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Akkadian, a Semitic language, gradually replaced Sumerian as the primary spoken language in the area c. 2000 BC (the exact date is debated), [5] but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD.
However, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory. From 1500 BC onwards, the Assyrian language is termed Middle Assyrian. It was the language of the Middle Assyrian Empire. However, the Babylonian cultural influence was strong and the Assyrians wrote royal inscriptions, religious and most scholarly ...
Although the first known text by native speakers dates to 1885, the first record of the language is a list of words recorded in 1793 by Alexander MacKenzie. 1885: Motu: grammar by W.G. Lawes: 1886: Guugu Yimidhirr: notes by Johann Flierl, Wilhelm Poland and Georg Schwarz, culminating in Walter Roth's The Structure of the Koko Yimidir Language ...
These closely related languages originated in the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples spoke them in an area encompassing what is today Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, as well as some areas of southwestern Turkey, Iraq, and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia.
Successful as second languages far beyond their numbers of contemporary first-language speakers, a few Semitic languages today are the base of the sacred literature of some of the world's major religions, including Islam (Arabic), Judaism (Hebrew and Aramaic (Biblical and Talmudic)), churches of Syriac Christianity (Classical Syriac) and ...
Approximate historical distribution of the Semitic languages in the Ancient Near East.. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Genre is often the first judgement made of ancient literature; types of literature were not clearly defined, and all Sumerian literature incorporated poetic aspects. Sumerian poems demonstrate basic elements of poetry, including lines, imagery, and metaphor. Humans, gods, talking animals, and inanimate objects were all incorporated as characters.