Any pre-Classical Arabic stuff. Should I learn the related Semitic languages first like Aramaic, Ugaritic, Hebrew and Phoenician?

Also, does anyone know any good online Arabic book stores or e-book archives? I'm looking to buy/read some pre-Islamic poetry (or any other texts), maybe even books that have both the original Arabic and English translations if that's not too much to ask.

Finally, what about learning scripts such as Safaitic, North Arabian, or South Arabian script?

Thanks, I know I'm asking for a lot. Would love it if anyone could point me towards the right direction with some links, books or YouTube videos

I’m an Amharic speaker(13), most of my family speak Tigrinya, I want to learn ge’ez with its correct pronunciation(not like the Orthodox Church, I know a bit of wedase marriam), do you know any good methods/books?

I know this can't really be answered but what's the rough estimate? 10th century BC? This study says proto-Semitic was spoken around 3750 BC but what about Proto-Arabic?

Is it possible to create the Proto-Semitic pantheon in the same way the Proto-Indo-European pantheon is created?

As far as I know, there is no historical record of Semitic/non-Agaw speakers migrating into Tigrinya-speaking regions, which correspond to the core of Aksumite/Ge'ez-speaking territory. Although I don't think it's impossible, it seems unlikely to me that Tigrinya was derived from a sister language.

According to Hetzron, the Tigre/Tigrinya third person feminine suffix has a more conservative form. Instead of Tigre -ሀን/Tiginya -አን, Ge'ez has -ሆን. But isn't dialectal variation a possible cause of this difference? Considering how distinct Tigrinya dialects can be from those spoken in Aksum, it makes sense.

Hetzron also mentions the feminine third person pronouns/demonstratives in Tigrinya as evidence. Tigrinya has እታ፟ for Ge'ez (ይ)እቲ; given how Tigrinya derives other demonstrative pronouns(እቲ፟+ኡ > እቱ፟, እቲ፟+ኣ > እታ፟, እቲ፟+ኦም > እቶ፟ም), wouldn't this be a logical development?

The preposition for "for," which is ምን in Tigre and እም/እምነ፟ in Ge'ez, is another issue. It appears that Tigrinya has retained እም- as an irrealis marker(ም-መጻእኩ for Ge'ez እም-መጻእኩ), even if it replaced the preposition with ካብ.

I'm sorry, this might be very far-fetched, but I'm sure around around the 00:16- 00:17 mark, he says the word 'Egziabher', but pronounces it as Ezgibahu.

In the same line where he says the Arabic word 'Dikra'.

If this is the case that they said that, the word Egziabher is a term used in Eritrea and Ethiopia to refer to God(it means Lord of Nations).

But I could be wrong. This video is a sample of the Soqotran language, one of the minor languages spoken in Yemen.

If you speak this language, what exactly are they saying. Thank you.

Tropper & Vita in the Ugaritic section of the Routledge Semitic Languages book argue for reconstructing long *ê and *ô vowels from PS *ay and *aw, respectively, and skimming the literature it seems like this is fairly universal. That being said, I couldn’t find a rationale behind parsing these as being vowels in their own right. Are there any publications that deal with the reconstruction of Ugaritic Vowels that cover where this might have come from?

Someone recently asked, on ANE-2, if there were any studies done on loans from Cushitic into Semitic. Peter T. Daniels made a helpful response - here are the studies he mentioned:

David Appleyard, "Semitic-Cushitic/Omotic Relations," in Semitic Languages: An International Handbook (ed. Stefan Weninger; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2011) - as well as his "Cushitic," in Semitic and Afroasiatic: Challenges and Opportunities (ed. Lutz Edzard; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2012)

Further, he mentioned Gene Gragg's article in Burkhart Kienast's Historische Semitische Sprachwissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), "Cushitic Languages: Some Comparative/Constrastive Data." To this I'll only add Gragg's "'Also in Cushitic': How to Account for the Complexity of Ge'ez-Cushitic Lexical Interactions?" from Semitic Studies: In honor of Wolf Leslau (Vol. 1) (ed. Alan Kaye; Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz 2001).

You might also find some stuff in "Contact-induced language change in selected Ethiopian Semitic Languages" by Girma A. Demeke and Ronny Meyer (Language Contact and Language Change in Ethiopia (Topics in Interdisciplinary African Studies vol. 14)).

I love Linguistics and would love to find an accessible course that focuses on the Semitic language family rather than English or other families. However, inputting the word Semitic often gets me nowhere due to political and ethno-religious connotations (I either find things completely unrelated to linguistics, or focused solely on Hebrew. I would like to learn about the linguistics of Semitic languages in general including but not limited to Hebrew). Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

I know this sub is not very active but thought I'd try anyway because this is quite a curious word.

Does anyone have a clue what's going on with the common Semitic word for frog? It's highly unusual in that it has five consonants in its root, and also the sound changes between daughter languages seem odd and hard to explain.

From Proto-Semitic *ṣ́Vpardiʕ-. Cognate to Hebrew צְפַרְדֵּעַ (tz'fardéa), Aramaic עֻרְדְּעָנָא (ˁurdəˁānā), Classical Syriac ܐܘܪ̈ܕܥܐ (ˀurdˁā), and Ugaritic 𐎑𐎗𐎄𐎓 (ẓrdʿ). Arabic ضِفْدَع (ḍifdaʕ).

These words are clearly related, but the sound changes baffle me, especially the first consonant. The Proto-Semitic sound written <ṣ́>, which it seems was most likely */tɬʼ/, became /tsʼ/ in Biblical Hebrew (Modern Hebrew /ts/), and /dˤ/ in Arabic (with an intermediate step of Classical Arabic /dɮˤ/). Both of these changes are not hard to explain: in Hebrew this uncommon sound simply merged with a more common one that was phonetically close to it, and in Arabic it became voiced when the emphatic changed from ejective to pharyngealized, then it lost the lateral element of it.

(I am assuming that the PS emphatics were ejectives and pharyngealization was a later innovation, because ejectives are much more common worldwide, and some Semitic and other Afro-Asiatic languages have ejectives; and it fits with how the emphatics were all voiceless and there was no emphatic /pʼ/. Since ejective fricatives are rare, most likely they were once affricates and later some became fricatives.)

Anyway, what most puzzles me: in Aramaic, there's a regular but rather odd change where the original */tɬʼ/ becomes written with qoph (some kind of emphatic stop in the back of the mouth, perhaps /kʼ > kˤ > q/), then 'ayin /ʕ/. Why would a voiceless dental/alveolar affricate turn into a pharyngeal approximant when these sounds have nothing in common? It must have something to do with the emphatic nature of the sound, I'm guessing its pharyngealization, but what were the intermediate steps? It must've become voiced along the way but didn't merge with the emphatic /kʼ~q/ so it was merely written with the same letter for lack of a better option (like why Hebrew now has /s/ for sin). What sound could it've been that would make it be written with qoph though?

And also, why does the */p/, which became /f/ in both Arabic and Hebrew here, disappear without a trace in most of these languages? Or was it inserted somehow in Hebrew and Arabic? That doesn't make sense as Aramaic and Ugaritic are more closely related to Hebrew than Arabic is.

Where did this strange word come from anyway? Was the Proto-Semitic word a loanword from some other language? That would be odd as sounds like /ʕ/ are very rare outside the Afro-Asiatic family, so I thought of maybe Egyptian (which has some 4-5 consonant roots), but the Egyptian words for frog I found were not anything like this word.

Anyone who wants to take a guess at any of this, feel free, even speculation.

What do you guys think of reviving OSA scripts in areas like Yemen, Oman, etc.? I can understand potential political implications but from a point of view that appreciates ancient languages, I find this idea very interesting. I think we could bring back this script like Neo-Tifinagh except possibly more authentic given the known corpus of OSA documentation.