All words with the letter 'tha' in them will have shin in Hebrew, and so knowing these kinds of letter-merges will help to recognise the cognates.



			
				k8an said:
			
		

> Lechem - Lahme - [Ethiopian - cow] (In Hebrew this means "bread" an in Arabic it means "meat" - I have heard theories that all derived from a common word meaning



In Hebrew it can also mean meat as well. For instance in the Tanakh:

כָּאֵלֶּה תַּעֲשׂוּ לַיֹּום שִׁבְעַת יָמִים לֶחֶם אִשֵּׁה רֵֽיחַ־נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה עַל־עֹולַת הַתָּמִיד יֵעָשֶׂה וְנִסְכֹּֽו

After this manner ye shall offer daily, throughout the seven days, the meat of the sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD: it shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink offering. (Numbers 28:24)

In Akkadian it means food, and in the Tanakh as well it's used generally for food a few times too. In Ugaritic it means bread/food and the verb it's derived from means to eat.

There is a verb in Hebrew לָחַם meaning to engage in battle with a secondary meaning of to eat, this was probably originally two roots, one l-H-m (to eat) and one l-kh-m (engage in battle), but when Haa and Khaa merged in Hebrew, the two roots ended up as one.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> In Hebrew it can also mean meat as well. For instance in the Tanakh:
> 
> כָּאֵלֶּה תַּעֲשׂוּ לַיֹּום שִׁבְעַת יָמִים לֶחֶם אִשֵּׁה רֵֽיחַ־נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה עַל־עֹולַת הַתָּמִיד יֵעָשֶׂה וְנִסְכֹּֽו
> 
> After this manner ye shall offer daily, throughout the seven days, the meat of the sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD: it shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink offering. (Numbers 28:24)


This occurance of לחם can also be understood to mean _food_. Actually, most translators understand it this ways. The KJV is the only one I am aware of translating it as _meat_. And in this 400 year old translation, the word _meat_ is very likely used in its historical meaning which is, you've probably guessed it by now, _food_.


----------



## Abu Rashid

Generally people don't sacrifice bread


----------



## Myridon

Hulalessar said:


> any monolingual English speaker is going to find almost any text in a Germanic language other than English opaque to the point of being virtually incomprehensible


While modern German itself is quite difficult, it is easier for me to read and verbally understand Dutch than French even though I've taken a little bit of French in school.  West Frisian is even easier if you can find it.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> Generally people don't sacrifice bread


Did I say _bread_? Don't think so.


----------



## Abu Rashid

A sacrifice would refer quite specifically to meat, and that's probably why it's been translated as such.


----------



## berndf

Abu Rashid said:


> A sacrifice would refer quite specifically to meat, and that's probably why it's been translated as such.


No, it hasn't. Not if you define "meat" as "flesh as food". This is only the modern meaning of the word "meat". In 1600 the original meaning "food" was still alive, though the narrower meaning "flesh as food" already existed. Modern English speakers are generally not aware of the historical meaning of the word and therefore newer English translations use "food" in this passage and not "meat".

As to the logic of the interpretation of this passage: We have an object _X_ of which we know it is _meat_ (in the modern sense of the word). Because every _meat_ is also _food,_ _X_ is also _food_. Now we have the word _lehem_ and we have three hypotheses concerning its meaning:
_H1(y)_: In context _y_. _lehem_ means _bread_.
_H2(y)_: In context _y_. _lehem_ means _food_.
_H3(y)_: In context _y_. _lehem_ means _meat_.

Now we are confronted with the statement
_X_ _is_ _lechem_.

We want to know the possible meanings of _lechem_ in this statement. The given evidence is compatible with _H2(X is lechem)_ and _H3(X is lechem)_ but not with _H1(X is lechem)_.

As a result, the passage can serve as evidence to reject _Vy:H3(y)_, i.e. it does prove that _lehem_ did not always mean _bread_. But it cannot be use to discriminate between _Ey:H2(y)_ and _Ey:H3(y)_, i.e. it does not prove (nor does it even constitute evidence*) that there are attestations where _lehem_ means _meat_ rather than the more general term _food_.
________________________________________
*Unless you share Hempel's definition whereby any object X fulfilling the relation R(X) would constitute evidence for the Statement Vx:R(x). But this would lead to Hempel's paradox, where _finding a white shoe_ would constitute evidence for the statement _all ravens are black_: Because _all ravens are black_ is logically equivalent to _all non-black objects are non-ravens _and _there is a white shoe_ logically implies there is a _non-black object which is not a raven_, the statement _there is a white shoe_ corroborates the hypothesis _all non-black objects are non-ravens _and because with one formulation of a hypothesis all logically equivalent formulations are corroborated as well, the hypothesis _all ravens are black_ is also corroborated.


----------



## jimmyjimjam

Masjeen said:


> Here in Kuwait we are also studying French in our schools and I was understand French quickly even without Explanation because it is so similar to English So who cares about the classifications.
> 
> And yes the words are so important If you understand the whole speech you will understand gradually the grammars as you did when you was a child.


Linguists care about the classifications.

I studied Japanese in university.  Japanese and Korean grammar have certain similarities.  I have now learned some Korean words.  I have attempted to "insert" Korean words into Japanese grammar with little success.


----------



## clevermizo

Abu Rashid said:


> Generally people don't sacrifice bread



Actually, sacrificial loaves of bread were a very normal practice in the ancient Jewish Temple cults. They were an offering of Shavu'ot (Pentecost) and a type of Qorban Minħa. Some of the Qorban Minħa was to be burnt at the altar; the remaining amount was eaten by the priests. Raw grain is offered on Pesaħ (Passover) while leavened bread on Shavu'ot. Furthermore, Qorban Minħa was the general offering of someone who was too poor to bring animals. In fact, when the meal offering stands in the place of an animal for a normal Qorban Olah (Burnt Offering), the priests have to eat some of it and the reason for this is that it is to show the poor person that their offering is not cheapened or lessened by not being animal meat (which is burnt up entirely and not consumed). This is not to mention of course the twelve loaves of "Showbread" (לחם פנים) which were regularly present as an offering and replaced every week on the Sabbath.




Abu Rashid said:


> In Hebrew it can also mean meat as well. For instance in the Tanakh:
> 
> כָּאֵלֶּה תַּעֲשׂוּ לַיֹּום שִׁבְעַת יָמִים לֶחֶם אִשֵּׁה רֵֽיחַ־נִיחֹחַ לַיהוָה עַל־עֹולַת הַתָּמִיד יֵעָשֶׂה וְנִסְכֹּֽו
> 
> After this manner ye shall offer daily, throughout the seven days, the meat of the sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD: it shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink offering. (Numbers 28:24)



The proper modern translation of לֶחֶם in this context is in fact "food" and this is actually the first time for me reading it as "meat" but it makes sense if this is a more archaic English sense in the KJV. Perhaps you neglected to read on to verses 27 and 28?

כז  וְהִקְרַבְתֶּם עוֹלָה לְרֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ, לַיהוָה--פָּרִים בְּנֵי-בָקָר שְׁנַיִם, אַיִל אֶחָד; שִׁבְעָה כְבָשִׂים, בְּנֵי שָׁנָה.    27 but ye shall present a burnt-offering for a sweet savour unto the LORD: two young bullocks, one ram, seven he-lambs of the first year;
כח  וּמִנְחָתָם--סֹלֶת, בְּלוּלָה בַשָּׁמֶן:  שְׁלֹשָׁה עֶשְׂרֹנִים, לַפָּר הָאֶחָד, שְׁנֵי עֶשְׂרֹנִים, לָאַיִל הָאֶחָד.    28 and their meal-offering, fine flour mingled with oil, three tenth parts for each bullock, two tenth parts for the one ram,

The _leħem_ of the burnt offering is an inclusive term, referring to the meats and grains depending on what is being offered.

Typically the bread offering is made by taking the flour, oil (שָּׁמֶן is probably Arabic سمن) and frankincense and making basically a sort of pancake.

Aside meat and bread/grains, I actually am unaware of any offerings involving fruits and vegetables. I think in ancient Israelite/Jewish culture it may have only been these two.

To steer this back on topic (kind of?), I agree with the poster above who said that both meanings may have originated from a common word for food, and in fact the Biblical verse above lends support to that.


----------



## MexicanPatriot

Maltese is probably the closest to Arabic, but since Maltese is influenced by the Romance languages and to a lesser extent Greek, a day-to-day conversation between a Maltese man and a Arabic man would be impossible. Hebrew is close, but also not intelligible. Aramaic is also related. The Berber languages are also part of the Afro-Asiatic family, which would relate it to Arabic. A large vocabulary of Farsi is from Arabic, but is Indo-European, not Afro-Asiatic.


----------



## Istriano

Hebrew is the closest to Arabic.
And to people who think vocabulary is the core of one language: it's not. The essence of a language is its syntax and not vocabulary, do you want an example?

Speakers of Portuguese cannot understand Cape Verdean creole even tho' they share 95% of vocabulary. Cape Verdean creole has 95 % African grammar and that's why it's impossible for speakers of Romance languages to understand it without learning. Were it vocabulary the basis of linguistic classification, Cape Verdean Creole (or even Papiamentu) would be a Romance language while Romanian would not!


----------



## Abu Rashid

Istrian said:
			
		

> Hebrew is the closest to Arabic.



Why do you say that? I'd say the Ancient South Arabian languages (Sabaic etc) are closer than Hebrew. And Hebrew is probably no more closer to Arabic than Aramaic. Also there is another Canaanite language which shares probably just as much similarity with Arabic as Hebrew, but which also still retains a more conservative set of phonemes as Arabic does, and that is Ugaritic.


----------



## elianecanspeak

clevermizo said:


> Actually, sacrificial loaves of bread were a very normal practice in the ancient Jewish Temple cults. They were an offering of Shavu'ot (Pentecost) and a type of Qorban Minħa.. . .
> 
> 
> Aside meat and bread/grains, I actually am unaware of any offerings involving fruits and vegetables. I think in ancient Israelite/Jewish culture it may have only been these two.



Weren't the seven species (olives, figs, grapes, and pomegranates as well as wheat and barley) part of bikkurim  brought on Shavuot and I think maybe also at other times?


----------



## WadiH

So what is the consensus nowadays?  Ancient South Arabian or Northwest Semitic?  Or is the matter unresolved (because it bears the same similarity to each)?  From a cursory look at short sample texts and descriptions, Ancient South Arabian *feels* more familiar, but I'm obviously not well placed to judge.

And what is the status of Ancient South Arabian for that matter?  Is it closer to the NW Semitic group or to the group (or groups) that include Ethiopic and Modern South Arabian languages?


----------



## momai

Wadi Hanifa said:


> So what is the consensus nowadays?  Ancient South Arabian or Northwest Semitic?  Or is the matter unresolved (because it bears the same similarity to each)?  From a cursory look at short sample texts and descriptions, Ancient South Arabian *feels* more familiar, but I'm obviously not well placed to judge.
> 
> And what is the status of Ancient South Arabian for that matter?  Is it closer to the NW Semitic group or to the group (or groups) that include Ethiopic and Modern South Arabian languages?


Old South Arabian didn't undergo much sound shifts as Canaanite and Aramaic languages did, thus it gives you the impression it is more similar to Arabic but in fact grammar-wise is (relatively) different than Arabic.
For example in OSA the article is suffixed as in Aramaic, in Arabic it is prefixed as in Hebrew. The conjugation of verbs is slightly different. So instead of qataltu it is -as far as I can remember- qatalku while in Hebrew it is qatalti. It had meemation instead of nunation. So for an Arab it would be confusing to know that rajuln is THE man and rajulm is A man. I chose the word rajul just for demonstration purposes.


----------



## k8an

Wadi Hanifa said:


> So what is the consensus nowadays?  Ancient South Arabian or Northwest Semitic?  Or is the matter unresolved (because it bears the same similarity to each)?  From a cursory look at short sample texts and descriptions, Ancient South Arabian *feels* more familiar, but I'm obviously not well placed to judge.
> 
> And what is the status of Ancient South Arabian for that matter?  Is it closer to the NW Semitic group or to the group (or groups) that include Ethiopic and Modern South Arabian languages?



I still know nothing about Ancient South Arabian, so I'm still in the dark.

But having studied Assyrian more, and definitely being more proficient in Arabic than I was in 2010 (wow), I feel that Hebrew is definitely closer to Arabic than Aramaic is. Hebrew almost feels like a halfway point between Aramaic and Arabic. That being said, the Aramaic I speak of (Assyrian) is highly influenced by Iranian languages, Akkadian and also somewhat by Turkish and Arabic, while Arabic dialects are of course highly divergent as well.


----------



## Perseas

Outsider said:


> Maltese is also close to Arabic.


There is also Cypriot Arabic, an endangered language.


----------



## k8an

Perseas said:


> There is also Cypriot Arabic, an endangered language.



Wow, just reading those example sentences is amazing. It's so different to any other dialect of Arabic, and you can slightly sense a similarity to western dialects of neo-Aramaic along with the Greek words.


----------



## WadiH

momai said:


> Old South Arabian didn't undergo much sound shifts as Canaanite and Aramaic languages did, thus it gives you the impression it is more similar to Arabic but in fact grammar-wise is (relatively) different than Arabic.
> For example in OSA the article is suffixed as in Aramaic, in Arabic it is prefixed as in Hebrew. The conjugation of verbs is slightly different. So instead of qataltu it is -as far as I can remember- qatalku while in Hebrew it is qatalti. It had meemation instead of nunation. So for an Arab it would be confusing to know that rajuln is THE man and rajulm is A man. I chose the word rajul just for demonstration purposes.



But what about morphology?  South Arabian languages apparently had broken plurals, like Arabic.  It seems they also had almost the same case markers as Arabic.  They had mimation instead of nunation, but the NW languages have neither.

Also, does Aramaic say qatalti or qatalki?  Which is considered the more 'conservative' variant (t or k)?  And is it true that Himyaritic had a prefixed definite article am-?  I've always thought it was an Arabic phenomenon (a variant of al-) but I've started to see some mixed information on this.

This Himyaritic sentence from Wikipedia is very striking:

رأيك بنحلم كولدكُ ابناً من طيب

Granted, the n-article being prefixed rather than suffixed is unusual, but if you substitute a t- for the k- it sounds almost Arabic.



k8an said:


> I still know nothing about Ancient South Arabian, so I'm still in the dark.
> 
> But having studied Assyrian more, and definitely being more proficient in Arabic than I was in 2010 (wow), I feel that Hebrew is definitely closer to Arabic than Aramaic is. Hebrew almost feels like a halfway point between Aramaic and Arabic. That being said, the Aramaic I speak of (Assyrian) is highly influenced by Iranian languages, Akkadian and also somewhat by Turkish and Arabic, while Arabic dialects are of course highly divergent as well.



Yes, I'm fairly convinced that Arabic is closer to Hebrew than it is to Aramaic, but would you agree that Hebrew and Aramaic are still closer to each other than either of them is to Arabic?



Perseas said:


> There is also Cypriot Arabic, an endangered language.





k8an said:


> Wow, just reading those example sentences is amazing. It's so different to any other dialect of Arabic, and you can slightly sense a similarity to western dialects of neo-Aramaic along with the Greek words.



It looks more like a Greek-inflected version of Maltese to me.  But like I said (years ago), languages like Maltese, Cypriot Arabic and the even more exotic Arabic dialects of central Asia are all part of what we call "Arabic" so bringing them into this discussion doesn't make much sense.

The way I understand the thread's topic is: languages that share the most recent common ancestor with Arabic or that share the most linguistic features with Arabic (due for example to 'areal' influence).  I'm starting to think we can't say much other than that Arabic is in the same large branch that includes both Ancient South Arabian and Northwest Semitic.  It shares many features with both, whether as common retentions from an ancient West Semitic ancestor, common retentions from Proto-Semitic itself, or as a result of some 'areal' influence.


----------



## momai

Wadi Hanifa said:


> But what about morphology?  South Arabian languages apparently had broken plurals, like Arabic.  It seems they also had almost the same case markers as Arabic.  They had mimation instead of nunation, but the NW languages have neither.


Akkadian has also the same case markers but it is in terms of grammar ( conjugation and almost all prepositions are different) and vocabulary very special. Broken plurals as far as I understand are not an original thing of Semitic languages and mainly developed in the south of Arabia and in some Ethiopic languages as some kind of Sprachbund. Note that even Hebrew has broken plurals, but it consistently adds either -im or -ot to the plural e.g sefer -> sefarim على وزن فِعل التي تصبح فِعال. This phenomenon even exist in some Syrian words e.g. قرقوعة (scrap or useless thing) -> قراقيع qraaqee3 -> قراقعين qraaq3een



> The way I understand the thread's topic is: languages that share the most recent common ancestor with Arabic or that share the most linguistic features with Arabic (due for example to 'areal' influence).  I'm starting to think we can't say much other than that Arabic is in the same large branch that includes both Ancient South Arabian and Northwest Semitic.  It shares many features with both, whether as common retentions from an ancient West Semitic ancestor, common retentions from Proto-Semitic itself, or as a result of some 'areal' influence.


I highly recommend you to follow Ahmad Al-Jallad on Twitter if you have not already. Here is him reading some Sabaic if you are interested.


----------



## k8an

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Yes, I'm fairly convinced that Arabic is closer to Hebrew than it is to Aramaic, but would you agree that Hebrew and Aramaic are still closer to each other than either of them is to Arabic?



Yeah, I think so - but it can be pretty hard to determine considering how divergent Aramaic dialects are. Old dialects of Aramaic (especially the Jewish ones) seem really similar to the point that it's almost mutually intelligible. Modern dialects are a different story though - centuries of Iranian, Turkic and Arabic influence on Assyrian/Eastern dialects have made them barely any more intelligible than Arabic at first listen (and some of the dialects from Nineveh in Iraq have been heavily influenced by Arabic vocabulary in the last 30-50 years as well). The dialects of Syria are even more heavily influenced by Arabic, and barely spoken enough for me to get a real idea. Of course, Modern Hebrew is also different to older incarnations of the language.

With all that said though, I remember listening to some Assyrian songs before I had ever studied the language and being able to pick out entire phrases (4-5 words) and understand them. I feel like the vocabulary and some aspects of word formation of Aramaic and Hebrew are closer than either is to Arabic, but Arabic and Hebrew have really similar verb conjugations which always trips me out.



> It looks more like a Greek-inflected version of Maltese to me.  But like I said (years ago), languages like Maltese, Cypriot Arabic and the even more exotic Arabic dialects of central Asia are all part of what we call "Arabic" so bringing them into this discussion doesn't make much sense.



That's a good point.


----------



## Schem

momai said:


> Here is him reading some Sabaic if you are interested.



If I were to use Islamic genealogical terminology, I would say this sounds like an old Qahtanite Arabic while ours is the Ishmaelite version influenced by the Semitic tongues of the Levant hence the association to Hebrew. Taxonomically, of course, they're all sister languages having inherited features independently and having influenced eachother through geography with northern Arabic dialects acting as a bridge inbetween westerly groups.


----------



## radagasty

momai said:


> Note that even Hebrew has broken plurals, but it consistently adds either -im or -ot to the plural e.g sefer -> sefarim على وزن فِعل التي تصبح فِعال.



I would say that Hebrew doesn't have broken plurals in the same sense as Arabic, where one has to know that the plural of صِفْر is أصفار, the vocalisation of which cannot be predicted (although there are recurring patterns). In Hebrew, however, the plural of segholate nouns have a fixed vocalisation /ə-ā/, irrespective of the root vowel in the singular, thus סְפָרִים → סֵ֫פֶר, following the model of the non-segholate דְּבָרִים → דָּבָר.

To take another example of a Hebrew segholate, אֲרָצוֹת → אֶ֫רֶץ, the cognate of which in Arabic is أَرْض, which has both a sound plural أَرَضُون and a broken plural أَرَاضٍ‎, the Hebrew plural corresponds to the former rather than the latter in its vocalisation. Thus, even though the pluralisation of סֵ֫פֶר and אֶ֫רֶץ does entail the appearance of a vowel /ā/ where there was none before (the seghol under the second radical being merely epenthetic, as its absence in their Arabic cognates suggests), I would say this phenomenon is more akin to the appearance of the fatha in the sound plural أَرَضُون, and therefore not an example of a broken plural, which أَرْض likewise has. That this vowel is long in Hebrew—it was historically short—is merely a result of a phonological rule that lengthens the vowel in an open pre-tonic syllable .


----------



## WadiH

momai said:


> Akkadian has also the same case markers but it is in terms of grammar ( conjugation and almost all prepositions are different) and vocabulary very special.



Yes, but if we're trying to see which of NW Semitic and ASA is closer to Arabic, this is another point in favor of ASA.  Now it could be that:

1) Arabic and ASA just happened to retain this case system (and other features like phonology and broken plurals) from Proto-Semitic independently of each other (so ASA, NW and Arabic are three independent branches of West Semitic), or

2) ASA and Arabic share these features because they share a more recent common ancestor that had them (so some sort of SW branch), or

3) Arabic is just a particularly conservative sibling of the NW languages, so that its similarities with ASA are just common Proto-Semitic retentions (like the Akkadian case system) (feels unlikely), or

4) Aramaic is a particularly innovative sibling of Hebrew and Arabic (in which case why are Hebrew and Aramaic grouped together as NW?)



> Broken plurals as far as I understand are not an original thing of Semitic languages and mainly developed in the south of Arabia and in some Ethiopic languages as some kind of Sprachbund. Note that even Hebrew has broken plurals, but it consistently adds either -im or -ot to the plural e.g sefer -> sefarim على وزن فِعل التي تصبح فِعال. This phenomenon even exist in some Syrian words e.g. قرقوعة (scrap or useless thing) -> قراقيع qraaqee3 -> قراقعين qraaq3een



As @radagasty said, this Hebrew plural form is probably not a broken plural at all, and certainly can't be compared to the very extensive and well developed system of Arabic.  Is the South Arabian (e.g. Sabean) plural system similar to the Arabic one?  If it is, then that seems like pretty strong evidence for a closer relationship.  The Ancient North Arabian languages also seemed to have broken plurals, which I think adds weight here.

By the way, the قراقعين example occurs in some Najdi dialects too (كبير > كبار > كبارين).  Seems like just a 'plural of a plural' that arises independently and doesn't indicate any shared retention with Hebrew.



> I highly recommend you to follow Ahmad Al-Jallad on Twitter if you have not already. Here is him reading some Sabaic if you are interested.



I do and I'm half-way through one of his papers on South Arabian languages.  Does he tackle this question of classification/genetic descent directly anywhere?



Schem said:


> If I were to use Islamic genealogical terminology, I would say this sounds like an old Qahtanite Arabic while ours is the Ishmaelite version influenced by the Semitic tongues of the Levant hence the association to Hebrew. Taxonomically, of course, they're all sister languages having inherited features independently and having influenced eachother through geography with northern Arabic dialects acting as a bridge inbetween westerly groups.



No please not the genealogical terminology! 

This was the conflation that caused people like Taha Hussein to think that Imru' Al-Qays didn't speak Arabic so couldn't have composed Arabic poetry.  Most of the tribes the genealogists called "Qahtanite" (including the real-life historical Qahtan) spoke North Arabian Arabic.  Only a few were described as speaking "Himyarite" languages.  The Muslim scholars never claimed that the Qahtanites spoke another language (they thought the Qahtanites taught Arabic to the Adnanites).  It was only in modern times that early orientalists and their disciples like Taha Hussein made the logical leap that North Arabian vs. South Arabian languages is equivalent to Adnanite v. Qahtanite tribal genealogies, and so they thought Qahtanite = South Arabian and Qahtanite language = South Arabian language.

But yes I agree the simplest explanation is that North Arabian languages (like Arabic) are a sort of intermediate form between NW languages of the Levant like Canaanite/Hebrew and Ancient South Arabian languages like Sabaic.  If I were to venture to guess, I would say there was an early West Semitic speaking group in the Levant that split off and migrated south and became the Ancient South Arabians, and a group that migrated south slightly later whose language became Arabic, and perhaps a third a group that stayed in the Levant (or returned there early on) whose language became some of the other Ancient North Arabian dialects (like Safaitic).  And then areal influence pulled the Arabic inside the peninsula towards South Arabian and pulled the other Ancient North Arabian dialects towards Aramaic.  You probably also had later Arabic tribal migrations from inside the Peninsula before Islam (like the Iyad, Tanukh, Lakhm, Ghassan, Kalb, Jutham, Taghlib, etc.) bringing the Arabic we know today and and continuing until modern times, where older groups and dialects are displaced by dialects from the interior.


----------



## Ihsiin

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Yes, but if we're trying to see which of NW Semitic and ASA is closer to Arabic, this is another point in favor of ASA.  Now it could be that:



A few points occurs to me...



> 1) Arabic and ASA just happened to retain this case system (and other features like phonology and broken plurals) from Proto-Semitic independently of each other (so ASA, NW and Arabic are three independent branches of West Semitic), or
> 
> 2) ASA and Arabic share these features because they share a more recent common ancestor that had them (so some sort of SW branch), or



Well, I believe some ancient NW Semitic languages such as Ugaritic also have the case system, so it seems the case system was retain in proto-NW Semitic and lost in later stages of the languages (actually, just the same as in Arabic). Also, on the phonology front, I believe the way in which proto-Semitic phonemes merged across the NW Semitic languages implies that most if not all of the phonemes were conserved in photo-NW Semitic, so this doesn't really tell us much about its relationship to Arabic. Really the only feature I see that Arabic shares with Ancient South Arabian and not with NW Semitic is broken plurals.



> 3) Arabic is just a particularly conservative sibling of the NW languages, so that its similarities with ASA are just common Proto-Semitic retentions (like the Akkadian case system) (feels unlikely), or



Personally I find this to be the most likely scenario. As I mentioned, I think the only feature that needs to be 'explained' between Arabic and ASA is the broken plural system, and I can well believe this to be a proto-Semitic feature lost in daughter languages as they normalise towards regular plurals, and then only retained in the languages that happen to retain them. Even in Arabic, in some modern dialects we can see some instances of plural normalisation, such as حلمين instead of أحلام.

I also have this kind of idea that Semitic languages spoken by nomadic peoples tend to be more conservative than those spoken by sedentary peoples. Arabs of course remained predominantly nomadic for much longer than other Semitic peoples so perhaps it should not be surprising that Arabic retained many older Semitic features beyond the point when many of its sister languages lost them.



> 4) Aramaic is a particularly innovative sibling of Hebrew and Arabic (in which case why are Hebrew and Aramaic grouped together as NW?)



I think we need to be mindful of the stage of the language we're looking at. Remember Hebrew stopped being used as a spoken language around 2,000 years ago, so modern Aramaic has roughly 2,000 years of divergent evolution on Hebrew. Similarly, we continue to have knowledge of Classical Arabic which was spoken around ~1,500, and though there has been a lot of evolution within spoken Arabic since then, our knowledge of the classical language props up that particular familiarity with Hebrew. Perhaps if we _only_ knew modern vernacular Arabic, Hebrew would not look so similar. For example, Hebrew מה means 'what', and this is instantly recognisable as being the same as Arabic ما - but this is in Classical Arabic, pretty much every modern Arabic dialect has a ش-type word to mean 'what', and ما is used exclusively for negation (which it isn't in Hebrew). So, the later the stage of the language we look at, the fewer similarities we find. I suspect (and perhaps some learned Aramaicists can assist us on this), that if we look at an ancient form of Aramaic rather than at Neo-Aramaic, we will find it to be much more similar to both Arabic and Hebrew.


----------



## WadiH

Ihsiin said:


> A few points occurs to me...
> 
> Well, I believe some ancient NW Semitic languages such as Ugaritic also have the case system, so it seems the case system was retain in proto-NW Semitic and lost in later stages of the languages (actually, just the same as in Arabic). Also, on the phonology front, I believe the way in which proto-Semitic phonemes merged across the NW Semitic languages implies that most if not all of the phonemes were conserved in photo-NW Semitic, so this doesn't really tell us much about its relationship to Arabic. Really the only feature I see that Arabic shares with Ancient South Arabian and not with NW Semitic is broken plurals.



Yes but you're comparing apples and oranges (e.g. Old Arabic and ASA South Arabian from around 500-600 CE with NW languages almost 2000 years before).  It may not be conclusive proof but it least suggests that North Arabian and South Arabian may have had a more recent common ancestor that split off from the NW languages.



> Personally I find this to be the most likely scenario. As I mentioned, I think the only feature that needs to be 'explained' between Arabic and ASA is the broken plural system, and I can well believe this to be a proto-Semitic feature lost in daughter languages as they normalise towards regular plurals, and then only retained in the languages that happen to retain them. Even in Arabic, in some modern dialects we can see some instances of plural normalisation, such as حلمين instead of أحلام.



I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you here.  The tendency in vernacular Arabic has certainly not been away from broken plurals.  The system from Classical Arabic is more or less intact in modern dialects (marginal phenomena like حلمين notwithstanding) and if anything the broken plurals seem to be preferred.  The influence of "MSA" in the modern period may have brought back some non-broken plurals into use (e.g. إيطاليين vs طليان), but this seems like hypercorrection.  This is very different from the situation with the case-marking system.  There is no evidence of a tendency for the broken plural system to 'decay' with time, and it seems to me that if NW languages had them at the time they separated from Arabic they would have retained them long enough for them to be attested.

Of course there is no dispute that Arabic, ASA and the NW languages all share a common ancestor, and there also seems to be a consensus that Hebrew and Aramaic form their own sub-branch (NW Semitic).  I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand the reason why we have to come up with a "Central Semitic" group that includes Arabic and NW Semitic but excludes ASA.  Seems like the situation is more likely to be this:

West Semitic splits into:

1) NW Semitic (splits into Canaanite and Aramaic, and Canaanite splits into Hebrew, Phoenician, Ugaritic, etc.)
2) Ancient North Arabian (including Arabic)
3) Ancient South Arabian (includes Sabaic, Himyaritic, etc.)

So branch 2 may not be particularly close to either 1 or 3, but if you want to decide which is most similar to 2 you have to look at common features regardless of how far back they go.  Looking at things like broken plurals, phonology and case markings, it seems that Classical Arabic at least is more like ASA than Hebrew, and there is at least a case that actually 2 and 3 used to be a single language that broke off from the common ancestor of 1, 2 and 3.



> I also have this kind of idea that Semitic languages spoken by nomadic peoples tend to be more conservative than those spoken by sedentary peoples. Arabs of course remained predominantly nomadic for much longer than other Semitic peoples so perhaps it should not be surprising that Arabic retained many older Semitic features beyond the point when many of its sister languages lost them.



Perhaps, though it probably has more to do with geographic isolation than lifestyle since the ASA speakers were sedentary as well.  In any case, the modern vernaculars are also relatively conservative compared to NW languages (even compared to their older forms other than Ugaritic I guess).



> I think we need to be mindful of the stage of the language we're looking at. Remember Hebrew stopped being used as a spoken language around 2,000 years ago, so modern Aramaic has roughly 2,000 years of divergent evolution on Hebrew. Similarly, we continue to have knowledge of Classical Arabic which was spoken around ~1,500, and though there has been a lot of evolution within spoken Arabic since then, our knowledge of the classical language props up that particular familiarity with Hebrew. Perhaps if we _only_ knew modern vernacular Arabic, Hebrew would not look so similar. For example, Hebrew מה means 'what', and this is instantly recognisable as being the same as Arabic ما - but this is in Classical Arabic, pretty much every modern Arabic dialect has a ش-type word to mean 'what', and ما is used exclusively for negation (which it isn't in Hebrew). So, the later the stage of the language we look at, the fewer similarities we find. I suspect (and perhaps some learned Aramaicists can assist us on this), that if we look at an ancient form of Aramaic rather than at Neo-Aramaic, we will find it to be much more similar to both Arabic and Hebrew.



That's true, but what I've had in mind in this discussion was the state of the languages around the time when ASA and Old Arabic existed, at least for the purposes of figuring out how they all relate to each other genetically.  I agree that modern Arabic dialects look a bit more like Aramaic than older ones, but not substantially so.  (By the way Yemeni Arabic dialects routinely use ما as an interrogative, and most other Peninsular dialects still use it as a relative pronoun.)


----------



## Ihsiin

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Yes but you're comparing apples and oranges (e.g. Old Arabic and ASA South Arabian from around 500-600 CE with NW languages almost 2000 years before).  It may not be conclusive proof but it least suggests that North Arabian and South Arabian may have had a more recent common ancestor that split off from the NW languages.



Not quite. My point here was to note that if we reconstruct proto-NW Semitic we actually find a phonology and grammar very similar to Arabic, and I don't think less similar than ASA. The fact that subsequent NW Semitic languages diverged and lost some of these features doesn't really mean much when we look at the languages phylogenetically, as it were. When considering how the languages are related to each other (that is to say, from which common ancestors did they descend), we need to look at the oldest forms of the languages possible.



> I'm going to have to strongly disagree with you here.  The tendency in vernacular Arabic has certainly not been away from broken plurals.  The system from Classical Arabic is more or less intact in modern dialects (marginal phenomena like حلمين notwithstanding) and if anything the broken plurals seem to be preferred.  The influence of "MSA" in the modern period may have brought back some non-broken plurals into use (e.g. إيطاليين vs طليان), but this seems like hypercorrection.  This is very different from the situation with the case-marking system.  There is no evidence of a tendency for the broken plural system to 'decay' with time, and it seems to me that if NW languages had them at the time they separated from Arabic they would have retained them long enough for them to be attested.



I completely agree that broken plurals remain dominant in vernacular Arabic. My example of حلمين was really just to suggest how broken plurals could be replaced by regular plurals as some sort of paradigm levelling. All NW Semitic languages have regular plurals so if we were to suggest a shift from broken to regular plurals this would have been at a point before proto-NW Semitic split up into its daughter languages, so well before we would expect such a thing to be attested. I do admit, this is supposition and we don't have direct evidence for it, but it's a way of trying to rationalise the relative similarities between Arabic, NW Semitic and Ancient South Arabian.

(P.S. طليان means 'lambs' in Iraqi (and I guess other dialects too?), so perhaps ايطاليين has more utility in this case - made me chuckle, anyway).



> Of course there is no dispute that Arabic, ASA and the NW languages all share a common ancestor, and there also seems to be a consensus that Hebrew and Aramaic form their own sub-branch (NW Semitic).  I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't understand the reason why we have to come up with a "Central Semitic" group that includes Arabic and NW Semitic but excludes ASA.  Seems like the situation is more likely to be this:
> 
> West Semitic splits into:
> 
> 1) NW Semitic (splits into Canaanite and Aramaic, and Canaanite splits into Hebrew, Phoenician, Ugaritic, etc.)
> 2) Ancient North Arabian (including Arabic)
> 3) Ancient South Arabian (includes Sabaic, Himyaritic, etc.)
> 
> So branch 2 may not be particularly close to either 1 or 3, but if you want to decide which is most similar to 2 you have to look at common features regardless of how far back they go.  Looking at things like broken plurals, phonology and case markings, it seems that Classical Arabic at least is more like ASA than Hebrew, and there is at least a case that actually 2 and 3 used to be a single language that broke off from the common ancestor of 1, 2 and 3.



Well, we also find broken plurals in Ge'ez, and I believe in a very reduced state in Amharic (I suppose this is also probably a better example of a shift from a broken plural system to a regular plural system, assuming broken plurals to be a feature in proto-Ethiopic). Ge'ez also shares some features with ASA not shared with Arabic, such as using /k/ to form suffixes in the perfect tense as opposed to /t/ used in Arabic and NW Semitic (e.g. فعلكُ vs فعلتُ). But when I look at Ge'ez more broadly it seems a lot less similar to Arabic than Hebrew does, for example. But then I suppose this is the point where I raise my hands and say that I am not a linguist and a feeling of how similar languages are is not the same as a robust and comprehensive comparison of linguistic features. I would say, however, that I don't see that Arabic has more in common with ASA than it does with NW Semitic.



> Perhaps, though it probably has more to do with geographic isolation than lifestyle since the ASA speakers were sedentary as well.  In any case, the modern vernaculars are also relatively conservative compared to NW languages (even compared to their older forms other than Ugaritic I guess).



Yeah, I don't know, it was just a pet theory I had, I really have nothing robust on which to base it 



> That's true, but what I've had in mind in this discussion was the state of the languages around the time when ASA and Old Arabic existed, at least for the purposes of figuring out how they all relate to each other genetically.  I agree that modern Arabic dialects look a bit more like Aramaic than older ones, but not substantially so.  (By the way Yemeni Arabic dialects routinely use ما as an interrogative, and most other Peninsular dialects still use it as a relative pronoun.)



Yeah, I was just suggesting that Aramaic seems to be so different from Hebrew and Arabic because we're looking at Neo-Aramaic, not ancient Aramaic.


----------



## momai

Wadi Hanifa said:


> Yes, but if we're trying to see which of NW Semitic and ASA is closer to Arabic, this is another point in favor of ASA.  Now it could be that:
> 
> 1) Arabic and ASA just happened to retain this case system (and other features like phonology and broken plurals) from Proto-Semitic independently of each other (so ASA, NW and Arabic are three independent branches of West Semitic), or
> 
> 2) it could be that ASA and Arabic share these features because they share a more recent common ancestor that had them (so some sort of SW branch), or
> 
> 3) Arabic is just a particularly conservative sibling of the NW languages, so that its similarities with ASA are just common Proto-Semitic retentions (like the Akkadian case system) (feels unlikely), or
> 
> 4) Aramaic is a particularly innovative sibling of Hebrew and Arabic (in which case why are Hebrew and Aramaic grouped together as NW?)


As I said earlier broken plurals seem from many papers I read to have developed later evident by the fact that not even Akkadian 2500 BC. used them and semitists don't seem to consider broken plurals as much important as we would like to think when they go and classify semitic languages. It is of course one aspect of Semitic languages but only one.
As for your question why Aramaic and Hebrew are grouped together, this of course can't be explained here in full detail, but some points off my head:
1- initial waw becomes y as in yeled -> walad , wasan -> yeshen (to sleep)
2- The realization of S123 in NWS
     s1 -> Ar: s -> NW: sh
    s2 -> Ar: sh -> NW: samekh
    s3 -> Ar: s ->  NW: s
So Arabic doesn't have the samekh letter
3- much more similar vocabulary



> I do and I'm half-way through one of his papers on South Arabian languages.  Does he tackle this question of classification/genetic descent directly anywhere?


I don't know any of him, but here are two papers discussing ASA on Academia Aljallad linked them on his Twitter
one two
I have a dictionary of Sabaic (and many other semitic languages) I downloaded sometime earlier I could send to you on private if you wish.
One of the paper discusses how ASA use a b- prefix to denotes the present/future tense which is exactly what we still have in dialects.
The other interesting aspect is the w- prefixed verbs which are used for the past tense which is exactly how it is found in Biblical Hebrew.
Both of these prefixes didn't exist in Classical Arabic so ....


----------

