The Semitic Languages

Routledge Language Family

by John Huehnergard (Editor), Na’ama Pat-El (Editor)

The Semitic Languages presents a comprehensive survey of the individual languages and language clusters within this language family, from their origins in antiquity to their present-day forms.

This second edition has been fully revised, with new chapters and a wealth of additional material. New features include the following:

• new introductory chapters on Proto-Semitic grammar and Semitic linguistic typology

• an additional chapter on the place of Semitic as a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and several chapters on modern forms of Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian Semitic

• text samples of each individual language, transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet, with standard linguistic word-by-word glossing as well as translation

• new maps and tables present information visually for easy reference.

This unique resource is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and language. It will be of interest to researchers and anyone with an interest in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, linguistic anthropology and language development.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, History

772 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 23, 1997

About the author

John Huehnergard is a Canadian-American Semiticist and emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A survey of the Semitic language family that tries to avoid terminology specific to any given language on the grounds that it can obscure parallels (e.g. the Akkadian preterite, Hebrew yiqtol, and Arabic al-muḍāriʿ are all called the prefix conjugation) and ends up being remarkably unhelpful.
Twenty-three chapters each treat one language or closely related subfamily, and coverage is impressively broad: the relatively unfashionable Ethiopic languages get six chapters, and Modern South Arabian and Ancient Arabian each get one. It does also reflect contemporary academic biases: just Arabic gets four chapters (Classical, Levantine, Egyptian, and Moroccan), Hebrew gets two ("Biblical" and Modern), and Aramaic gets five (Samaritan, Modern Western, Syriac, Mandaic, NENA), while e.g. Phoenician has to share its chapter with the other non-Hebrew Canaanite languages (though given the relative availability of the evidence, it does dominate that).
Each chapter is written separately by a different person or pair of people, which is logistically reasonable and common, but does mean a lot of opportunities for comparison are lost (how similar are the three modern Arabic dialects mentioned? unclear) and things tend to get repetitive. The actual individual chapters tend to be adequate if not great (the "Biblical" Hebrew chapter refuses to look at the phonology of the language at the time and just describes the Tiberian reading tradition); most could have done with an additional pass by a proofreader.

An okay survey for the casual reader, but even very shallow comparative work is quickly going to run into its limitations.

[yellow tree · Rating 5 out of 5]

the book features a very useful overview on most of the semitic languages, such as amharic, hebrew and arabic, but also lesser known as epigraphic south arabian. it gives a short survey on each of them as well as quite complex information on important grammatical details. it proved itself more and more useful the more i got the chance to use it.

[Max Stoffel-Rosales · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's usually very difficult to find fault with any of the Routledge language books. They are patently written, proof-read, & corrected by experts; they are for the most part affordable; they are attentively digitized, which is of course indispensable for those languages that use weird, unicode-unfriendly scripts like Ge'ez and Syriac.

My one complaint is that I believe considerably greater space should have been allotted to those languages that have had the greatest "impact" on the literature and, to be frank, religion of the world at large. While what this means is of course a matter of opinion, it should be obvious that what I mean is a special, historical emphasis on: Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. This is not to say that the language and religious tradition of, for example, Ethiopia is any less important than that of Israel. However, if it happens that the Hebrew and Arabic sections of this book be three or four times the size of the others, on average, if only because an inordinately great proportion of people living on this earth follow a religion based largely on the Old Testament & Quran, well then I say: yəhī kō יהי כה 'So be it.'

Still, that my own personal agenda is not exactly the same as the authors' is no fault of the book. And what the hell do I know, anyway? As always with Routledge, I highly recommend.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of the volumes in Routledge’s Language Family Survey series consists of overviews of the individual languages in a specific family – phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon – as well as a few chapters on general themes like reconstruction of the family’s proto-language. Routledge’s book on the Semitic languages has seen two editions now, and they are in fact completely different books: the second edition edited by John Huehnergard and Na‘ama Pat-El contains entirely freshly written contributions. The second edition does feels like a great improvement and will prove more accessible to linguists trained in other families, as this time the editors decided to give IPA transcription and not just idiosyncratic Semiticist notation. Also, the second edition takes into account a number of recent advances in historical reconstruction, and also contains a chapter on Semitic as a member of the Afro-Asiatic macrofamily.

The second edition contains dedicated chapters on three forms of modern Arabic, namely Moroccan, Levantine, and Egyptian, as opposed to the single chapter on Arabic dialectology of the first edition. The downside is that the second edition contains virtually no mention of Maltese, which got a look in the first edition.

[Robert Coleman]

Excellent introduction. Highly technical.