The Canaanite languages continued to be spoken languages until at least the 5th century but were gradually supplanted by Aramaic. Modern Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language today and was revived in the 19th century by political and cultural activists as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was achieved mainly through the revitalization and cultivation efforts of Zionists throughout Europe and in Palestine. By the mid-20th century, Modern Hebrew had become the primary[citation needed] language of Palestinian Jews and was later made the official language of the State of Israel.
Analogous to the Romance languages, the Canaanite languages operate on a spectrum of mutual intelligibility with one another, with significant overlap occurring in syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics. This family of languages also has the distinction of being the first historically attested group of languages to use an alphabet, derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, to record their writings, as opposed to the far earlier Cuneiformlogographic/syllabic writing of the region, which originated in Mesopotamia and was used to record Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian and Hittite.
The Canaanite languages or dialects can be split into the following:[1][3]
North Canaan
Philistine – attested by several dozen inscriptions in Phoenician script scattered along Israel's southwest coast, in particular the Ekron Royal Dedicatory Inscription. It is noted as being similar to Phoenician, in particular the Byblian dialect.[4][5]
Sutean, a Semitic language, possibly of the Canaanite branch.
Amarna Canaanite – attested only through the Canaano-Akkadian language of the Amarna letters. Hetzron notes that it has distinctive features that mark it as a separate language from the other Canaanite dialects rather than a direct ancestor to any of them.
In 2022, two large, 3,800-year-old, Amorite-Akkadian bilingual tablets were published, yielding a large corpus of Northwest Semitic.[9] The Amorite text is notably very similar to other Canaanite languages.[10] Until then, Amorite was only known from personal names attested in Akkadian texts and its position within Northern Semitic languages was vague.
Modern Hebrew, revived in the modern era from an extinct dialect of the ancient Israelites preserved in literature, poetry, liturgy; also known as Classical Hebrew, the oldest form of the language attested in writing. The original pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew is accessible only through reconstruction. It may also include Samaritan Hebrew, a variety formerly spoken by the Samaritans. The main sources of Classical Hebrew are the Hebrew Bible and inscriptions such as the Gezer calendar and Khirbet Qeiyafa pottery shard. All of the other Canaanite languages seem to have become extinct by the early first millennium AD except Punic, which survived into late antiquity (or possibly even longer).
Slightly varying forms of Hebrew preserved from the first millennium BC until modern times include:
Mishnaic Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, rabbinical, any of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud.
Medieval Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, poetical, rabbinical, scientific, literary; lingua franca based on the Bible, Mishnah, and neologisms created by translators and commentators
Haskalah Hebrew – Jews, scientific, literary and journalistic language based on Biblical but enriched with neologisms created by writers and journalists, a transition to the later
The primary modern reference book for the many extra-biblical Canaanite inscriptions, together with Aramaic inscriptions, is the German-language book Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, from which inscriptions are often referenced as KAI n (for a number n).[11]
^Waltke & O'Connor (1990:8): "The extrabiblical linguistic material from the Iron Age is primarily epigraphic, that is, texts written on hard materials (pottery, stones, walls, etc.). The epigraphic texts from Israelite territory are written in Hebrew in a form of the language which may be called Inscriptional Hebrew; this 'dialect' is not strikingly different from the Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic text. Unfortunately, it is meagerly attested. Similarly limited are the epigraphic materials in the other South Canaanite dialects, Moabite and Ammonite; Edomite is so poorly attested that we are not sure that it is a South Canaanite dialect, though that seems likely. Of greater interest and bulk is the body of Central Canaanite inscriptions, those written in the Phoenician language of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and in the offshoot Punic and Neo-Punic tongues of the Phoenician colonies in North Africa.
"An especially problematic body of material is the Deir Alla wall inscriptions referring to a prophet Balaam (c. 700 BC), these texts have both Canaanite and Aramaic features. W. R. Garr has recently proposed that all the Iron Age Canaanite dialects be regarded as forming a chain that actually includes the oldest forms of Aramaic as well."
^Gitin, Dothan, and Naveh, 1997, p. 15, quote: "If so, one may ask why should a seventh century BCE inscription be written at Ekron in a language close to Phoenician and reminiscent of Old Byblian. Phoenician was the prestige language in the tenth and ninth century BCE. To find an inscription, however, in seventh century BCE Philistia, where a script from the Hebrew tradition was used, is something of an enigma."
Waltke, Bruce K.; O'Connor, M. (1990). An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. ISBN978-0-931464-31-7.
Further reading
Dallaire, Hélène M. The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose. University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2014. doi:10.1515/9781575064000
Izre'el, Shlomo. "Canaano-Akkadian: Linguistics and Sociolinguistics". In: Language and Nature. Papers Presented to John Huehnergard on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. hrsg. v. Rebecca Hasselbach, Na'ama Pat-El (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization (SAOC) 67). Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012. pp. 171–218. ISBN978-1-885923-91-2.
Pat-El, Na’ama; Wilson-Wright, Aren (2016). "The Features of Canaanite: A Reevaluation". Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. 166 (1): 41–55. doi:10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.166.1.0041. Accessed 18 May 2023.
