Inscriptions from Jabal Ikmah, in Saudi Arabia, c.644 BCE to 600 CE: these ancient inscriptions and petroglyphs were carved over the course of nearly 1,000 years
Inscriptions and drawings cover many of the rock formations at Jabal Ikmah, which is a mountain located in the al-Ula Valley of Saudi Arabia. These carvings record the everyday activities, transactions, religious practices, names, and political relationships of the ancient Lihyanites (and subsequent cultures) over the course of many centuries.
Several different languages can be identified at this site, including Aramaic, Dadanitic, Safaitic, Thamudic, Miaic, Nabataean, and Arabic; the inscriptions even demonstrate the evolution from Dadanitic to Arabic script.
The writings are often accompanied by petroglyphs depicting people, animals, and objects.
As this article explains:
In and around the al-Ula Valley loom vertical sandstone cliffs. Many of them now display depictions of human figures or animals known as petroglyphs, a term derived from the Greek words petra, meaning “rock”, and glypho, meaning “to carve”. Ancient artists would use stones or tools to scrape images onto the surface of cliffs and freestanding rocks—or, in some instances, they would carve figures or lines of text in relief, standing proud of the rock surface.
The al-Ula region is home to thousands of these petroglyphs, taking different forms and spanning centuries of time. Ibexes, camels, horses, ostriches, and many other species cavort across the rock faces, some pursued by stylized human hunters holding spears and other weapons. Other images depict large urns and include complex decorative patterns.
Jabal Ikmah is often described as an "open-air library:"
In the north of the al-Ula Valley rises the mountain known in Arabic as Jabal Ikmah. This is a particularly rich repository of images and texts that have managed to weather centuries of sun, wind, and rain with remarkably little deterioration—so rich that Ikmah has become known as an open-air library, even though its origin appears to have been as a place of worship rather than study. Some of its hundreds of inscriptions may be as much as 2,500 years old. Most offer tantalizing insights into life and culture during the period when the Lihyanite kingdom flourished in this region of northwest Arabia, roughly from the fifth to the first centuries B.C.E.
Sources & More Info:
National Geographic: Messages on the Mountains
Telegraph: Jabal Ikmah: Home to the "Open-Air Library"
So, as a Hebrew speaker, I one day got up and thought: what if English was structured the same as Hebrew, with templates and roots instead of just suffixes and prefixes?
Well, that's partially a lie. I woke up many days and had that thought. It sounded cool. And I think many speakers of other Semitic languages who learned English had the same thought. Trying to look it up leads you to nonconcatenative morphology (isn't that a mouthful), which is a more general term that also refers to apophony - something that exists in English and is used in some plural forms of words (man-men, foot-feet) and past tenses (rise-rose). While I did actually use those verb conjugations for what I tried (more on that later), it's not identical to what I was actually looking for, which is called a transfix. Transfix is just how the morphology of verbs (and some nouns, but that's another story) in Semitic languages is referred to in English - it's called that because the affix is added across the entire word. I'm not sure it's a good way to refer to it, but I'm still studying linguistics and that's the term!
Anyway, usually when someone starts mentioning "what if we did English with nonconcatenative morphology?" people just tell them it already exists in English and they can go ahead and generalize it if they want. If anyone else did that already I didn't see it yet, though, and looking up using "transfix" instead does not give many results. Darm homonyms and all that.
Anyway, I did decide to use the irregular past tense conjugations of certain English verbs in order to create my attempted English with transfixes! I currently call it Anglit because I'm a Hebrew speaker, but if I ever develop an interesting nouning a verb template I might base it on an alternative word to speech. We'll see.
That has been a lot to say for what was supposed to be my opening to detailing things, so I'll just wrote the actual details of what I did so far under the cut. Commentary and further ideas are welcome!
All right. So first, I went on the Internet to find a list of irregular verb conjugation in English. The list I found had lots of such verbs, with irregular past conjugations, but many of them were actually variations of the now common -ed suffix, which wouldn't serve my purpose. However, many of the other irregular verbs had the past participle suffix -en, which isn't that common in English, so I went and wrote down a list of those. Out of them all there were a couple of verbs that still had the regular -ed suffix for the past tense, like proved, swelled and showed, but most of them didn't.
Next, I sorted them by what was their irregular past tense. The most common structure was (C)CoCe with 22 such verbs. With most of those, the -(e)n suffix of the past participle was added to the past tense form - though five verbs (swore, bore, wore, tore, shore [past tense of shear]) ended with r and lost the e in the past participle, and the nine (C)CiCe presemt temse verbs had it on their present tense form, with the i shortened.
Other past forms didn't have as many examples, but some worth mentioning include:
Verbs ending with w - which also lost the e in the past participle form, and had CCow as the usual present tense form, with CCew being the past tense. Draw and showed are notable exceptions to that. In a similar situation there are the verbs ending with y (or with [aj] or [ej] at the end), which sometimes had the y in the past tense turn into a w. What can I say, semivowels are a nightmare. Lie, as in to lie down, is a notable example of when it didn't happen.
CaCe verbs. Most of them are CiC in the present tense, and their past participle is based on it instead of the past tense. Same for CooC verbs - the only two I found are took and shook, both of which have CaCe as their present tense, which is used for their past participle. Only one verb with irregular past conjugation I managed to find has CooC(e) as its present tense, and that's choose. It's in the largest group mentioned above.
CiC verbs. They're generally CiCe (with one CighC, but the pronunciation is the same) in the present tense. Their past participle is based on their past tense. And yeah, they should belong to the train that is the previous point.
Get and fall. They're not even alike, as their past tenses seem to swap - got and fell. But it's a neat, if weird, cycle. True, fall isn't foll, but to my ears it sounds way too similar.
There were a couple of verbs that just didn't belong anywhere in particular, because their past tense didn't have any other examples or was the regular -ed suffix. Some of those went through an attempted draft to an existing past tense paradigm. Others - such as strike - have a different deal with their past tense, with a paradigm that just doesn't have any other representatives with the -en past participle, so they're mostly just floating there.
Within the (C)CoCe paradigm for past tenses, I sorted the verbs according to their present tense. Nine of them had the (C)CiCe structure as present tense - which would make 13 with that present tense structure on the list in general. Further eight were CCeaC, but five of those are pronounced with a short e sound, as well as one verb not of these eight thar actually has a short e sound - swell. Though to be fair, the past tense "swole" with this one is out of use, so maybe it belongs with get-got. I suppose swole isn't pronounced with a long o. Anyway, there's also freeze to join the other three with the long ea sound (speak, steal, shear). And break, while also spelled this way, is pronounced more similarly to wake. So it also isn't in this group - which is too bad, since if I grouped based on spelling it would mean I have two groups with nine members, while swell, freeze and wake are left to fend for themselves. Which would actually cover it all. Hum. In addition to wake being an CaCe verb, similarly to take and shake. Maybe becoming Wook would do it good. And having its past participle be waken. I think it does have precedence. Freeze, meanwhile, can join choose! Anyway, sorry for the mess. Writing about it helped me think a bit.
Now, all this just gives me existing verbs in English. What do I do with that? Well, in theory, move on to find other verbs with familiar structures and seeing how they work. Let's see some possibilities:
Live is pronounced like give, and likely got its e in a similar way to it (short version: some medieval scribes thought a word can't end with a v). So, in theory, its past tense would be lave, and liven its past participle - which might actually already exist as a word, maybe I missed it.
Like, on the other hand, is similar to ride or bite. If we liken it to ride, it becomes loke. If it's more like bite, it'll be lik. Either way, likken or licken would be the past participle.
I have started listing other irregular past tenses, as well as looking at other verbs with old -en forms that're out of use (molten, holden), and trying to figure out ones with widely unrelated past tense conjugation (go-went-gone, be-was-been). Maybe I'll elaborate in the future. Lately I also thought of moving the future tense clitic 'll to the start of the verb instead of the end of a pronoun, maybe while creating a different form for future tense and making it an imperative tense (or mood? Apparently?). Anyway, please share any thoughts you might have on the project so far! It's true that I currently mostly work with verbs of one vowel or diphthongs only, which is weird since most all Hebrew templates work on two vowels, but that's all I have for now.
Pardon my lateness, but I was only today years old when I realized that Rosh HaShanah is directly related to the Arabic term for the New Year, "رأس السّنة" ("ra's al-sana", or "ras e'sene" in Lebanese dialect), which literally translates to "the head of the year" (yes, as in the literal head).
By Rafy - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13256859
The ancient Semitic-speaking peoples lived in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region of the Afro-Eurasian continents. Some of these peoples include the Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, and Samaritans. Proto-Semitic existed during the 4th millennium BCE and writing was developed by the mid-3rd millennium BCE. From there, the language developed into three identifiable language groups, East, Central, and South Semitic languages. The Eastern branch includes languages like Akkadian and Eblaite. The Central branch includes two sub branches of northwest, which includes Aramaic and Canaanite, and the southern branch, which inclues Arabic and Hebrew. Southern branch is further divided into southwestern, which includes Qatabanic and Minaic, and Southeastern, which includes Mehri and Harusi. Geographically, this language family covers from modern day Iraq through the Arabian Peninsula, and over to Ethiopia.
Exactly where the Semitic-speaking peoples originated is still a question with possible locations being Mesopotamia, the Eastern Mediterranean including the Levant and/or Arabian Peninsula, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and North Africa. The most accepted theory points to the Levant around 3800 BCE where the dialects then languages spread out from there with groups like the Phoenicians, who were renown as traders and sailors along the Mediterranean coast. The dissenting theory is that since all five or more of the other Afroasiatic family languages originated in North or Nortwest Africa, that the Semitic languages originated there as well during the late Neolithic, perhaps during the Green Sahara, which made travel in the area by foot much easier.
By Msanzl - Own work, cf. Manuel Sanz Ledesma, 'Manual de lingüística semítica', ed. Bubok, Madrid 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30681320
During the Bronze Age, Semitic languages had spread over the Ancient Near East with the earliest written record found in Mesopotamia in around 2800 BCE by the Akkadian Empire, who adapted Sumerian cuneiform to their language. From there, writing moved into the Levant and Canaan and into the Sinai Peninsula and into Anatolia, dominating the area known as the Fertile Crescent. There is no currently known evidence of the Semitic languages being spoken in North Africa or in the Horn of Africa at this time. as the Akkadian Empire expanded through the Ancient Middle East. The Eblaites begin to appear in the historical record, as well. Their language is closely related to Akkadian and also used cuneiform as its writing system. Akkadian continued to appear in writing until the 1st century AD and cuneiform continued to be used about a century longer, though the still extant Assyrians still use some Akkadian grammatical features and words
West Semitic languages begin to appear in the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet that appeared around 1500 BCE, though there appears to be earlier uses of the alphabet. With Akkadian being used in the lingua franca in the area, most of the writing that remains is in Akkadian, so writing in other languages is much more sparse than those in Akkadian, but does become more available as the 2nd millennium BCE continues. There also appears to be some snobbery among those who speak Akkadian and had a higher level of technology against the Amorites, who they called the Martu with mentions in Akkadian saying 'he MAR.TU who know no grain… The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains… The MAR.TU who digs up truffles… who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death.' This difference in technology, however, has its origin with the Akkadian speaking peoples of the Old Assyrian Empire preventing those in northern Mesopotamia from participating in the activities they complain they don't do.
By Iry-Hor - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34922151
A group of Canaanite-speaking peoples appear to have entered Egypt. They came to be known as the Hyksos by the Egyptians. They conquered Lower Egypt and became the 15th Dynasty, which ruled from approximately 1650-1550 BCE and were displaced by the Kush from Upper Egypt. They introduced technology, which included the war chariot, and intensive trade with the Canaanites. They also were recorded as having ransacked Egyptian temples and the pyramids for treasures.
The fall of the first Babylonian Empire in 1595 BCE allowed for about 300 years of other languages to develop, especially in the Levant and Canaan. Some of the people groups that developed their own language in the 14th century BCE, which were closely related to Ugaritic, a West Semitic language, included the Phoenicians, Moabites, Ammonites, and Israelites. Through the 13th to the 11th centuries BCE, multiple small states arose, including the Edomites, Hebrews (Israelites/Judeans/Samaritans), and Amalekites. These peoples spoke languages that were closely related to each other. The Philistines, who appeared in the 12th century BCE, appear to have been one of the Sea Peoples. There is little evidence of their language, but based on the pottery style they left behind, which was very similar to Mycenaen Greek pottery, their language was probably related to Indo-European rather than Proto-Sianitic.
