Page:Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (1910 Kautzsch-Cowley edition).djvu/26

 [b]  2. The better known Semitic languages may be subdivided^[1] as follows:—

1. The South Semitic or Arabic branch. To this belong, besides the classical literary language of the Arabs and the modern vulgar Arabic, the older southern Arabic preserved in the Sabaean inscriptions (less correctly called Himyaritic), and its offshoot, the Geʿez or Ethiopic, in Abyssinia.

II. The Middle Semitic or Canaanitish branch. To this belongs the Hebrew of the Old Testament with its descendants, the New Hebrew, as found especially in the Mishna (see below, § 3 a), and Rabbinic; also Phoenician, with Punic (in Carthage and its colonies), and the various remains of Canaanitish dialects preserved in names of places and persons, and in the inscription of Mêšaʿ, king of Moab.

 [c]  III. The North Semitic or Aramaic branch. The subdivisions of this are—(1) The Eastern Aramaic or Syriac, the literary language of the Christian Syrians. The religious books of the Mandaeans (Nasoraeans, Sabians, also called the disciples of St. John) represent a very debased offshoot of this. A Jewish modification of Syriac is to be seen in the language of the Babylonian Talmud. (2) The Western or Palestinian Aramaic, incorrectly called also 'Chaldee'.^[2] This latter dialect is represented in the Old Testament by two words in Gn 31⁴⁷, by the verse Jer 10¹¹, and the sections Dn 2⁴; Ezr 4⁸ to 6¹⁸, and Ezr 7^12–26 as well as by a number of non-Jewish inscriptions and Jewish papyri (see below, under m), but especially by a considerable section of Jewish literature (Targums, Palestinian Gemara, &c.). To the same branch belongs also the Samaritan, with its admixture of Hebrew forms, and, except for the rather Arabic colouring of the proper names, the idiom of the Nabataean inscriptions in the Sinaitic peninsula, in the East of Palestine, &c.

For further particulars about the remains of Western Aramaic (including those in the New Test., in the Palmyrene and Egyptian Aramaic inscriptions) see Kautzsch, Gramm. des Biblisch-Aramäischen, Lpz. 1884, p. 6 ff.

 [d]  IV. The East Semitic branch, the language of the Assyrio-Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions, the third line of the Achaemenian inscriptions.

On the importance of Assyrian for Hebrew philology especially from a lexicographical point of view cf. Friedr. Delitzsch, Prolegomena eines neuen

1. For conjectures as to the gradual divergence of the dialects (first the Babylonian, then Canaanite, including Hebrew, lastly Aramaic and Arabic) from primitive Semitic, see Zimmern, KAT.³, ii. p. 644 ff.
2. In a wider sense all Jewish Aramaic is sometimes called 'Chaldee'.