Phoenician language
'language of Canaan'[2]) is an extinct Canaanite Semitic language originally spoken in the region surrounding the cities of Tyre and Sidon.
Extensive Tyro-Sidonian trade and commercial dominance led to Phoenician becoming a lingua franca of the maritime Mediterranean during the Iron Age.
A third practice reported in the literature is the use of the consonantal letters for vowels in the same way as had occurred in the original adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet to Greek and Latin, which was apparently still transparent to Punic writers: hē for [e] and 'ālep for [a].
There is no consensus on whether Phoenician-Punic ever underwent the lenition of stop consonants that happened in most other Northwest Semitic languages such as Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic (cf.
The letter Y used for words such as 𐤀𐤔 /ʔəʃ/ ys/υς "which" and 𐤀𐤕 /ʔət/ yth/υθ (definite accusative marker) in Greek and Latin alphabet inscriptions can be interpreted as denoting a reduced schwa vowel[20] that occurred in pre-stress syllables in verbs and two syllables before stress in nouns and adjectives,[31] while other instances of Y as in chyl/χυλ and even chil/χιλ for 𐤊𐤋 /kull/ "all" in Poenulus can be interpreted as a further stage in the vowel shift resulting in fronting ([y]) and even subsequent delabialisation of /u/ and /uː/.
[34] As is typical for the Semitic languages, Phoenician words are usually built around consonantal roots and vowel changes are used extensively to express morphological distinctions.
However, unlike most Semitic languages, Phoenician preserved (or, possibly, re-introduced) numerous uniconsonantal and biconsonantal roots seen in Proto-Afro-Asiatic: compare the verbs 𐤊𐤍 kn "to be" vs Arabic كون kwn, 𐤌𐤕 mt "to die" vs Hebrew and Arabic מות/موت mwt and 𐤎𐤓 sr "to remove" vs Hebrew סרר srr.
The written forms and the reconstructed pronunciations of the personal pronouns are as follows:[38][39] Singular: 1st: /ʼanōkī/ 𐤀𐤍𐤊 ʼnk (Punic sometimes 𐤀𐤍𐤊𐤉 ʼnkj), also attested as /ʼanek/ 2nd masc.
and feminine /himūt/ 𐤄𐤌𐤕 hmt Enclitic personal pronouns were added to nouns (to encode possession) and to prepositions, as shown below for "Standard Phoenician" (the predominant dialect, as distinct from the Byblian and the late Punic varieties).
In late Punic, the 3rd masculine singular is usually /-im/ 𐤌 m. The same enclitic pronouns are also attached to verbs to denote direct objects.
The near demonstrative pronouns ("this") are written, in standard Phoenician, 𐤆 z [za] for the singular and 𐤀𐤋 ʼl [ʔilːa] for the plural.
Byblian still distinguishes, in the singular, a masculine zn [zan] / z [za] from a feminine 𐤆𐤕 zt [zuːt] / 𐤆𐤀 zʼ [zuː].
There are also many variations in Punic, including 𐤎𐤕 st [suːt] and 𐤆𐤕 zt [zuːt] for both genders in the singular.
Much as in Biblical Hebrew, the initial consonant of the article is dropped after the prepositions 𐤁 b-, 𐤋 l- and 𐤊 k-; it could also be lost after various other particles and function words, such the direct object marker 𐤀𐤉𐤕 ʼjt and the conjunction 𐤅 w- "and".
They all distinguish gender: 𐤀𐤇𐤃 ʼḥd, 𐤀𐤔𐤍𐤌/𐤔𐤍𐤌 (ʼ)šnm[40] (construct state 𐤀𐤔𐤍/𐤔𐤍 (ʼ)šn), 𐤔𐤋𐤔 šlš, 𐤀𐤓𐤁𐤏 ʼrbʻ, 𐤇𐤌𐤔 ḥmš, 𐤔𐤔 šš, 𐤔𐤁𐤏 šbʻ, 𐤔𐤌𐤍/𐤔𐤌𐤍𐤄 šmn(h), 𐤕𐤔𐤏 tšʻ, 𐤏𐤔𐤓/𐤏𐤎𐤓 ʻšr/ʻsr[41][42] vs 𐤀𐤇𐤕 ʼḥt, 𐤔𐤕𐤌 štm,[43] 𐤔𐤋𐤔𐤕 šlšt, 𐤀𐤓𐤁𐤏𐤕 ʼrbʻt, 𐤇𐤌𐤔𐤕 ḥmšt, 𐤔𐤔𐤕 ššt, 𐤔𐤁𐤏𐤕 šbʻt, 𐤔𐤌𐤍𐤕 šmnt,[44] unattested, 𐤏𐤔𐤓𐤕 ʻšrt.
[45] The tens are morphologically masculine plurals of the ones: 𐤏𐤔𐤓𐤌/𐤏𐤎𐤓𐤌 ʻsrm/ʻšrm,[42][46] 𐤔𐤋𐤔𐤌 šlšm, 𐤀𐤓𐤁𐤏𐤌 ʼrbʻm, 𐤇𐤌𐤔𐤌 ḥmšm, 𐤔𐤔𐤌 ššm, 𐤔𐤁𐤏𐤌 šbʻm, 𐤔𐤌𐤍𐤌 šmnm, 𐤕𐤔𐤏𐤌 tšʻm.
Like for other Semitic languages, Phoenician verbs have different "verbal patterns" or "stems", expressing manner of action, level of transitivity and voice.
The old Semitic jussive, which originally differed slightly from the prefix conjugation, is no longer possible to separate from it in Phoenician with the present data.
[54] Some prepositions are always prefixed to nouns, deleting, if present, the initial /h/ of the definite article: such are 𐤁 b- "in", 𐤋 l- "to, for", 𐤊 k- "as" and 𐤌 m- /min/ "from".
They are sometimes found in forms extended through the addition of 𐤍 -n or 𐤕 -t. Other prepositions are not like that: 𐤀𐤋ʻl "upon", .𐤏𐤃 ʻd "until", 𐤀𐤇𐤓 ʼḥr "after", 𐤕𐤇𐤕 tḥt "under", 𐤁𐤉𐤍, 𐤁𐤍 b(y)n "between".
[52] Adjectives can be formed following the familiar Semitic nisba suffix /-īy/ 𐤉 y 𐤑𐤃𐤍𐤉 (e.g. ṣdny "Sidonian").
It is possible that Punic may have survived the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb in some small isolated area: the geographer al-Bakri describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in the city of Sirte in rural Ifriqiya, a region in which spoken Punic survived well past its written use.
The name given to those people by Hanno the Navigator's interpreters was transmitted from Punic into Greek as gorillai and was applied in 1847 by Thomas S. Savage to the western gorilla.
Phoenician, together with Punic, is primarily known from approximately 10,000 surviving inscriptions,[63] supplemented by occasional glosses in books written in other languages.
The only written documents of Phoenicians and Carthaginians are monumental inscriptions on stone, a few ephemeral letters or notes on pieces of broken pottery, and three fragmentary papyri.
[64] Roman authors, such as Sallust, allude to some books written in the Punic language, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (e.g., Mago's treatise) or in snippets (e.g., in Plautus' plays).
The Cippi of Melqart, a bilingual inscription in Ancient Greek and Carthaginian discovered in Malta in 1694, was the key which allowed French scholar Jean-Jacques Barthélemy to decipher and reconstruct the alphabet in 1758.
However, just to note the advances made in the nineteenth century, it is noteworthy that Gesenius’ precursor Hamaker, in his Miscellanea Phoenicia of 1828, had only 13 inscriptions at his disposal.
On the other hand only 30 years later the amount of Phoenician inscribed monuments had grown so enormously that Schröder in his compendium Die phönizische Sprache.
Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben of 1869 could state that Gesenius knew only a quarter of the material Schröder had at hand himself.
