Don’t quite know the terminology - a descendant language, perhaps?
My question is whether the Phoenecian language, or any language derived from it, is still spoken in the Mediterranean area.
The Phoenecians were very wide-spread traders and colonists (Carthage). You’d think there would be some impact on linguistic development. Or did the sack of Carthage and the spread of Arabic with the advent of Islam just wipe out Phoenecian?
And what was Phoenecian - a Semitic language?
I suspect that you’ll get a better set of responses in GQ. (Unless you have information that philologists are fighting over the answer and suspect that you will have partisans of various theories debating them, here?)
I’m moving this to GQ.
I believe most western alphabets (Greek, Latin and their derivatives) were based upon the Phonecian one.
The language page on the phoenicia.org site implies, but does not explicitly state, that Phoenician simply faded or was overcome by rival languages, and probably was finally pushed into extinction by the spread of Arabic.
thanks, tom - I thought I was in GQ when I opened it.
We need Johanna or Wendell, or perhaps Tamerlane, in here to discourse on the subject, but it’s my impression that the Semitic languages suffered a severe die-off in the first millennium AD, owing to the spread of Arabic among other reasons. Off the top of my head, I know of only Arabic and Hebrew as actively spoken languages, with Aramaic doing the linguistic equivalent of someone fallen over a cliff and hanging on by his fingertips, and two South Arabian* languages surviving as local patois in parts of Yemen and Oman.
Is the language of the Druze any connexion? I just wondered, because of its territorial location?
The Druze speak Arabic. I don’t know of any surviving Phoenician languages. The closest you’ll get to that is Maltese, which is an Arabic language, but which some people think might have Phoenician influence.
Also the various languages of Ethiopia.
Oh, Ge’ez! 
I keep forgetting about them!
The following short account is courtesy of the government’s National Virtual Translation Center:
[quote]
[ul][li] Phoenician is an ancient Semitic language that was originally spoken in today’s Lebanon. It is attested through inscriptions from the 12th century BC to the 2nd century AD. Phoenician traders established settlements all over the Mediterranean. The Phoenician consonantal script, written from right to left and consisting of 22 letters, is almost identical with the Old Hebrew script. It is the ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets.[/li][li] Punic, a later stage of Phoenician, was the language of Carthage and the Carthaginian empire. It was influenced by the surrounding Berber languages. Punic became extinct by the 6th century AD.[/ul][/li][/quote]
And apparently there are far more Aramaic speakers left than I’d thought: almost half a million. I’d formed the impression it was only a few thousand at most.
I have a book on my shelf (Lyovin’s Introduction to the Languages of the World) which cites (Hetzron, 1992) the following scheme for the Semitic languages:
[ul][li]Semitic is divided into two branches, East Semitic and West Semitic. East Semitic includes the ancient Babylonian language and its descendants, now all extinct.[/li][li]West Semitic is divided into the sub-branches of Central and South Semitic. South Semitic includes the various Ethiopean languages mentioned by Cptn. Amazing, as well as the south Arabian languages mentioned by Polycarp.[/li][li]Central Semitic divides into the Aramaic branch and the “South-Central Semitic” branch.[/li][li]South-Central Semitic divides into the Arabic branch (also including Maltese, a dialect of Arabic heavily influenced by European lanugages and now usually considered to be distinct from Arabic), and the Canaanite branch, which includes Hebrew and (we finally get to it) Phoenician.[/li][/ul]
From this classification, it would appear that Hebrew is the modenr language most closely related to Phoenician, with Arabic a close second. (Of course, I’m sure a real linguist will now come along & tell me my cite is out of date now.)
All of them. See this old thread.
Phoenician was one dialect of Canaanite. Hebrew was another dialect of Canaanite. The Canaanite language survives today in the form of Hebrew. In that sense Phoenician sorta survived, or rather its nearest relative. The question is whether Phoenician and Hebrew can be considered separate languages at all, or whether it’s all just variations of Canaanite. Anyway, until Hebrew was resurrected from the dead about 100 years ago, there were no survivals of Canaanite.
Ge‘ez is irrelevant to the OP, because it’s from South Semitic instead of Northwest. When you compare the two branches, the similarities are apparent, though there are some stark differences too.
Speaking of which, a few South Arabian languages survive in the provinces of Hadramawt and Soqotra in southeastern Yemen and the province of Dhofar in southwestern Oman.
I was going to make the point that the first place you should look for information about any language is in Ethnologue:
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
However, that’s irrelevant for this question, since Ethnologue only lists languages that still exist. In any case, no current language is directly descended from Phoenician. It’s likely that there are a number of words derived from Phoenician that were borrowed into other languages of the region and these words (or modern versions of them) still exist, but that’s something different.
Huh, I had always heard, in New Testament contexts, that Aramaic was a dialect or offshoot of Hebrew. Certainly, by that time, there were people who would have been ethnically Hebrew speaking it.
Chronos writes:
> Huh, I had always heard, in New Testament contexts, that Aramaic was a
> dialect or offshoot of Hebrew. Certainly, by that time, there were people who
> would have been ethnically Hebrew speaking it.
No, as you can see, Aramaic is a related language but definitely not a dialect of nor descended from Hebrew. Hebrew ceased to be spoken about 400 B.C. The people who spoke it began speaking Aramaic after that point (because they had been overrun by the Aramaic speakers, or because Aramaic was the politically more important language, or whatever).
After Assyria took over Aram, Aramaic somehow became the lingua franca of the Assyrian Empire, and then when the Babylonians took over, it became the language of their empire, including Israel/Judea/Palestine.
Then when the Achaemenids took over, it became the lingua franca of the Persian empire. Similarily under the Parthians. It was only under the Sassanids that Persian displaced it in the east ( as earlier under the Seleucids, Greek had slowly done so in the levant, though even in Seleucid Antioch Aramaic was for a long time the second language ).
Meanwhile the Aramaic script spread from ancient Persia to ancient Sogdiana (modern Uzbekistan), where it was used to write an Eastern Iranian language called Sogdian (now extinct). The former indigenous Indo-European peoples of Central Asia replaced Sogdian with Persian at some point, and nowadays they are called Tajiks. The Aramaic script was then taken up in turn for use by a series of Altaic languages eastward: Uyghur, Mongolian, Manchu. This alphabet traveled across the entire Asian continent lengthwise, from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, in pre-modern times. The Mongolian version of it (written vertically) is being revived in the Republic of Mongolia today, while it has been in official use in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia.
Johanna: In a classic instance of synchronicity, I had had occasion to look up something regarding Mongolia in a quite different context, and came across the descent of traditional Mongol script from Phoenician/Aramaic script, for the first time, in a 20-year-old reference not two days before your post. I’m glad to know they’re reviving it.
For those interested, the Semitic languages constitute one family, equivalent to Germanic or Slavic, in a language phylum now called the Afro-Asiatic. Fformerly it was termed the Hamito-Semitic phylum, on the theory that the other five families constituted a “Hamitic” superfamily, but they are no closely related to each other than to Semitic. The A-A breakdown at Ethnologue can be found here in outline form. Among the other languages in the group are the Berber tongues (Kabyle, Tamasheq, etc.), Ancient Egyptian/Coptic, Hausa, and the Somali and Afar tongues.