Historical Linguistics
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Aramaic lexicons often stratify the language into its many overlapping periods and dialects with diachronic implications for their entries. These technical abbreviations are difficult for non-Aramaic specialists to hold in mind. For example, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL) is a magnificent tool. The corpora of an item’s attested usage are, as a rule, listed in…
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Of the 101 linguistic developments analyzed in the NWS branches of Iron Age II, Randall Garr lists a combination of 32 as identifying the Hebrew dialect. He forewarns, “No two linguistic features have the identical distribution among these [NWS] dialects” (2004: 205, 225–35). While sharp borders do not exist (hence Garr’s use of dialect instead…
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Reconstructed languages or language subgroups are in italic font; all other languages are historically witnessed.© Joshua C. Sherrill, 2026. Bibliography Rubin, Aaron D. 2010. A Brief Introduction to the Semitic Languages. Piscatawy, NJ: Gorgias (pages 3–21). Huehnergard, John, and Naʾama Pat-El. 2019. “Introduction to the Semitic Languages and Their History.” Pages 1–21 in The Semitic Languages.…
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Since the late 1980s, Semitists have homed in on a “Canaanite” subgroup of Northwest Semitic languages. Archaeology has revealed that the languages of Iron Age Canaan and its surroundings were obviously related and at times mutually intelligible. The linguistic features they had in common were, therefore, inferred features of their reconstructed Proto-Canaanite mother tongue, as…
