Northwest Semitic languages
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by the Canaanite languages (Phoenician and Hebrew). The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommel's 1883 classification of  West Semitic languages into Northwest (Canaanite and Aramaic) and Southwest (Arabic and Abyssinian). Brockelmann's Canaanite sub-group includes Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew. Some scholars would now separate Ugaritic as a separate branch of Northwest Semitic alongside Canaanite. Central Semitic is a proposed intermediate group comprising Northwest Semitic and Arabic. Central Semitic is either a subgroup of West Semitic or a top-level division of Semitic alongside East Semitic and South Semitic. SIL Ethnologue in its system of classification (of living languages only) eliminates Northwest Semitic entirely by joining Canaanite and Arabic in a "South-Central" group which together with  Aramaic forms Central Semitic. The Deir Alla Inscription and Samalian have been identified as language varieties falling outside Aramaic proper but with some similarities to it, possibly in an "Aramoid" or "Syrian" subgroup. It is clear that the Taymanitic script expressed a distinct linguistic variety that is not Arabic and not closely related to Hismaic or Safaitic, while it can tentatively be suggested that it was more closely related to Northwest Semitic. Historical development. The time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain, it has been recently suggested by Richard  C. Steiner that the earliest attestation of Northwest Semitic is to be found in snake spells from the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, dating to the mid-third millennium BCE. Amorite personal names and words in Akkadian and Egyptian texts from the late third millennium to the mid-second millennium BCE and the language of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions dated to the first half of the second millennium otherwise constitute the earliest traces of Northwest Semitic, the first Northwest Semitic language attested in full being Ugaritic in the 14th century BCE. During the early 1st millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout  the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in today's Tunisia. The Phoenician alphabet is of fundamental importance in human history as the source and ancestor of the Greek alphabet, the later Latin alphabet, the Aramaic (Square Hebrew), Syriac, and Arabic writing systems, Germanic runes, and ultimately Cyrillic. By the 6th century BCE, the use of Imperial Aramaic, a form of the Aramaic language, spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region and largely drove the other Northwest Semitic languages to extinction. The ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. Hebrew  was preserved, however, as a Jewish liturgical language and language of scholarship, and resurrected in the 19th century, with modern adaptations, to become the Modern Hebrew language of the State of Israel. After the Muslim conquests of the 7th century, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region. Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East. There is also an Aramaic substratum in Levantine Arabic. Phonology. Sound changes. Phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́, replacing it with (ṣ) (the  same shift occurred in Canaanite and Akkadian). That this same sound became in Aramaic (although in Ancient Aramaic, it was written with qoph), suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group. An example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for "earth": Ugaritic ("’arṣ"), Punic ("’"a"rṣ)", Tiberian Hebrew ("’ereṣ"), Biblical Hebrew ("’arṣ") and Aramaic ("’ar‘ā’"). The vowel shift from to distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic. Also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants: (ḏ), (ṯ) and (ṱ) became , (š) and (ṣ) respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be  seen by comparing the following words: Vowels. Proto-Northwest Semitic had three contrastive vowel qualities and a length distinction, resulting in six vocalic phonemes: *a, *ā, *i, *ī, *u, and *ū. While *aw, *ay, *iw, *iy, *uw, and *uy are often referred to as diphthongs, they do not seem to have had a different status as such, rather being a normal sequence of a short vowel and a glide. Consonants. Suchard proposes that: "*s, both from original *s and original *ṯ, then shifted further back to a postalveolar *š, while deaffrication of *ts and *dz to *s and *z gave  these phonemes their Hebrew values, as well as merging original *dz with original *ḏ. In fact, original *s may have been realized as anything between [s] and [ʃ]; both values are attested in foreign transcriptions of early Northwest Semitic languages". Emphatics. In Proto-Northwest Semitic the emphatics were articulated with pharyngealization. Its shift to backing (as opposed to Proto-Semitic glottalization of emphatics) has been considered a Central Semitic innovation. According to Faber, the assimilation *-ṣt->-ṣṭ- in the Dt stem in Hebrew (hiṣṭaddēḳ ‘he declared himself righteous’) suggests backing rather than glottalization. The same assimilation is attested in Aramaic (yiṣṭabba  ‘he will be moistened’). Grammar. Nouns. Three cases can be reconstructed for Proto-Northwest Semitic nouns (nominative, accusative, genitive), two genders (male, female) and three numbers (single, dual, plural). Pronouns. Proto-Northwest Semitic pronouns had 2 genders and 3 grammatical cases. Numerals. Reconstruction of Proto-Northwest Semitic numbers. Verbs. The G fientive or G-stem (Hebrew "qal") is the basic, most common, unmarked stem. The G-stem expresses events. The vowel of the prefix of the prefix conjugations in Proto-Northwest Semitic was *-a- and the stem was *-qṭul- or *-qṭil-, as in *ya-qṭul-u 'he will kill', while  the stem of the suffix conjugation had two *a vowels, as in *qaṭal-a 'he has killed'. The G stative is like the fientive but expressing states instead of events. The prefix conjugation of stative roots, the vowel of the prefixes was *-i- and it contained and *a vowel, e.g. *yi-kbad-u 'he will become heavy', while the second vowel of the suffix conjugation was either *-i-, as in *kabid-a 'he is/was/will be heavy', or *-u-, as in *ʕamuq-a 'it is/was/will be deep'. Whether the G-stem stative suffix conjugation has *i or  *u in the stem is lexically determined. The N-stem (Hebrew "nip̄ʕal") is marked by a prefixed *n(a)-. It is mediopassive which is a grammatical voice that subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice. In other words, it expresses a range of meanings where the subject is the patient of the verb, e.g. passive, medial, and reciprocal. The stem of the suffix conjugation is *naqṭaland the stem of the prefix conjugations is *-nqaṭil-; as is the case with stative Gstem verbs, the prefix vowel is *-i-, resulting in forms like *yi-nqaṭil-u 'he will  be killed'. The D-stem (Hebrew "piʕel") is marked by gemination of the second radical in all forms. It has a range of different meanings, mostly transitive. The stem of the suffix conjugation is *qaṭṭil-, and the same stem is used for the prefix conjugations. It is not clear whether the Proto-Northwest-Semitic prefix vowel should be reconstructed as *-u-, the form inherited from Proto-Semitic (i.e. *yuqaṭṭil-u), or as *-a-, which is somewhat supported by evidence from Ugaritic and Hebrew (*yaqaṭṭil-u). The C-stem (Hebrew "hip̄ʕil") more often than not expresses a causative meaning. The most  likely reconstructions are *haqṭil- (from older *saqṭil-) for the stem of the suffix conjugation and *-saqṭil- for the stem of the prefix conjugations. The reconstructed prefix vowel is the same as that of the D-stem, and similarly, the participle is to be reconstructed as *musaqṭilum. All of the stems listed here, except the N-stem, could bring forth further derivation. The "internal passive stems" (Gp, Dp, and Cp; Hebrew passive "qal", "puʕal", and "hɔp̄ʕal") aren't marked by affixes, but express their passivity through a different vowel pattern. The Gp prefix conjugation can be reconstructed as *yu-qṭal-u  'he will be killed'. Reflexive or reciprocal meanings can be expressed by the t-stems, formed with a *t which was either infixed after the first radical (Gt, Ct) or prefixed before it (tD). The precise reconstruction are uncertain.