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Summary Linguistic History of the Middle East
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Course: Linguistic History of the Middle East. Taught by N.D. Kontovas at the University of Leiden, year .
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Week 1 IntroductionDisciplines of linguistics:
Phonology: the study of sound systems in a language
Syntax: the study of the organization of words
Morphology: the study of the parts of words
Semantics: the study of meaning which is context independent
Pragmatics: the study of the purpose and result of a linguistic art f.e. not
accepting food
Diachronic linguistics: the study of a language that changed over time
(stammbaumtheorie)
Synchronic linguistics: the study of languages at a particular stage in it’s
development (usually now).
Sociolinguistics: the meaning of language in society
Proto-semitic: the language where al semitic languages derive from.
,Week 2 The semitic languages I
Oldest Semitic language: Akkadian
It has two major dialects: Assyrian and Babylonian
The goal of ‘familytrees’: to reconstruct the missing steps and eventually find the
proto-language.
A language family has similarity in vocabulary and grammar.
We distinguish two types of vocabulary: cognate and loanword.
Proto-Semitic: the reconstructed origin of all Semitic languages. Descends from
Proto-Afro-Asiatic.
Common theory: it started in the Levant.
Common features of the Semitic languages:
-Consonantal roots
-Templatic Morphology (prefixes, suffixes)
-Grammatical gender (masculine, feminine)
Akkadian
-Mesopotamia Akkadian Empire
-Important literary language
Akkadian got heavily influenced by the non-
semitic language Sumerian.
Sumarian: a prestige language in the region
also a liturgical language (important in religion)
They both influence each other a lot, due to the meeting of their speakers.
Writing systems
Scripts can be transmitted independently it does not go together with the spoken
language.
Common froms of writing systems: cuneiform, hieroglyphic, runiform, etc.
Popular families of writing systems: Latin alphabet, Arabic script, Cyrillic
The emergence of writing: in trade deals had to be promised, and noted
somewhere
bulla pre-literate markings indicating property & transactions
, The emergence of writing:
Pictrogram: a symbol that represents the thing pictorally
Ideogram: a symbol which represents the idea of the thing abstractly
The Rebus principle
Week 3 The semitic languages II
Arabian languages: languages whose early history has been mostly associated with
the Arabian Paeninsula.
Arabic
Old North Arabian
Old/Epigraphic South Arabian
Modern South Arabian
Pre-Islamic Arabic
Before islam: Jahiliyya = ignorance
Arabs were mostly isolated nomads the more isolated the ‘purer’ the Arabic
Classified Pre-Islamic Arabian: Nabataean Arabic, Old Higazi, Safaitic ….
Pre-Islamic Arabic probably came from the Southern Levant, Northern Arabia
Arabic and the Qur’an
-Special status of the (classical) Arabic language
-The language of Qur’an differs slightly from Classical Arabic
Classical Arabic
Important texts in classical Arabic: hadit, fiqh
Diglossia: describes a situation in a society wherein there exist two very different
varieties of the same language at use simultaneously in different spheres within that
society. (Arabic)
Arabic dialects: Egyptian, Maghrebi, Gulf, Levantine, Iraqi
Mutual intelligibility depends on many factors:
-Level of education
-Experience with other dialects
-Exposure to media
White Arabic: the phenomenon where people who speak different dialects attempt
to minimize hard-to-understand dialectal features and so to understand each other.
Maltese: most closely resembles Tunesian Maltese is written in Latin script.
Old/Epigraphic South Ararbian: Sabean, Hadramitic, Minaean, Qatabanian.
No living descendents.
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