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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 large expatriate communities in North America and Europe. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by German orientalists von Schlözer and Eichhorn, 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), and Hebrew (unknown; 5 million native and non-native L1 speakers). Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively. However, 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 alphabet, 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 official Semitic 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. ''kitāb'' "book", ''kutub'' "books", ''kātib'' "writer", ''kuttāb'' "writers", ''kataba'' "he wrote", ''yaktubu'' "he writes", etc. ==Name and identification== The similarity of the Hebrew language, Arabic language and Aramaic language has been accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. The languages were familiar to Western European scholars due to historical contact with neighbouring Islamic countries and through Biblical studies, and a comparative analysis of Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic was published in Latin in 1538 by Guillaume Postel. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopic languages.〔 However, neither scholar named this grouping as "Semitic".〔 The German orientalists (1781) and (1787) first coined the name "Semitic" in the late 18th century to designate the languages closely related to Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.〔 The choice of name was derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the genealogical accounts of the biblical ,〔 or more precisely from the Greek rendering of the name, . Eichhorn is credited with popularising the term, particularly via a 1795 article "Semitische Sprachen" (''Semitic languages'') in which he justified the terminology against criticism that Hebrew and Canaanite were the same language despite Canaan being "Hamitic" in the Table of Nations: Previously these languages had been commonly known as the ' in European literature.〔〔 In the 19th century, ''Semitic'' became the conventional name; however, an alternative name: ' was later introduced and used by some writers.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Semitic languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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