Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Pūt in Ancient Egyptian, Canaan in Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Phoenicia in Greek and Latin. Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. This area includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria and northern Israel. Its speakers called their own language (dabarīm) Pōnnīm/Kana'nīm "Punic/Canaanite (speech)". Composite satellite image of the Mediterranean Sea. ... The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ... Sicily (Sicilia in Italian and Sicilian, Σικελία in Greek) is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of 25,700 km² and 5 million inhabitants. ... An extinct language (also called a dead language) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. ... Punic (from Latin pÅ«nicus) was a Latin version of the term Phoenician. (After the Punic Wars, Romans used this term as an adjective meaning treacherous.) In archaeological and linguistic usage, it refers to the Greco-Roman era culture and dialect of Carthage and its empire as distinct from their... The 7th century is the period from 601 - 700 in accordance with the Julian calendar in the Christian Era. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). ... 14th century BC diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Tell Amarna. ... The West Semitic languages are a proposed major sub-grouping of Semitic languages. ... 12th century Hebrew Bible script The Semitic languages are a family of languages spoken by more than 250 million people across much of the Middle East, where they originated, and North and East Africa. ... The Northwest Semitic languages form a medium-level division of the Semitic language family. ... The Canaanite languages are a subfamily of the Semitic languages, spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, including Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and eventually Philistines. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Because of technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... For other uses, see Canaan (disambiguation). ... Hebrew redirects here. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a four-thousand year history. ... Phoenicia was an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plains of what is now Lebanon. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... 14th century BC diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Tell Amarna. ... The Canaanite languages are a subfamily of the Semitic languages, spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, including Canaanites, Hebrews, Phoenicians, and eventually Philistines. ... Hebrew redirects here. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a four-thousand year history. ...

Phoenician is known only from inscriptions such as Ahiram's coffin, Kilamuwa's tomb, Yehawmilk's in Byblos, and occasional glosses in books written in other languages; Roman authors such as Sallust allude to some books written in Punic, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (eg. Mago's treatise) or in snippets (eg. in Plautus' plays). The ruins of the Crusader castle in Byblos. ... Gaius Sallustius Crispus, simply known as Sallust, (86-34 BC). ... Titus Maccius Plautus (born at Sarsina, Umbria in 254 B.C.) was a comic playwright in the time of the Roman Republic. ...

Punic and its influences

The significantly divergent later-form of the language that was spoken in the Tyrian Phoenician colony of Carthage is known as Punic; it remained in use there for considerably longer than Phoenician did in Phoenicia itself, surviving certainly into Augustine's time. It may have even survived the Arabic conquest of North Africa: the geographer al-Bakri describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in the city of Sirt in northern Libya, a region where spoken Punic survived well past written use. [1]. The Triumphal Arch Tyre (Arabic , Phoenician , Hebrew Tzor, Tiberian Hebrew , Akkadian , Greek Týros) is a city in the South Governorate of Lebanon. ... Bold text Carthage Ruins of Roman-era Carthage For other uses, see Carthage (disambiguation). ... Punic was a Roman contraction of Phoenician, and was used by the Romans after the Punic wars as an adjective meaning treacherous. In archaeological and linguistic usage, it refers to the later culture and dialect of Carthage and its empire, as distinct from their Phoenician originals. ... Phoenicia was an ancient civilization centered in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plains of what is now Lebanon. ... For the first Archbishop of Canterbury, see Saint Augustine of Canterbury. ... The Arabs (Arabic: عرب) are a heterogeneous ethnic group who are predominantly speakers of the Arabic language, mainly found throughout the Middle East and North Africa. ...  Northern Africa (UN subregion)  geographic, including above North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent. ... Abu Abdullah al-Bakri (1014–1094) was a Spanish-Arab geographer and historian. ... The Berbers (also called Imazighen, free men, singular Amazigh) are an ethnic group indigenous to Northwest Africa, speaking the Berber languages of the Afroasiatic family. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... Coptic is the most recent phase of ancient Egyptian. ... The Staten Island Railway (SIR, formerly SIRT) is a rapid transit line operating in the Borough of Staten Island, New York City, USA. It is considered a standard railroad line, but is currently disconnected from the national railway system and operates with modified R44 New York City subway cars . ...

The ancient Lybico-Berber alphabet derived from the Punic script still in irregular use by modern Berber groups such as the Touareg is known by the native name tifinaġ, possibly a declined form of the borrowed word Pūnic. Direct borrowings from Punic appear in modern Berber dialects: one interesting example is agadir "wall" from Punic gader. This term also served as the origin of the name of the Spanish city of Cádiz (Latin: Gades), from Punic (Qart-)Gadir "The Walled (City)". For the African ethnic group or nation see Tuareg. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

Perhaps the most interesting case of Punic influence is that of the name of Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula, comprising Portugal and Spain), derived from the Punic אי שפן "I-Shaphan" meaning "coast of hyraxes", in turn a misidentification on the part of Phoenician explorers of its numerous rabbits as hyraxes. Roman theater at Mérida; the statues are replicas Hispania was the name given by the Romans to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula (modern Portugal, Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar) and to two provinces created there in the period of the Roman Republic: Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior. ... The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ... Genera  Procavia  Heterohyrax  Dendrohyrax A hyrax is any of about 11 species of fairly small, thickset, herbivorous mammals in the order Hyracoidea. ... Genera Pentalagus Bunolagus Nesolagus Romerolagus Brachylagus Sylvilagus Oryctolagus Poelagus Rabbits are small mammals in the family Leporidae, found in many parts of the world. ...

Phonology, grammar and vocabulary

It is difficult to evaluate sound-changes in Phoenician dialects over time because writers continued to use archaic "book-spellings" that did not mark vowels in any way. Punic writers fitfully added a system of matres lectionis (vowel letters) at a very late period, but soon thereafter mostly shifted to Latin- or Greek-based scripts, which had their own failings (ie. the inability to mark emphatic, laryngeal and guttural consonants). Matres lectionis (singular form: mater lectionis) are an early manner of indicating vowels in the Hebrew alphabet. ...

Certain similarities between Phoenician and its related neighbours include the vowel-shifts known en masse as the "Canaanite Vowel Shift": Proto-Northwest Semitic ā became ū (and Hebrew ō), while stressed Proto-Semitic a became o (Hebrew å) as shown by Latin and Greek transcriptions like rūs for "head, cape" (Hebrew ראש rôš). Despite this regional-specific name, Ancient Egyptian underwent this same vowel shift, which is evident in the spellings of late dialects of this language, particularly Coptic.

Phoenician dialects also appear to have merged the three proto-Northwest Semitic sibilants sin, shin and samekh at a fairly early stage. This process was irregular in Hebrew and Aramaic (see shibboleth), leaving later dialects of those languages with two distinct sounds, s and š. In later Punic, the gutturals seem to have been entirely lost (thus merging tzade with unmarked s as well). The loss of emphatic and laryngeals was also present in certain Roman-era Hebrew dialects (such as at Qumran) and common to all medieval ("Rabbinical") forms of the language, but not in Aramaic. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Qumran (Hebrew:חירבת קומראן Khirbet Qumran) is located on a dry plateau about a mile inland from the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank. ...

Unique to Punic of all the Northwest Semitic languages was the shift p>f in all environments (as in proto-Arabic).

Phoenician-Punic did not undergo the consonantal lenition process that most other Northwest Semitic languages did (such as Hebrew and Aramaic) and it maintained many of the "primitive" Northwest Semitic sounds that were merged in other dialects (such as the merger of laryngeals and gutturals as laryngeals). This lenition is visible in the Hebrew verb conjugations listed below, where the underlying p>f (spelled as "ph") in certain forms because of the phonetic environment in which it appears, whereas in Punic the same verb appears simply with an underlying f in all places.

Differences in the grammatical system abound: eg. the survival of case endings in early Phoenician, the causative Punic verb-form yif‘il or īf‘il (orthographical YP‘L or ‘YP‘L, Hebrew hiph‘īl). There are also interesting vocabulary differences, including the use of the verb KN "to be" (as in Arabic) (rather than Aramaic-Hebrew HYH) and P‘L "to do" (rather than ‘SH) and the exclusive use of bal "not" (Aramaic-Hebrew lō < *lā‘).

The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to ca. 1000 BCE. Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are found in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Malta and other locations such as the Iberian Peninsula as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era. The ruins of the Crusader castle in Byblos. ... Sardinia (Sardegna in Italian, Sardigna or Sardinna in the Sardinian language), is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea (Sicily is the largest), between Italy, Spain and Tunisia, south of Corsica. ... Sicily (Sicilia in Italian and Sicilian, Σικελία in Greek) is an autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of 25,700 km² and 5 million inhabitants. ... The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ...

Knowledge of Hebrew aided the reconstruction of Phoenician inscriptions. One of the earliest essays in Phoenician language studies was Wilhelm Gesenius (1786-1842), Scripturae linguaeque phoeniciae monumenta, 1837, analyzing texts from coins and monumental inscriptions. Today, it is possible to study Phoenician at most univsersities in the U.S. that teach Semitic Philology; in particular, those that have a Department of Near Eastern Studies, such as Harvard, JHU, Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Michigan, The Catholic University of America, and Chicago. Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius (February 3, 1786 - October 23, 1842), was a German orientalist and Biblical critic. ... 1786 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... 1842 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... United States is the current Good Article Collaboration of the week! Please help to improve this article to the highest of standards. ... Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... The Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, is a private institution of higher learning located in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... Binomial name Ucla xenogrammus Holleman, 1993 The largemouth triplefin, Ucla xenogrammus, is a fish of the family Tripterygiidae and only member of the genus Ucla, found in the Pacific Ocean from Viet Nam, the Philippines, Palau and the Caroline Islands to Papua New Guinea, Australia (including Christmas Island), and the... UM also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint. ... The Catholic University of America (abbreviated CUA), located in Washington, DC, is unique as the national university of the Roman Catholic Church and as the only higher education institution founded by U.S. Roman Catholic bishops. ... The University of Chicago is a private university located principally in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. ...

See also

• Phoenician alphabet
• Extinct language
• Pyrgi Tablets Golden artifact made circa 500 BC, found in Italy. It records an Etruscan chief named Thefarie Velianas. The inscription is bilingual, written in both Etruscan and Phoenician, and was made to commemorate the building of a temple to honour the Semitic goddess Ashtarte.

The Phoenician alphabet dates from around 1400 BC and is related to the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. ... An extinct language (also called a dead language) is a language which no longer has any native speakers. ... The Pyrgi Tablets, found in an excavation of a sanctuary of that town in Italy, a port of the southern Etruscan town of Caere, are three golden leaves that record a dedication made around 500 BC by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, to the Phoenician goddess ‘Ashtart. ...

Sources

• Krahmalkov Charles R (2001): A Phoenician-Punic Grammar (Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1, Vol. 54); Brill Publishing (Leiden, Boston & Köln); ISBN 90-04-11771-7