Context: The Tigris and Euphrates, with their tributaries, form a major river system in Western Asia. From sources in the Taurus mountains of eastern Turkey they flow by/through Syria through Iraq into the Persian Gulf. The system is part of the Palearctic TigrisEuphrates ecoregion, which includes Iraq and parts of Turkey, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan., The Euphrates (Sumerian: : "Buranuna", : "Purattu", : "al-Furt", : "Prt", : "Yeprat", : "Perat", ) is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia. Originating in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates flows through Syria and Iraq to join the Tigris in the Shatt al-Arab, which empties into the Persian Gulf., Syria, officially known as the Syrian Arab Republic (""), is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest. Syria's capital and largest city is Damascus., The IranIraq boundary runs for 1,458 kilometers, from the Shatt al-Arab (known as Arvand Rud in Iran) waterway to the tripoint boundary with modern Turkey at the Kuh e-Dalanper. Although the boundary was first determined in 1639, certain disputes fester, particularly disputes surrounding navigation on the Shatt al-Arab waterway., Iraq (, or ; '; '), officially known as the Republic of Iraq ('; ') is a country in Western Asia, bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest, and Syria to the west. The capital, and largest city, is Baghdad. The main ethnic groups are Arabs and Kurds; others include Assyrians, Turkmen, Shabakis, Yazidis, Armenians, Mandeans, Circassians, and Kawliya. Around 95% of the country's 36 million citizens are Muslims, with Christianity, Yarsan, Yezidism, and Mandeanism also present. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish., The Middle East is a transcontinental region centered on Western Asia and Egypt. The corresponding adjective is "Middle-Eastern" and the derived noun is "Middle-Easterner". The term has come into wider usage as a replacement of the term Near East (as opposed to Far East) beginning in the early 20th century., The Horn of Africa (, "yäafrika qänd", "al-qarn al-'afrq") (shortened to HOA) is a peninsula in Northeast Africa. It juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. The area is the easternmost projection of the African continent. The Horn of Africa denotes the region containing the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia., Europe is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. To the east and southeast, Europe is generally considered as separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Yet the non-oceanic borders of Europea concept dating back to classical antiquityare arbitrary. The primarily physiographic term "continent" as applied to Europe also incorporates cultural and political elements whose discontinuities are not always reflected by the continent's current overland boundaries., Western Asia, West Asia, Southwestern Asia or Southwest Asia is the westernmost subregion of Asia. The concept is in limited use, as it significantly overlaps with the Middle East (or Near East), the main difference being the exclusion of Egypt (which would be counted as part of North Africa). The term is sometimes used for the purposes of grouping countries in statistics., Kuwait ('), officially the State of Kuwait ('), is a country in Western Asia. Situated in the northern edge of Eastern Arabia at the tip of the Persian Gulf, it shares borders with Iraq and Saudi Arabia. , Kuwait has a population of 4.2 million people; 1.3 million are Kuwaitis and 2.9 million are expatriates. Expatriates account for 70% of the population., Sumerian ("native tongue") is the language of ancient Sumer and a language isolate which was spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). During the 3rd millennium BC, a very intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. The influence of Sumerian on Akkadian (and vice versa) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a substantial scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has prompted scholars to refer to Sumerian and Akkadian in the third millennium BC as a "Sprachbund" (area of linguistic convergence)., Beth Nahrain or Bet Nahrain or ("house (of the) rivers") is the Assyrian name for the region known as Mesopotamia in the Syriac language (Greek "land between the rivers") as well as its surrounding periphery. Geographically, it refers to the areas around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers (as well as their tributaries). The Aramaic name loosely describes the area of the rivers, not between the rivers, as the literal Greek term does, but both names refer to the same region., The Book of Genesis (from the Latin Vulgate, in turn borrowed or transliterated from Greek , meaning "origin" "Brš", "In [the] beginning") is the first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament., Mesopotamia ("[land] between rivers"; from Ancient Armenian  (Mijagetq); "bild ar-rfidayn" "miyn rodn"; "Beth Nahrain" "land of rivers") is a name for the area of the TigrisEuphrates river system, in modern days roughly corresponding to most of Iraq plus Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish-Syrian and IranIraq borders., The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages 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 expatriate communities in North America and Europe, with smaller communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia. 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 East Semitic languages are one of six fairly uncontroversial divisions of the Semitic languages , the others being Northwest Semitic , Arabian , Old South Arabian ( also known as Sayhadic ) , Modern South Arabian , and Ethio - Semitic . The East Semitic group is attested by two distinct languages , Akkadian and Eblaite , both of which have been long extinct . They stand apart from other Semitic languages , traditionally called West Semitic , in a number of respects . Historically , it is believed that this linguistic situation came about as speakers of East Semitic languages wandered further east , settling in Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE , as attested by Akkadian texts from this period . By the beginning of the second millennium BCE , East Semitic languages , in particular Akkadian , had come to dominate the region . They were influenced by the non-Semitic Sumerian language and adopted cuneiform writing . Modern understanding of the phonology of East Semitic languages can only be derived from careful study of written texts and comparison with the reconstructed Proto - Semitic . Most striking is the loss of the glottal stop , or aleph , and the voiced pharyngeal fricative , or ayin , both of which are prominent features of West Semitic languages ( for example , Akk . bl ' master ' < PS. * ba `` al ) . Also , East Semitic languages do not possess a series of three back fricatives : * h , *  , *  . Their elision appears to give rise to the presence of an e vowel , where it is not found in other Semitic languages ( for example , Akk . ekallu ' palace / temple ' < PS. * haykal ) . It also appears that the series of interdental fricatives became sibilants ( for example , Akk . šalšu ' three ' < PS. * ala ) . However , the exact phonological make - up of the languages is not fully known , and the absence of features may have been the result of the inadequacies of Sumerian orthography to describe the sounds of Semitic languages rather than their real absence . The word order in East Semitic may also have been influenced by Sumerian , being subject -- object -- verb rather than the West Semitic verb -- subject -- object order ., Shem ("Sm"; Ge'ez: , "Sm"; "renown; prosperity; name"; Arabic: "Sm") was one of the sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible as well as in Islamic literature. Genesis 10:21 refers to relative ages of Shem and his brother Japheth, but with sufficient ambiguity to have yielded different English translations. The verse is translated in the KJV as "Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.". However, the New American Standard Bible gives, "Also to Shem, the father of all the children of Eber, and the older brother of Japheth, children were born.", North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of Africa. The United Nations definition of "North Africa" includes seven countries and territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara. The countries of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya are often collectively referred to as the Maghreb, which is the Arabic word for "sunset". Egypt lies to the northeast and encompasses part of West Asia, while Sudan is situated on the edge of the Sahel, to the south of Egypt., A sprachbund ("federation of languages")  also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, diffusion area or language crossroads  is a group of languages that have common features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related. Where genetic affiliations are unclear, the sprachbund characteristics might give a false appearance of relatedness. Areal features are common features of a group of languages in a sprachbund., Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey (Turkish: ), is a transcontinental country in Eurasia, mainly in Anatolia in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan peninsula in Southeast Europe. Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, parliamentary republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Turkey is bordered by eight countries: Greece to the west; Bulgaria to the northwest; Georgia to the northeast; Armenia, the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the south. The Aegean Sea is to the west, the Black Sea to the north, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. The Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, which together form the Turkish Straits, divide Thrace and Anatolia; they also separate Europe and Asia. Turkey's location has given it geopolitical and strategic importance throughout history., The Caucasus or Caucasia is a region at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and the Caspian seas., A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship with other languages, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. Language isolates are in effect language families consisting of a single language. Commonly cited examples include Ainu, Basque, Korean and Sumerian, though in each case a minority of linguists claim to have demonstrated a relationship with other languages., Sumer was the first urban civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, modern-day southern Iraq, during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze ages, and arguably the first civilization in the world with Ancient Egypt and the Indus Valley. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers were able to grow an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus of which enabled them to settle in one place., Central Asia or Middle Asia is the core region of the Asian continent and stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also colloquially referred to as "the 'stans" (as the six countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan", meaning "land of") and is within the scope of the wider Eurasian continent., North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It can also be considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea., The Tigris is the eastern member of the two great rivers that define Mesopotamia, the other being the Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq and empties itself into the Persian Gulf., Subject: east semitic languages, Relation: instance_of, Options: (A) adjective (B) area (C) bible (D) book (E) border (F) branch (G) case (H) century (I) christianity (J) city (K) civilization (L) concept (M) continent (N) country (O) cultural heritage (P) day (Q) definition (R) ecoregion (S) eight (T) federation (U) geographical (V) group (W) historical region (X) house (Y) iran (Z) language ([) language contact (\) language family (]) language isolate (^) location (_) mediterranean sea (`) member (a) millennium (b) name (c) ocean (d) official (e) peninsula (f) people (g) population (h) region (i) relationship (j) republic (k) river (l) sea (m) sense (n) seven (o) single (p) six (q) sprachbund (r) state (s) statistics (t) subcontinent (u) subregion (v) suffix (w) term (x) three (y) tripoint (z) turkey ({) two (|) valley (}) vice
Output: language family