• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Arabic & Hebrew had a common root language

JacksinPA

Supporting Member
DP Veteran
Monthly Donator
Joined
Dec 3, 2017
Messages
26,290
Reaction score
16,776
Gender
Male
Political Leaning
Progressive

Is Arabic derived from Hebrew?

Arabic and Hebrew both belong to the Semitic language family making them similar languages and the new generations can find them under the tree of the BiDi “Bidirectional“ languages. The structures, pronunciations and words resemble one another.
============================
Reading right to left in both. They derived from Proto-Semitic. So did Abraham, the Biblical father of both cultures (per the OT) speak & read/write Proto-Semitic? I guess his family didn't get along either & went their separate ways.
 

Roots of the Arabic Language - Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic & Maltese

The Arabic language has been coming more and more into the limelight due to world events and spreading the language around the world.
alphaomegatranslations.com

Roots of the Arabic Language​

In order to demystify Arabic, let’s go back and take a look at its origins. Arabic is in the Afroasiatic language family, specifically the Semitic branch. This is the very same branch that Hebrew, Amharic, Aramaic, Maltese, and many other languages with historic and literary weight are part of. All of these languages are descendants of Proto-Semitic, the common ancestor to all Semitic languages. Proto-Semitic later split up into what would eventually become modern Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, Amharic, and more.

On the Arabian Peninsula and surrounding areas during ancient times, there were two branches of what we could call Old Arabic. The first was Safaitic, which was thought to have been used between 100 BC and 400 AD. Hismaic is the name given to other dialects spoken between 800 BC and 600 AD. These Old Arabic dialects were soon joined, and later eclipsed by, Classical Arabic in the 4th century AD, which was based on the Arabic used to write the Quran and other literary works from the Arab world. Modern Arabic is based on Classical Arabic in terms of grammar and spelling, though there are so many dialects and varieties that pronunciation can differ.
 
Surprising that two Semitic people have similar languages. Not.
 
mrjurrs said:
Surprising that two Semitic people have similar languages. Not.
Click to expand...
Interesting as I'm interested in etymology. The 2 languages are obviously related: scribbles read right-to-left.

My bro-in-law spent 11 years living in Germany teaching English. Back in the U.S. he got hired by the CIA, which never had him use his fluency in German. Instead they spent huge amounts of $$$ having him spend a year for him to learn Farsi, which they also never had him used.

Looking at this flagrant waste, the repugs should cut back funding for the CIA instead of the FBI & IRS.
 
Last edited:
Yes. Arabic tends to use a lot of “s” sounds in words, whereas Hebrew tends to use the “sh” sound in those same words: not a big difference. For example “salaam” in Arabic is “shalom” in Hebrew”. “Rosh Hashanna” in Hebrew is “raas Al- Sana” in Arabic.

Another language in that Semitic family of languages, which is now extinct, was Aramaic. That was the language of Jesus and his 12 disciples. That’s one of the reasons some scholars doubt that the four gospels were actually written by the disciples, as it is written in Greek, rather than Aramaic- and there is no evidence that the folks in that part of the world at that time spoke Greek.
 
JacksinPA said:
Is Arabic derived from Hebrew?
Click to expand...

Not on this planet.

There's no written evidence of proto-Indo-European (PIE) but we know it existed from cognates.

Anyone who understands linguistics knows the third part of Grimm’s Law is that PIE voiced aspirate stops, bh, dh, gh, and ghw, became simple voiced stops, b, d, g, and gw or w. For example, “brother” is bhrata in Sanskrit, in Greek, phrater, and Latin, frater, which corresponds to Gothic (Scandinavian) bropthar and English brother.

The same is true for proto-Semitic. There are cognates in all the Semitic languages. Ashurbanipal makes a rather strange statement. He says he was taught the read the language that existed before the Deluge and that might very well have been pro-Sumerian or proto-Semitic. It's too bad Yahweh doesn't actually exist or the morons who translate the King Joke Vision would actually translate that Sumerian-Akkadian word as "deluge" instead of incorrectly translating it as flood.

Most people don't think so but I believe proto-Sumerian incorporates ideograms from proto-Semitic.

97000-7000 BCE Archaic Sumerian
3500 BCE Akkadian which is actually Semitic splits off from Sumerian
3200-2500 BCE Eblaite exists as a short-lived bridge between East/West Semitic
2800 BCE Amorite (West Semitic) splits off from Akkadian (now East Semitic)
2000 BCE Amorite (the people morons call "Babylonians") splits into South Semitic (Arabic and Ethiopian) and Northwest Semitic (Aramaic)
1800 BCE Canaanite language diverges from Aramaic
1500 BCE Ugaritic, Phoenician and Punic emerge as dialects of Canaanite
1200 BCE Proto-Hebrew emerges from Ugaritic as a sub-dialect
900 BCE Hebrew emerges as a language in its own right after the destruction of Ugarit by the Sea Peoples. It is differentiated by the loss of case endings used in Aramaic languages (ie Vocative, Locative, Dative, Genitive, Accusative, Nominative etc and please don’t tell me I have to give a 9th grade grammar lesson on cases).

While the Exodus never happened because the Hebrews always lived in Canaan from the southern border of Ugarit to just south of Jerusalem they did come under Egyptian suzerainty after the destruction of Ugarit and Egypt is other only language in the region that does not use case endings. You can infer from that the Hebrews did a lot of commerce with the Egyptians and/or Egyptian administrators were running the local governments.

The other major influence on Classical Biblical Hebrew was the destruction of Assyria. Refugees come pouring into Jerusalem which was a backwoods podunk town of a whole 12 acres of land and it suddenly grew into a city of 150 acres in about 2 decades. You can read Finklestein and Silberman who discuss that in detail.

Anyway, Arabic split off and differentiate long before Classical Biblical Hebrew existed.
 
The Gospels were written many-hands later. But how about the Gospel of Judas where was palling around with the man (aka savior) that he finally betrayed to the Jews? And the Apostles were all Jews, as was Jesus.
 
mrjurrs said:
Surprising that two Semitic people have similar languages. Not.
Click to expand...
The similarity makes a common ancestor language apparent. I'm interested in etymology, not smart-assed comments.
 
The earliest Semitic language we know about is Akkadian and various Akkadian dialects that is on the East Semitic branch. The earliest languages that somewhat resembled Hebrew that there are some texts surviving from are Ugaritic and Canaanite (and for example Hebrew and Phoenician probably spawned from Canaanite, with Phoenician there are barely any noticeable differences from Canaanite, might be the same language).
 
The Semitic languages family tree is always interesting, especially since there are alot of schloarly debate how to classify different Semitic languages, and exactly how they relate to each other. That Akkadian and other East Semitic languages are a separate branch all agree on, but how exactly to deal with all the languages that'd be on the other branch is debated and several solutions has been presented. Some things of course all agree on. For example that Canaanite spawned Hebrew, and that Aramaic is closely related to Hebrew, Canaanite and Ugaritic. But how is for example Arabic related to the others, and when and where did the ancestor of the Ethiopian languages break off, and what languages would be their closest cousin? The scholarly consensus that is now slowly starting to form has West Semitic split into three: Modern South Arabic, Ethiopian languages and Central Semitic languages. Central Semitic then split into Arabic, Old South Arabic and Northwest Semitic (i.e. Hebrew and close relatives).


 
Thank you for your excellent post. A*
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn more…