Semitic languages | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 05/10/2019

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages


00:03:08 1 Name and identification
00:05:56 2 History
00:06:04 2.1 Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples
00:08:28 2.2 Common Era (CE)
00:11:51 3 Present situation
00:16:09 4 Phonology
00:17:29 4.1 Consonants
00:24:07 4.2 Vowels
00:25:05 4.3 Correspondence of sounds with other Afroasiatic languages
00:25:23 5 Grammar
00:25:44 5.1 Word order
00:26:46 5.2 Cases in nouns and adjectives
00:27:41 5.3 Number in nouns
00:28:50 5.4 Verb aspect and tense
00:32:29 5.5 Morphology: triliteral roots
00:39:16 5.6 Independent personal pronouns
00:39:26 5.7 Cardinal numerals
00:39:54 5.8 Typology
00:40:09 6 Common vocabulary
00:41:53 7 Classification
00:44:16 8 Semitic-speaking peoples
00:44:32 8.1 Central Semitic
00:45:47 8.2 East Semitic
00:46:22 8.3 South Semitic
00:47:02 8.4 Unknown
00:47:17 9 See also



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SUMMARY
=======
The Semitic languages, previously also named Syro-Arabian languages, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East that are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in often large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe and Australia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million), Amharic (22 million), Tigrinya (7 million), Hebrew (~5 million native/L1 speakers), Tigre (~1.05 million), Aramaic (575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers) and Maltese (483,000 speakers).Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively. The only earlier attested languages are Sumerian, Elamite (2800 BCE to 550 BCE) (both language isolates), Egyptian and unclassified Lullubi from the 30th century BCE.
Most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjads – a type of alphabetic script that omits some or all of the vowels, which is feasible for these languages because the consonants in the Semitic languages are the primary carriers of meaning. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and South Arabian alphabets. The Ge'ez script, used for writing the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea, is technically an abugida –  a modified abjad in which vowels are notated using diacritic marks added to the consonants at all times, in contrast with other Semitic languages which indicate diacritics based on need or for introductory purposes. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union.
The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. That is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants (usually three, making a so-called triliteral root). Words are composed out of roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants (although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well). For example, in Arabic, the root meaning "write" has the form k-t-b. From this root, words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants, e.g. كتاب kitāb "book", كتب kutub "books", كاتب kātib "writer", كتّاب kuttāb "writers", كتب kataba "he wrote", يكتب yaktubu "he writes", etc.