ABSTRACT
Arabic belongs to the family of languages traditionally identified as being Semitic, a term coined in the late eighteenth century ce and inspired by the Book of Genesis’s account of the physical dispersal of the descendants of Noah together with the “tongues” they spoke. Semitic languages are members of the Afro-Asiatic (HamitoSemitic) phylum of languages. Emphasizing the geographical bearing of this label, Semiticists use it to map out a typological classification of the syntactic, morphological, phonological, and lexical features which are collectively defined to be characteristic of these languages. These traits include triliterality (many of the morphemes of Arabic are traced to a triliteral root), parataxis (the omission of conjunctions in clauses), the appendage of conjugational markers, and resemblances in the lexical repertoire of the languages in question. The suggestion is that these languages branched out from a common root, namely a proto-Semitic archetype, although the schema was inspired by earlier efforts to postulate the proto-type of the family of Indo-European languages. In the attempts to reconstruct the proto-Semitic language, great significance was attached to the language of Arabic: it was the most prolific of the surviving Semitic languages and preserved a profusion of linguistic sources germane to its early development and history.
