Ay eas OF TUT e ih CHAIM RABIN DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE INAUGURATION OF THE FELLOWS PROGRAM OF THE INSTITUTE OF SEMITIC STUDIES OCCASIONAL PAPERS SERIES OF THE INSTITUTE OF SEMITIC STUDIES. 1.This supplement presents a lecture delivered on 28 September 1986, for the inauguration of the Fellows Program at the Institute of Semitic Studies, by Professor Emeritus Dr. Chaim Rabin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the first Fellow of the Institute. Edited by Yoél L. Arbeitman, with the assistance of Alessandra Mazzucato, for the Institute of Semitic Studies. Copyright © by the Institute of Semitic Studies, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1047-238 ‘The Institute of Semitic Studies, located at 195 Nassau Street in Princeton, New Jersey, is an independent center for advanced studies in the Semitic languages and civilizations, in their entirety and in their nu- merous separate developments over the 4000 years for which we have documentation for them. The Institute also works to disseminate knowledge of Semitics as a field and of its components to the general public, The Institute seeks to unify research efforts amongst the many separate disciplines of the field, in order to build a comprehensive picture of Semitic cultures and the contributions they have made to West- em and world civilization, ‘The Institute sponsors conferences on various aspects of these contributions which are open to the public free of charge. The Institute is working at the present time towards the goal of planning a comparative dictionary of the Semitic languages, which will be produced in a format where continual updating and advances in schol- arship will be able to be added. ‘The Institute sponsors the Journal of Afroasiatic Languages (Robert Hetzron, Editor; Joan Friedman, Executive Manager; Yoel L. Arbeitman, Managing Editor), and also publishes some major monographs on Semitic languages and on the larger family of which Semitic is only a part, the Afroasiatic family. ‘Those wishing to become Friends of the Institute should write to the director, Dr. Ephraim Isaac Institute of Semitic Studies 195 Nassau Street Princeton, New Jersey 08542 EX + LIBRIS Secs] ALLAN R. BOMHARDTHE SCOPE OF SEMITIC Chaim Rabin Hebrew University of Jerusalem “‘Semitic’’ is the name we give to a language family which, at the time we meet it first, was concentrated in the Middle East, and comprises some seventy different languages,! most of them only sparsely documented in inscriptions or literature. As everywhere, when dealing with forms of speech closely resembling each other, there is no agreed criterion for distinguishing between “‘language”” and ‘‘dialect.”” In the present study we shall deal with Semitic as a family, and mainly with the large and well-known languages. The idea that some languages might be related to each other was first proposed by Judah Ibn Quraish, a Jewish physician at Fez in Morocco, in the 10th century C.E., who demonstrated that words in the Hebrew Bible could be explained by etymological comparison with words in Aramaic and Arabic. This insight was further developed by Hebrew lexicographers in medieval Spain. Learned Jewish refugees carried the new idea to Western Europe, where it began to be applied systematically by scholars such as Albert Schultens in the 16th century.? A knowl- edge of Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic and Arabic became more widespread among Christian scholars. The first study of living Semitic speech was a vocabulary of spoken Spanish Arabic by Pedro de Alcala,? the second a description of Amharic by Job Ludolf. It must be stressed that those early Semitic comparativists did not develop the concept of a language family, i.e. of related languages descended from a common ancestor, documented in ancient times, or reconstructed by comparative methods, though something of this may be detected in the belief, attributed to Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1092-1167), that Aramaic and Arabic are corrupted Hebrew.? The con- cept appears to have been proposed first by Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767- 1835), who toyed with the idea that German, or the Germanic languages, might be the source of what later came to be called the Indo-European family. It was the " For a tentative list, see Encyclopedia Migra’it, vol. VIIL, Jerusalem 1982, columns 337-338 and 351-380. 2 Origines hebraeae sive hebraeae linguae antiquissima natura et indoles ex Arabiae penetralibus revocata, 2nd edition, Leiden 1761, with “Orationes duae de linguae arabicae antiquissima or > Petri Hispani de lingua arabica libri duo, ed. Paul de Lagarde, Gottingen 1883, 4 Job Ludolf, Grammatica linguae amharicae and Lexicon amharico-latinum, both Frankfurt 1698, 5 CF. Rene S. Sirat, “La comparsison lingustique entre Phébreu, I'araméen et Varabe chez les auteurs da “Omer Hatikhah," Revue des Etudes Juives 125, 1965, 398-407.CHAIM RABIN growing knowledge of Sanskrit, the holy language of India, that most influenced the reconstruction of **Proto-Indo-European.”* To no small extent this was due to the rich phonetic and grammatical structure of Classical Sanskrit, which fitted the belief that languages necessarily deteriorated and became simplified. Only the dis- covery of further, at least equally ancient, languages related to Indo-European dis- placed Sanskrit from its absolute position and initiated a search for a Proto-Indo- European which did not necessarily resemble any particular known language. The idea of a Semitic family, along with the name, was introduced by August Ludwig Schlézer.° For a long time, Arabic played in Semitic linguistics a role corresponding to that of Sanskrit in Indo-European. In this context it must be un- derstood as the language of pre-Islamic bedouin poetry and of the Koran, as well as of the early grammarians, who claimed that their description of the language was based upon information by bedouins, the ‘‘natural’’ speakers of Classical Ar- abic. Subsequently, through the grammarians and through language planners for the administrative civil service, such as Ibn Qutaiba (ca. 828-889 C.E.), this Clas- sical Arabic became the norm of official and literary writing in all Muslim Arab countries. This Classical Arabic had a larger phonological inventory than any of, the Semitic languages known by the middle of the 19th century, a clear and regular verbal system, and cases of the noun and moods of the verb marked clearly by short vowel affixes. As with Sanskrit, there existed extensive descriptions and systematizations by users of the language. The very fact that both Sanskrit and Classical Arabic had ceased, long before the rise of Comparative Linguistics, to be spoken in everyday life and were used only in writing, put them in a category high above the spoken idioms of the communities in whose culture they held such central position, and this continued even for several generations after the vernac- ulars had come to be written. Also in Western Europe, after Latin had been largely displaced from written communication, the grammar of the vernaculars was still described according to the categories of Latin. The comparative Semitists found it easy to base their descriptions of other Semitic languages on Arabic, by assuming that they originally had all the phonemes of Arabic, but that some of these co- alesced, or that single phonemes split up for phonetic reasons, that the short final vowels ceased to be sounded, and that their verbal systems, originally like that of Arabic, had become altered by phonetic causes or by analogy, and sometimes by the influence of non-Semitic languages, a reason Arab scholars were wont to give for the grammatical deviations of spoken Arabic dialects from the written lan- guage. Proto-Semitic thus turned out to be practically identical with Classical Arabic. 6 Repertorium fiir Biblische und Morgenliindische Lineratur, 8, Leipzig 1781, p. 161. The innovation is often wrongly attributed to the editor of that volume, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, who gave it as his own in his Einleitung in das Alte Testament, vol. I (2nd edition), Leipzig 1787, p. 45. 2THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC There was only one difficulty about this: Sanskrit is one of the oldest attested Indo- European languages, the Rig-Veda being assumed to have been composed in the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., but the Arabic poetry known to us is hardly older than a few generations before Muhammad (ca. 571-632 C.E.). On the other hand, languages that were believed to have gone through a process of far-reaching changes from the Arabic-like Proto-Semitic stage, were written much earlier: Akkadian and Eblaite by 2500 B.C.E., Ugaritic in the first half of the second millennium B.C.E., Phoenician, Aramaic and Hebrew somewhat before 1000 B.C.E., Sabaen C. 1000 B.C.E. and Classical Ethiopic ca. 300 C.E. In order to maintain that literary Arabic of the sixth century C.E. was practically identical with Proto-Semitic, a reason had to be found to explain why it had not changed. Already Schultens in his Origines Hebraeae of 1724 ascribes the persis- tence of primeval traits in the speech of the desert Arabs to the inaccessibility of their domicile, “‘the extremely old character and excellency to be recovered from the innermost regions of Arabia."’’ In other words, Arabic had been protected from outside influences. In 1906, the German Semitist Carl Brockelmann, in his mon- umental ‘‘Outline of the Comparative Grammar of the Semitic Languages,’’* states: ‘‘If we take account of the fact that even in the historical period the civilized countries of Mesopotamia and Syria were time after time flooded by nomadic tribes from the deserts of Arabia . . . it appears probable that Arabia, the country from which most probably the Semitic population of Ethiopia also originated, should be regarded as the original home of the Semites.” In developing his theory, he sees the spread of the Semites as a number of successive waves of emigration of groups or tribes, whose languages differed to some degree already in their Ara- bian homeland. The first wave were the speakers of Akkadian, later divided into Babylonian and Assyrian, the second the Canaanites, the third the Aramaeans, and the fourth the Arabs. The ancient and modern languages of South-Arabia (today’s Yemen, South-Yemen, and southern Oman), Brockelmann considers to have de- veloped from Arabic, and Ethiopic to have been the language of South-Arabian immigrants to Africa, influenced by the languages of the local Cushitic peoples. Brockelmann does not explicitly say so, but the above theory, and his comparisons throughout the two volumes, clearly show that he took Classical Arabic to be the most conservative of all Semitic languages, and therefore the one most similar to Proto-Semitic. The theories of Schultens and Brockelmann rest on the assumption that the Pre- Islamic bedouins were primitive people out of touch with other civilizations. We now know this to be wrong: they were in close touch with the sophisticated culture 7 See Latin text, above, note 2. ' Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen, 1, Berlin 1908, p. 2. 3CHAIM RABIN of the ancient South-Arabians and participated already in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E. in the caravan trade in Indian and African goods across the desert to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean coast. Classical Arabic employs hundreds of Aramaic and Ethiopic loanwords and probably also large numbers of loanwords from the three ancient South-Arabian languages. There are numerous graffiti on rocks in the outer regions of the peninsula in three forms of a script related to the South-Arabian scripts, and put up by people whose system of names was the same as those of the North-Western Semites, including the Israelites of Biblical times, and of the South-Arabians, namely, the name of a god and a verb expressing some activity desired of that god, while the Arabs of historical times had no such compound names. We do not know when the Arabs started to write and in what script; the Arabic script we know is developed from some form of Aramaic writing. The few inscriptions in Arabic from before Islam differ from the Classical Arabic, and Arab philologists record features of a number of dialects deviating from the classical language. According to the Arab account, poetry was not written down, but remembered and transmitted by assistants of the poets, but on the other hand we are told that when Muhammad died, the text of the Koran was collected from records written down by his adherents immediately after each revelation. The pre-Islamic Arabs thus may have had a writing, but used it only for limited purposes, like the Tuareg Berbers in the Western Sahara, where until recently the script was taught by mothers to their sons, so that they should remem- ber the names of their ancestors, which the mother wrote for them in the sand. However, even if the Arabs are assumed not to have known writing before the seven century C.E., this would force us to abandon the idea that their language had hardly changed from Proto-Semitic, as it can be demonstrated by numerous examples that spoken language changes much more rapidly than written. The language of Arab classical poetry does in fact exhibit at least one archaism which may go back to Proto-Semitic: short vowels at the end of nouns marking the nominative by -u, the genitive by -i, and the accusative by -a, as in early Akkadian and in Ugaritic. There is little doubt that this declension existed in Proto-Semitic, as it also exists, in somewhat reduced form, in Classical Ethiopic. The elaborate rhythms and rhymes of Arabic poetry prove the endings to be genuine, as they could not have been inserted by scribes without collision with rhythm or rhyme. However, a noun followed by another noun in the genitive has in early Akkadian no final vowel, and in Classical Ethiopic a vowel -a for all cases. Though Hebrew and Aramaic have no case vowels in the stage represented by the vowel signs, they can be shown to have had no vowel before a genitive by the fact that before a genitive a feminine noun ends in -at, while the previous -atu, -ati, and -ata all appear as -ah, as they do in Classical Arabic at the end of a sentence. In Arabic poetry, however, also nouns before a genitive have the case vowels, a develop- 4THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC ment peculiar to Classical Arabic, and possibly due to the needs of poetry. All spoken Arabic dialects distinguish in the feminine between -eh and -et just like Hebrew and Aramaic, which suggests that this was so also in the stage of Arabic in which the literary tradition and the spoken language had not yet separated. Likewise, in contrast to Akkadian, Ugaritic, Ethiopic, and the archaic Hebrew of Biblical poetry, ancient Arabic poetical language had a definite article, in the prefix al-. The early grammarians state that some dialects had the article in the form am-. The difference within Arabic, and the widely differing forms of the article in the languages which have it, prove that it did not exist in Proto-Semitic. The most important evidence for changes in Arabic is its system of tenses in the verb. Classical Arabic has a past tense, in which the persons are marked by suf- fixes, and another tense which is both present and future and marks the persons by prefixes, with endings for number and gender in some persons. Classical Ethiopic has the same system. So have Aramaic and Postbiblical Hebrew, except that they mark also the present by using the active participle. In Hebrew and Aramaic, the suffixless forms of the future have one syllable after the prefix: yi-grol. Classical Arabic has two syllables, ya-grulu, the -u being a sign of the indicative mood. Classical Ethiopic has also two syllables: yé-qattél, while the modal form is yé-gtél. Akkadian has similar forms: present-future i- gattal, but i-qrul for the past and for some uses as mood. In Arabic ya-qrul is mainly a mood, but in the negative /am yaqtul it is a past tense. In Biblical Hebrew, wé-yigtol" is a mood, but wa-yyigtol is a past tense, in many verb types exhibiting forms that are shorter than the indicative future, for instance yagiim “‘he gets up,”” but wayydgom'! ‘“‘and he got up,’’ yisteh “he drinks,” but wayyast ‘‘and he drank.”” It is widely accepted nowadays that Semitic is but a branch of a much larger group of languages, comprising hundreds of languages in North Africa. This group is mostly called ‘‘Afroasiatic’’ (or ‘‘Afrasian,"’ formerly “‘Hamito-Semitic’’). Many Afroasiatic languages mark the persons in the verb by prefixes or suffixes bearing some resemblance to those used in Semitic, but the opposition prefixes/ * On the connection between Classical Arabic, the language of ancient poetry and of the Koran, and the spoken dialects of the pre-Islamic times, ef. W. Margais as quoted by H. Fleisch, Introduction a l'étude des langues sémitiques, Patis 1947, p. 99; R. Blachére, Introduction au Coran, Paris 1947, pp. 156-169; Ch. Pellat, Langue et littérature arabe, Paris 1952, p. 31; Johann Fick, Arabiya, Berlin (DDR) 1950, p. 5 (French translation, Paris 1955, p. 7); David Cohen, “Koiné, langue commune et dislectes arabes,” Arabica 9, 1962, 119-14; Anna Parzymies, ““Apergu sur I’évolution socio-fonetionnelle de la langue arabe,” Africana Bulletin (Warsaw) 32, 1984, on p. 164. + The medieval system used in the printed Bibles to indicate vowels (“pointing") does not distinguish be- tween originally long and short oin stressed closed syllables, but in this case phonemic shortness of o is proved by its reduction when unstressed, e.g. yigtélu. The ois im this case indicated by the short vowel games qatanCHAIM RABIN suffixes does not express future and past in any of those languages. Some have only one way, others have one in some verbs and the other in other verbs. In one Berber dialect verbs expressing a state, such as color, size, etc., have suffixes, but no tenses.!? In Egyptian, and only there, all tenses have suffixes, but there is a form with special suffixes, resembling those of the Semitic past tense, which in- dicates a state rather than an action, just like the Akkadian suffix tense. We can see that Egyptian and Akkadian made one step beyond the African part of Afroas- iatic, by building the prefix/suffix opposition into the conjugation of every verb. Other Semitic languages went further: Biblical Hebrew, and perhaps Ugaritic and South-Arabian, used for each of the two tenses both a prefix and a suffix forma- tion, Classical Arabic had but a small remnant of this, and all other languages made the prefix/suffix opposition the exclusive means of indicating tense. Ara- maic, Postbiblical Hebrew, and the modern Arabic dialects created each in its own way separate forms for the present tense. As far as the verb is concerned, Arabic, as we meet it first, was in the third stage of development. On the other hand, it is possible that with regard to its phonetics, Arabic repre- sents a particularly early stage of Semitic, because it has such a large number of consonants. Only one language (or at least script) is richer than Classical Arabic, namely Ancient South-Arabian, which has letters corresponding to Hebrew Jin, Sin, and samek, while Arabic § corresponds to sin and Arabic s both to Hebrew sin and samek. It is easier to derive a smaller set of phonemes from a larger set by assuming coalescence of previous sounds than to derive a larger set from a smaller one, since in the latter case it is necessary to find conditions for each different development. However, both directions of development are well attested in many languages, and therefore this is not a reliable criterion for deciding what is earlier or later in a given case.!3 We do not know whether the Semites came to their historical domiciles as a single unit and divided up in the course of time, or whether they arrived at different periods, and the specific Semitic traits were developed by mutual influence. One thing is clear, though: the Semitic languages influenced each other a great deal more than the Indo-European languages did. The reason for this may be geogra- phy. The Semitic peoples in Asia were enclosed by the seas, by chains of high mountains and by desert, unlike the Indo-Europeans, who had at their Eastern boundary the plains of Asia and in Europe itself enough territory to develop centres distant enough from each other for new languages to form. The Semitic peoples of Asia could extend only into areas already occupied by other Semites and to assim- ilate them or to assimilate themselves to the local language. In this way substrates "Cf, André Basset, La langue berbere, London 1952, p. 20. "8 Giovanni Garbini, Le lingue semitiche, Rome 1972, argues that the system of consonants in the later Semitic languages is larger than that of the early ones.THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC came into being and the overlaid languages broke up into dialects, in speech and in writing. In these meetings of languages, not only words native to one language passed into the other, but also words and phrases which each language had ab- sorbed previously in contact with another language. Akkadian, the first super- strate-language of which we have knowledge in that area, transmitted masses of Sumerian words. When Aramaic usurped the international role of Akkadian, it transmitted large quantities of Akkadian words. Arabic, heavily aramaicized while still in Arabia," transferred Aramaic words to the populations it influenced. Pop- ulations, who thus changed their spoken language, preserved in their new language words and grammatical features of their former idiom. The colloquial Arabic of Lebanon and Syria still preserves many words from the Canaanite dialects which the ancestors of the present inhabitants spoke over 2000 years ago, before they were aramaicized. The contacts of Egypt with the Canaanites in the Tell-Amarna letters show very little penetration of Egyptian words into the Akkadian used by the scribes. Even more remarkable, apart from Egyptian objects, like the word “*Pharaoh”’ and the word yé’ or ‘‘river’’ for the Nile—and that in a late pronunci- ation for the written word ytrw—we find no Egyptian words in the account of the servitude of the Israclites. The words Sorérim for the overseers (literally ‘‘writ- ers’) and lébénim for the bricks are both Akkadian, which suggests that the Egyp- tian officials spoke Akkadian, at that time the international language of the Near East, to their foreign workers. On the other hand, the Egyptian of the New Empire is full of words borrowed from Canaanite and related languages. With the mention of Egypt, we come to the one direction in which Semitic could expand. As we have seen, the African Afroasian languages are related to Semitic, and it is not impossible that the Semites came to the Near East from Africa. The expansion of Semitic languages into Africa, however, was not, as in Europe with Indo-European, a ‘migration of nations’ which swept away the former inhabit- ants, but a displacement of small groups, which influenced the previous population through trade or through religion. Carthage was language-wise a Phoenician city, but we do not know what percentage of its citizens were actual descendants of Phoenician colonists. The area of Ethiopia in which the Semitic Classical Ethiopic was spoken, was in the first centuries C.E.., still small, centered around the city of Aksum. Semitic speech penetrated southwards, and several Semitic languages with strong Cushitic influence came into being, but in the same part of the country Cushitic languages continue until now, and only in the last generations there seems to have been a massive penetration of words from the Semitic Amharic. With the spread of Islam, Arabic expanded over the whole Afroasiatic area of North Africa, 4 Siogmund Fraenkel, Die aramdischen Fremdworter im Arabischen, Leiden 1886, has in the Index 981 Aramaic words.CHAIM RABIN without displacing the languages previously spoken there. The expansion of Islam introduced into those local languages much religious and cultural vocabulary in Arabic, and in the cities, where people of diverse origins congregated, Arabic spread as a lingua franca. This also happened in the Islamic southern part of Spain. The spoken language in different areas was strongly influenced by the substrate languages, but the written Arabic of the Muslims, written and read by a small elite, remained the same everywhere. Writing spoken dialects was for Muslims unthinkable,’ although there seems to have been less hesitation to use established local languages when sizable num- bers of their speakers had been converted to Islam, and after a method of writing them in Arabic script had been devised, mainly by extending the system of dia- critic points by which Arabic itself had adapted a previous Northwest Semitic script to its own larger consonantal phonology. Languages such as Persian, Turk- ish, Urdu, Swahili and Hausa became important literary idioms. They also ab- sorbed large quantities of Arabic words. All of them co-existed with a local liter- ature in Arabic. On the other hand, non-converted communities in Muslim countries adopted Arabic both in the spoken form and as literary language, written in their own script (adapted by diacritic signs), but since literary Arabic could only be leant in Muslim religious schools, these non-Muslim written varieties represent various degrees of compromise between contemporary standard written Arabic and the local spoken forms of Muslims, and non-Muslims alike.'* Arabic words were borrowed into the literary languages of non-Muslim communities in Islamic coun- tries, as well as loan-translations and semantic loans,"’ and even their syntax was affected by replication of Arabic syntactic constructions."* As against this, there appear to have been very few cases in which non-Muslim groups used the Arabic alphabet to write their own literary language. The only one known to me is that of the Karaites, from whom we have even Biblical texts in Arabic script. The non-Muslim groups also played an important role in creating an intellectual linkage between Arabic literature and other languages. The Arabs no doubt picked +5 Colloquial Arabic was not written (except accidentally by the ignorant) until early moder times, and even then only by Christians in Lebanon and Malta, and by Jews in North-AVftica and Iraq. In Muslim society itis reserved for humorous contexts in newspapers, and sometimes to represent the speech of the uneducated, 4 Now called “*Middle Arabie.”” Cf. Joshua Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo- Arabic, London 1965; 2nd edn. Jerusalem 1981; id.,A Grammar of Christian Arabic, based mainly upon South: Palestinian texts from the First Millennium, Louvsin 1966-67; Simon Hopkins, Studies in the Grammar of Early Arabic, Oxford 1984, 17 “Loan-translations" are derived or compound words reflecting the semantic structure of a word in another language; “‘semantic borrowing’” is the extension of the range of meaning of a native word so as to include an additional meaning of the corresponding word inthe other language. ‘WE.g, Arabic influence in Hebrew poctry in medieval Spain, which otherwise closely followed Biblical Hebrew. It became much larger in the medieval (Post-mishnaic) prose of translations from the Arabic in Southern France and in the scientific style in original Hebrew works. 8THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC up spoken languages in their surroundings, but appear to have been adverse to Tearning non-Muslim literary languages. '? The translations of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic was due to Syrian Christians: the first translation from Persian literature was made by a converted Zoroastrian,” and strongly infiu- enced the formation of an educated narrative style. The first comprehensive Arabic grammar was written by another Persian, Sibawaihi (from Persian Sebokht). In the same way the influence of Arabic science and philosophy upon medieval Western Europe was in no way due to Arabic-speaking Muslims, but to Jews, who gave Christian scholars from countries outside Spain an oral translation in a vernacular understood by both, which the Westerner wrote down in Latin, thus completing the path by which Greek ideas and Greek terminology passed from the Greek orig- inal via two successive Semitic languages* into what was then the intellectual language of Western Europe. The Arab unwillingness to acquire Latin or Greek may have been due to their having had to spend long years and great effort before they could understand texts in Classical Arabic and had access to learning. This may be a sociological feature of diglossia situations in general: the difficulty of leaning a complicated and over- rich language engendered a psychological fear to attempt another, equally compli- cated, intellectual vehicle. While we read of many medieval Jews who acquired a knowledge of one or more contemporary languages, we meet Jewish scholars who knew Latin only in the 16"-17" centuries. In Ethiopia, the progress of Semitic was slow but steady, and is still going on. The general view of Semitists has been that Semitic was brought over from Asia, most probably from South Arabia. There are indeed many South-Arabian inscrip- tions in northern Ethiopia, most of which no doubt antedate the first Ethiopian inscription with vowel indication by elements attached to the letter or by changes in its shape, and which therefore can be proved to be in Ge’ez, the ancient literary idiom. But if Ge’ez developed out of South-Arabian, this would mean that Sa- baean should be read with the vocalization of Ge’ez, a claim which could also be supported by the grammar of the present-day South-Arabian languages, and would connect the whole branch with one of the oldest attested Semitic languages, Ak- Shown e.g. by oft-repeated assertion that Arabic was the only language which had case-endings (i'rab). ® Qalifa wa Dimna, translated by Ibn al-Mugaffa’, ca. 720-756 C.E. Cf. Dominique Sourdel, Arabica 1, 1954, pp. 308 and 311 on the later’s origin from Persian nobility and conversion to Islam, > Some Syriac Christian scholars had translated the Greek into Arabic via 2 Syriae version, extant or prepared by themselves, so that the transition was through three Semitic languages. ® Eg. Rashi (Troyes 1040-1105), whose French glosses written in Hebrew characters in his commentaries to Bible and Talmud prove that he was thoroughly conversant with French terminology in many fields to which Jews had no access. Cf. Arstne Darmesteter, Les gloses francaises dans les commentaires talmudiques de Rashi, posthumously edited by David Simon Blondheim in 1929, who wrote a second volume published 1937. Moché Catane, Recueil des Gloses ctc., Jerusalem 1984, has in the index 2460 items.CHAIM RABIN kadian. The view that the oldest speakers of Ge’ez were ‘‘semitized Aksumites’”® implies South-Arabian origin of the language, and excludes the likelihood that the earliest speakers of both South-Arabian and Akkadian might have crossed the Red Sea from Africa, where they had been part of the Hamito-Semitic phylum. How- ever, an assumption that Ge’ez (and pethaps the ancestors of other Ethiopic-Se- mitic languages) represents a section of Semites that did not cross into Asia, fits in with the Hamito-Semitic theory, and pethaps also explains some archaic features of pre-Islamic Arabic, as shown by the poetry, such as the rich phonology (one letter less than Ancient South-Arabian) and the plural formation by changes of vocalization and ‘a- prefixes, which Arabic shares with Ge’ez and South-Arabian, but with no other known Semitic language. Another feature which Arabic shares with Ge’ez, the ancient South-Arabian languages Minaean and Qatabanian, and present-day South-Arabian, the s- prefix of the causative conjugation—preserved only in the causative-reflexive (i)stagtala—is also the rule in Akkadian and Uga- ritic, and has remnants in Aramaic and in Biblical Hebrew.** The causative s- is also found in many “‘Hamitic”” languages. For a long period, the Semitic languages of Ethiopia were restricted to Christian populations, the main exception being the city dwellers of Harar, who are Mus- ims, and write their language, Harari, with Arabic letters. I have not found in the literature when Harar was islamized, probably by the Arab traders, but the fact that the Muslims from elsewhere assimilated to the language, shows that there must have been a considerable and integrated population, which may well have been Christian. In recent decades, with the administrative and commercial integra- tion of Ethiopia, Amharic, the language that replaced Ge’ez in its original terti- tory, has been spreading over extensive further areas, at least as a second lan- guage. In spite of being separated from the main traditional area of Semitic by the Red Sea, both Ge’ez and Amharic have had contacts with other Semitic languages. Most scholars seem to agree that Ethiopic Christianity exhibits a considerable number of Jewish elements, and that this points to the presence of Jews in the country at the formative period, approximately the middle part of the first millen- nium C.E.,’ irrespective of whether we connect that Jewish presence with the ® Edward Ullendorff, Journal of Semitic Studies (ISS) 1, 1956, 245, reprinted in his Studia Aethiopica et Semitica, Stuttgart 1987 (SAS), p. 31. 2 Several scholars have sought such “broken plurals” in Biblical Hebrew, but the idea remains unconvine- ing. % Cf. C. Rabin, Eretz-Yisra’el 9, 1969, 148-158 (Hebrew) and literature cited. % Cf, Enrico Cerulli, Studie Etiopici I, La lingua e la storia di Harar, Roma 1936; Wolf Leslau, Etymolog- ‘cal Dictionary of Harari, Berkeley 1963; Ewald Wagner, Harari Texte in Arabischer Schrift, Wiesbaden 1983. 2 Ullendorff, loc. cit. note 23, footnote 20.THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC Beta Yisrael (Falashas)* (called in medieval chronicles ayhud “‘Jews’’) or not. These Jews, as far as they were not local converts, would have come from Yemen and from Northern Arabia, where there were large Jewish settlements, at least partly of refugees from Roman oppression in Palestine after 70 C.E., and part of these may have spoken Aramaic. Ullendorff® argued that the Ge’ez version of the Old Testament and of apocryphal and pseudepigraphal Jewish writings, shows signs of having been translated from Hebrew, though redaction based on Septua- gint may have followed. The present text also has a number of words in the cultic terminology clearly borrowed from Aramaic. From the second half of the first millennium C.E., there is a steady influence of Arabic in Ge’ez and later on in Amharic,” reinforced by translations from that language. But it must not be overlooked that there was also some influence from the Ethiopic script upon Arabic: the oldest system of vocalization in Arabic man- uscripts used large dots, above the letter for a, after the letter at the same height for u, and below the letter for i, thus in the same places where short strokes are attached to many Ethiopic letters to denote the same vowels (o where Arabic has a). We have to distinguish between areas where Semitic languages were carried by settlers of Semitic origin or previously semitized, as in the case of Arabic in North- em Africa and the various Semito-Ethiopic languages in Ethiopia, and areas which began to use a Semitic language for certain purposes although no considerable number of Semites settled there. It is possible that this happened in some of the outlying regions where we find Akkadian inscriptions, much in the same way as Western Semites in Ebla, Ugarit and Palestine employed Akkadian for commu cation in the 2nd millennium B.C.E. In the first millennium B.C.E., Aramaic spread into the Babylonian Empire. We have no clear indication that the scribes who produced the Aramaic classifications upon cuneiform tablets, were all Ara- maeans, or whether this language was employed also by clerks speaking other languages because Aramaic had a convenient script for the purpose. This factor becomes much clearer in the use of Aramaic as communication language through- out the Persian Empire. When we find the scribe of a Persian nobleman in Meso- potamia corresponding in Aramaic with the scribe of his master’s administrator in the latter’s estates in Egypt,*? there is no cogent reason to assume that both scribes % 1d., ibid. p. 255 (SAS p. 41) calls the Falashas remnants of unconverted nuclei of the Abyssinian popula- tion in the 4th century A.D. but elsewhere rejects the idea that they were Jewish immigrants. ® In The Bible World . . . in Honor of Cyrus H. Gordon, ed. Gary A. Rendsburg et al. New York 1980, pp. 249-257 (SAS 43-51). ® Ullendorff, op. cit. p. 229 (SAS 15). Most of the words quoted could also have been Jewish Aramaic. 5 Cf. Wolf Leslau, “Arabic loanwords in Amharic,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, 1957, 221-244. ® Godfrey R. Driver, Aramaic Documents of the fith Century B.C., Oxford 1954, 2nd edition 1957. IrCHAIM RABIN happened to be native speakers of Aramaic, but simply that this was the done and convenient thing to use Aramaic for such a purpose, much as Arab villagers cor- respond with relatives in other villages through the services of scribes who employ standard written Arabic, in spite of the fact that the sender and the recipient speak the same dialect or mutually intelligible dialects. In fact, as H. H. Schaeder phrased it,2* the Aramaic was only a script “‘representing”’ the language(s) of the sender and the recipient. Extensive remnants of this method were retained in the writing of Sassanid Persian (Pehlevi) with its copious Aramaic ideograms. It thus seems clear that Aramaic, in spite of its use with non-Aramaic-speaking peoples over more than 1500 years, remained a language of convenience, without a specific Aramacan message or culture. In this it is diametrically opposed to Ar- abic in the period after the rise of Islam: Arabic as a language outside Arabic speaking society is the bearer of a message, both religious and cultural. Especially in the Asian regions, there is in many places a local Arabic literature, principally of religious content, and in a language that is still governed by the grammar and the style of Classical Arabic. Indeed, the stubborn maintenance of the rules and vocabulary of Classical Arabic in face of the ever larger distance between it and the local dialects spoken in each area, with all the problems this creates, is viewed ‘as necessary to the perpetuation of Islam and of Arab civilization. Although Arabic had no need to defend its position as a national and cultural language, the begin- ning of a European-style literature in literary Arabic in the last century was felt by the educated public to be a ‘‘renaissance,”’ a victory over the challenges of a tech- nical revolution which at that time had merely started.** The same ideology of “renaissance” marks the recent history of the Hebrew language. This language, owing to the ejection of the Jewish population from the last remaining part of its homeland, Judaea, and the dispersion of the Jewish peo- ple across many different countries, looked in the first centuries C.E. like a dead or dying language, unused by some of the culturally and economically most ad- vanced Jewish centres, like Greek-speaking Egypt and the international commu- nity of Rome, and employed in other countries merely as a vehicle of prayer and recitation. Some original writing still existed, but even in the central intellectual endeavour of that time, fixation of Jewish law and custom, the discussions handed down as they took place in Galilee and in Mesopotamia were not carried on in Hebrew, but in Aramaic. Yet, while it might seem that life of Hebrew had come to a close, the same Galilee witnessed the first revival, the emergence of a lively and sophisticated poetry for enriching the festival prayers, called by the name piyyut, from Greek poiétés. The poems which have survived exhibit a high degree 5 Franische Beitrige 1, Halle 1930, pp. 199-212. ¥ CE, Joshua Blau, The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic: Parallels and Differences in the Revival of two Semitic Languages, University of California, Berkeley 1981 12THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC of ingenuity in form and in creating new Hebrew words, on a Biblical basis, but with unlimited use of late Hebrew (Mishnaic Hebrew) as well as of Aramaic. These poems, for the appreciation of which a mastery of the language and artistic taste are needed, spread into far countries, e.g. the later France and Western Ger- many, where these poems were absorbed into the prayers, and new, somewhat simpler, poems were composed. By the year 900, the Jews of the Arab countries were ready to attempt adjusting the rhythms and techniques of Arabic poetry to the Hebrew language. Taking recourse to a renaissance of Biblical Hebrew, the Jews of North-Africa, Spain, and later also Southern France and Italy, produced both religious and worldly poetry, some of it of great beauty and refinement. Following the Arab practice of linking poetry to discovery of the language’s structure and possibilities, a detailed grammatical description of the Biblical language took place, covering also lexicography and semantics. The influence of contemporary Hispano-Arab sociolinguistics, however, pre- vented Hebrew from being used also for scientific and philosophical prose. As we have seen, medieval Arabic culture rejected all literary use of spoken varieties of the language. Biblical Hebrew, because of the small vocabulary rescued by the Bible text, did not suffice for scientific purposes, and Mishnaic Hebrew, the re- sources of which were much larger, was considered to have been a popular spoken language, ‘‘the language of our forefathers,” and thus, by Arabic standards, unfit for writing—a state of ‘‘insufficiency of language’’ bewailed by several authors of the period. Only, when in the 12th century Spanish scholars came to Southern France, where they saw among the Christian population a contemporary language being used for poetry and artistic prose, did Mishnaic Hebrew come to be used for prose writing, and especially for translation of learned works from the Arabic, in which very few Arabic words were borrowed, but large quantities of loan transla- tions and semantic borrowings were introduced. The revival of certain rare Bibli- cal syntactic constructions resembling those used in Arabic prose enabled this sci- entific Hebrew to be more exact in its sentence structure. This new type of Hebrew penetrated, to varying degrees, into the writings of Jews in Northern France and Italy, who did not know Arabic, and formed the basis on which a flourishing and variegated prose literature developed in the period of the European Renaissance and the beginning of the Modern Period. Poetry, how- ever, remained restricted to Biblical Hebrew vocabulary, and this applied also to the majority of the plays written in the eighteenth century. After 1850, the Enlight- enment (Hebrew Haskalah) produced a stream of poetry, as well as some novels, all in pure Biblical Hebrew, and this style also was adopted by the journals in Germany and later in Eastern Europe. This applied, however, only to belles lettres: religious literature and folk literature continued to employ Mishnaic Hebrew, with admixture of Talmudic Aramaic.CHAIM RABIN ‘The turning point in the structure of European Hebrew was reached with the rise of realistic story writing, which above all introduced dialogue which reflected the way people spoke. In 1886, S. J. Abramowich, writing under the pseudonym “‘Mendele the itinerant bookseller’’ (Mendele, Mokher Sépharim), published in a daily newspaper in Russia the first instalment of a story describing contemporary Jewish life, written in the Mishnaic-medieval language of popular literature. This caught on immediately, and by 1890 also penetrated into poetry. As it happened, this was also the period of a beginning revival of Hebrew speaking, of a Jewish national revival which in the 1890's became Zionism, the deterioration of the Jew- ish situation in Russia and the ensuing stream of Jewish emigration to Palestine and to the U.S.A. (which became for a time the home of a lively Hebrew litera- ture). The coincidence of the stylistic revolution with the beginnings of settlement in Palestine brought it about that the renascent spoken Hebrew, as well as the literature which accompanied it, were in the much more adaptable continuation of medieval Hebrew, which also had the advantage of being familiar to those who had not been touched by the Enlightenment literature or by the movement for He- brew revival. Hebrew was necessary to provide contact between Jews from many different countries—and had served as a lingua franca already earlier in the 19th century.** The reintroduction of Hebrew into daily life and into schools in Pales- tine thus took place without problems, and Hebrew became a thriving modern language. To solve the vocabulary needs of a literary language, suddenly required to sup- ply all the words needed for modern life, technology and ways of speaking, Ele- azer Ben-Yehudah, initiator of the revival, founded the ‘“‘Language Committee’’ in 1890 to direct the development of the language and wrote in 1903 a small prac- tical dictionary, and in 1908 embarked on a Thesaurus Totius Hebraitatis which would present the vocabulary of all periods of Hebrew.** He used the newspapers which he edited to popularize his newly-created words. In his circle there were many other innovators who worked, like Ben-Yehudah, on the basis of derivation from existing Hebrew words. At one stage Ben-Yehudah himself felt that by der- ivation it would not be possible to provide all the necessary terminology, and pro- posed to the Language Committee to use the vocabulary of Arabic, with phonetic adaptations, on the assumption that Arabic had preserved many words that had also existed in Hebrew but happened not to be used in the only literature saved from Biblical times, the Hebrew Bible. The suggestion was rejected by the Com- % Tudor V. Parfit, ““The use of Hebrew in Palestine, 1800-1882," Journal of Semitic Studies 17, 1972, 237-252, and ‘“The contribution of the Old Yishuy to the revival of Hebrew,” ibid. 29, 1984, 93-103, sees in the lingua franca the renaissance of Hebrew. % Completed long after his death by other scholars itis still important both for its etymological notes and for its references, especially those to medieval writings. 4THE SCOPE OF SEMITIC mittee.2” At the same time the public introduced into spoken Hebrew many hun- dreds of words borrowed from European languages, part of which have become part and parcel of present-day Hebrew. Even the Language Academy, the succes- sor of the Language Committee, sanctions in its technical vocabularies large quan- tities of international terms. ‘Among the languages accessible for borrowing was colloquial Arabic. The Jew- ish farmers frequently employed Arab workers, and from them learnt the names of plants and of agricultural techniques usual in the Middle East, as well as of garments and articles of food used by the Arab population. As Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Palestine/Israel in growing numbers, they brought with them their cuisine, some of which was also adopted by Jews of European origin, and especially by the latter’s children. One of the most common ways of entry of Arabic words into Hebrew was through slang, as used by young people, by soldiers and by artist circles. As is well known, slang expressions are relatively short-lived, and then either disappear or become part of the general informal spoken language. The number of words borrowed from the colloquial Arabic dialects of the various parts of Palestine and of Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrant groups probably goes into the hundreds. At the same time spoken Arabic is borrowing from Hebrew terms connected with technology and with Western styles of life. While it is true that the study of Arabic at the school level, though theoretically obligatory, runs into difficulties because of the need to teach both colloquial Arabic and written Arabic (which, as always in diglossia, have to be learnt as separate languages), the fact that Arabs, as we have seen, do not produce books in the colloquial, and the leaner has to read made-up reading matter in Hebrew script, has played its part too in the inad- equate mastering of the language by Hebrew-speaking students. Yet there are chances that the contacts between the two languages will increase with time. Many young people in administration, police and army learn both spo- ken and written Arabic as part of their training; the Arabic-language departments in the universities are well attended and produce a steady flow of research. Hebrew literature has begun to be translated into Arabic, and Arabic literature is made accessible in Hebrew translations. In most Arab countries, contemporary Hebrew is now taught as a subject, and Hebrew research literature is used by Arab scholars. In one Arab country, Hebrew is taught with the aim of producing scholars equipped to retranslate into Arabic works of medieval Arab philosophers and sci- entists which now exist only in Hebrew translations, as the manuscripts of the original texts were lost. For ideological reasons, Ben-Yehudah rejected borrowing from Talmudic Aramaic. Since then this has bbeen an important source of borrowing. 15CHAIM RABIN There is no ‘Semitic cultural collaboration,”” just as there is no Indo-European cultural collaboration. It so happens that most European countries speak Indo- European languages, but cultural Europeanism includes, in prominent positions, two Finno-Ugric languages: Finnish and Hungarian. There have been two true Semitic Cultural communities, that based on Akka- dian and the much wider one based on Aramaic. Will there pethaps be one day a Semitic cultural community including the users of Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic?