Ancient Babylonia - Semitic
A family of languages spoken by more than 200 million people in N Africa; much
of the Sahara; parts of E, central, and W Africa; and W Asia (especially the
Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel). Since four of the
Hamito-Semitic tongues, Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, and Syriac, are also
respectively the languages of Islam, Judaism, and two sects of the Christian faith, the
language family reaches many millions in addition to its native speakers.
Traditionally, the Hamito-Semitic language family is said to have two
subfamilies: Semitic and Hamitic. Although some scholars regard Hamitic and Semitic as
two distinct language families, they possess a number of grammatical
similarities and have a larger common vocabulary than borrowing would account for. The
most satisfactory explanation is that the Hamitic and Semitic groups, despite
their divergences, are subfamilies of a single Hamito-Semitic linguistic family,
as evidenced by their marked grammatical, lexical, and phonological
resemblances.
Ancient Babylonia
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