Proto-Semitic is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Semitic languages. There is no consensus among scholars regarding the location of its linguistic homeland: it may have originated in the Levant, the Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or northern Africa.The Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics by Keith Allan
The Semitic language family is considered part of the broader macro-family of Afroasiatic languages.
Dating The earliest attestations of any Semitic language are in Akkadian, dating to around the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (see Sargon of Akkad) and the Eblaite language, but earlier evidence of Akkadian comes from personal names in Sumerian texts from the first half of the third millennium BC. One of the earliest known Akkadian inscriptions was found on a bowl at Ur, addressed to the very early pre-Sargonic king Meskiagnunna of Ur (–2450 BC) by his queen Gan-saman, who is thought to have been from Akkad. The earliest text fragments of West Semitic are snake spells in Egyptian pyramid texts, dated around the mid-third millennium BC.
Proto-Semitic itself must have been spoken before the emergence of its daughters, so some time before the earliest attestation of Akkadian, and sufficiently long so for the changes leading from it to Akkadian to have taken place, which would place it in the fourth millennium BC or earlier.
Linguistic homeland
Since all modern Semitic languages can be traced back to a common ancestor, Semiticists have placed importance on locating the Urheimat of the Proto-Semitic language. The linguistic homeland of the Proto-Semitic language may be considered within the context of the larger Afro-Asiatic family to which it belongs.
The previously popular hypothesis of an Arabian Urheimat has been largely abandoned since the region could not have supported massive waves of emigration before the domestication of camels in the 2nd millennium BC.
Several lines of evidence indicate that important groups of early Semitic-speaking peoples originated in northern Arabia and the Syro-Arabian desert and moved into the Levant and Mesopotamia long before the widespread use of domesticated camels. From a geographical and historical perspective, the so-called Syro-Arabian Desert forms a single steppe-and-desert belt stretching from the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf up towards the Taurus foothills, with the Syrian steppe (Badiyat al-Sham) acting as a central corridor and gathering ground for Arab tribal groups moving between northern Arabia, the Levant and Mesopotamia from the Bronze Age into the Islamic and modern periods. The earliest securely attested Semitic languages, such as Akkadian and Eblaite, are already documented in Mesopotamia and the northeastern Levant by the mid-third millennium BCE, several centuries before the Iron Age and any firm archaeological evidence for camel-based pastoralism. By contrast, archaeozoological, archaeological and genetic studies place the regular use and full domestication of the dromedary camel as a pack and riding animal in Arabia and neighbouring regions only in the late second millennium BCE, roughly 1200–1000 BCE. This chronological gap shows that the initial dispersal of Semitic-speaking populations into the Fertile Crescent cannot be explained by reliance on camels and must instead have proceeded through earlier forms of pastoral and agro-pastoral mobility based on other livestock and overland routes.
There is also evidence that Mesopotamia and adjoining areas of modern Syria were originally inhabited by non-Semitic populations, distinct from the later Semitic-speaking tribal groups who entered these regions from the Syro–Arabian steppe. Non-Semitic toponyms preserved in Akkadian and Eblaite sources, alongside lexemes that are neither Sumerian nor early Semitic (proto-Akkadian), point to one or more pre-Semitic linguistic strata in both southern Mesopotamia and northern Syria. In his classic overview of Mesopotamian civilization, Oppenheim already stressed that the material culture of early Mesopotamia “contains terms and designations that do not seem to be Sumerian and do not belong to any early Semitic (proto-Akkadian) language,” a formulation later taken up and systematized in discussions of a so-called “Proto-Euphratean” or related substratum to account for opaque place names, divine names and technical vocabulary.
A similar picture emerges for northern Syria: Gelb and subsequent onomastic studies have argued that many of the earliest attested toponyms there are neither Semitic nor Hurrian and therefore reflect an older, pre-Semitic population of “unknown ethnic affiliation,” with clearly West-Semitic place names appearing only in a later layer. Even at Ebla, where the language of the archives is Semitic, the onomastic and religious repertoire preserves a mixture of Semitic, Sumerian and as yet unidentified non-Semitic names that point to complex interactions with earlier populations in Syria and Mesopotamia. In contrast, references to mobile Semitic-speaking groups (Akkadians, Amorites, later Arameans and “Western Semites”) on the fringes of the Syro–Arabian desert and their gradual penetration into the settled river valleys belong to a subsequent horizon, representing later tribal and linguistic layers superimposed upon these older, non-Semitic inhabitants rather than the first peopling of Mesopotamia and Syria.
However, none of these considerations contradict the Levant hypothesis.
Levant hypothesis A Bayesian analysis performed in 2009 suggests an origin for all known Semitic languages in the Levant around 3750 BC, with a later single introduction from South Arabia into the Horn of Africa around 800 BC. This statistical analysis could not, however, estimate when or where the ancestor of all Semitic languages diverged from Afroasiatic. It thus neither contradicts nor confirms the hypothesis that the divergence of ancestral Semitic from Afroasiatic occurred in Africa.
In another variant of the theory, the earliest wave of Semitic speakers entered the Fertile Crescent via the Levant and eventually founded the Akkadian Empire. Their relatives, the Amorites, followed them and settled Syria before 2500 BC. Late Bronze Age collapse in present-day Israel led the South Semitic settlers to migrate southwards where they settled Yemen after the 20th century BC until those crossed Bab-el-Mandeb to the Horn of Africa between 1500 and 500 BC.
Several lines of evidence suggest that the scenario just outlined concerns relatively late, historically specific phases in the spread of Semitic and does not describe the earliest movements that first carried Semitic speech into the Levant and Mesopotamia. Kitchen et al.’s Bayesian analysis explicitly dates only the diversification of the attested Semitic branches and places their common ancestor in the Early Bronze Age Levant, while also supporting a single, much later introduction of Ethiosemitic from South Arabia into the Horn of Africa in the late second or early first millennium BC, in line with the epigraphic and archaeological record for early Geʽez and the kingdom of Dʿmt. This makes the south-Arabian to Horn of Africa dispersal a secondary, first-millennium-BC development rather than a primary homeland event and leaves open the question of when and where Proto-Semitic itself diverged from Afroasiatic. As several surveys emphasize, the Syro–Arabian desert and adjacent steppe form a single ecological and tribal zone stretching from northern Arabia through Badiyat al-Sham to upper Mesopotamia, within which Semitic-speaking pastoralists are securely attested from the late third and especially the second and first millennia BC, making north Arabia and the adjoining Syrian steppe a plausible early centre for dispersals into both the Levant and Mesopotamia. On this view, any southward migrations of so-called South Semitic settlers from the Levant or northern Syria into Yemen and across the Red Sea in the late Bronze and early Iron Ages represent later waves layered over much older north-Arabian and Syro–Arabian processes of Semiticization, rather than the initial point of origin for the family as a whole.
However, these are not decisive arguments, and the primary division of Semitic into West Semitic and East Semitic inside the Levant continues to argue for a northern homeland.
Phonology
Vowels Proto-Semitic had a simple vowel system, with three qualities *a, *i, *u, and phonemic vowel length, conventionally indicated by a macron: *ā, *ī, *ū. This system is preserved in Classical Arabic.
Consonants The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic was originally based primarily on Arabic, whose phonology and morphology (particularly in Classical Arabic) is extremely conservative, and which preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes. Thus, the phonemic inventory of reconstructed Proto-Semitic is very similar to that of Arabic, with only one phoneme fewer in Arabic than in reconstructed Proto-Semitic, with and merging into Arabic and becoming Arabic . As such, Proto-Semitic is generally reconstructed as having the following phonemes (as usually transcribed in Semitology):
+ Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes Type Manner Voicing Labial Interdental Alveolar PalatalLateral Velar/Uvular Pharyngeal Glottal Obstruent Stop voiceless emphatic () / , voiced Fricative voiceless/ / [~] emphatic// / (~) voiced / [~], Resonant Trill Approximant / / Nasal The reconstructed phonemes *s *z *ṣ *ś *ṣ́ *ṯ̣ may be interpreted as fricatives () or as affricates, as discussed below. The fricative interpretation was the traditional reconstruction, and is reflected in the choice of signs.
The Proto-Semitic consonant system is based on triads of related voiceless, voiced and "emphatic" consonants. Five such triads are reconstructed in Proto-Semitic: Dental stops *d *t *ṭ Velar stops *g *k *ḳ (normally written *g *k *q) Dental sibilants *z *s *ṣ Interdental (written *ḏ *ṯ *ṯ̣) Lateral (normally written *l *ś *ṣ́)
The probable phonetic realization of most consonants is straightforward and is indicated in the table with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Two subsets of consonants, however, deserve further comment.
Voiceless consonantsProto-SemiticOld SouthArabianOld NorthArabian Modern SouthArabian 1, 2StandardArabicAramaicModernHebrewGe'ezPhoenician Akkadians₃ (s) 𐪏s s s ss₁ (š) 𐪊, sometimes š š šṯ 𐪛, later *ṯ, š,later ts₂ (ś) 𐪆, later *ś, s śEmphatic consonantsProto-SemiticOld SouthArabianOld NorthArabianModern SouthArabianStandardArabicAramaicModernHebrewGe'ezPhoenician Akkadianṣ 𐪎, rarely ṣ ṣ ṣ ṣṯ̣ 𐪜, later *ṱ, ṣ,later ṭṣ́ 𐪓, later *ṣ́, q/ḳ,later ʿ ṣ́Voiced consonantsProto-SemiticOld SouthArabianOld NorthArabianModern SouthArabianStandardArabicAramaicModernHebrewGe'ezPhoenician Akkadianz 𐪘z z z zḏ 𐪙, later *ḏ, z,later dNotes s₁ (š) is , sometimes and (in Soqotri) - and (for some speakers of Jibbali) ṯ , ḏ and ṯ̣ merge with , , and in Soqotri
Emphatics The sounds notated here as "emphatic consonants" occur in nearly all Semitic languages as well as in most other Afroasiatic languages, and they are generally reconstructed as glottalization in Proto-Semitic.That explains the lack of voicing distinction in the emphatic series, which would be unnecessary if the emphatics were pharyngealized. Thus, *ṭ, for example, represents . See below for the fricatives/affricates.
In modern Semitic languages, emphatics are variously realized as pharyngealized (Arabic, Aramaic, Tiberian Hebrew (such as )), glottalized (Ethiopian Semitic languages, Modern South Arabian languages, such as ), or as tenuis consonants (Turoyo language of Tur Abdin such as );Dolgopolsky 1999, p. 29. Ashkenazi Hebrew and Maltese are exceptions and emphatics merge into plain consonants in various ways under the influence of Indo-European languages (Sicilian for Maltese, various languages for Hebrew).