Portal:Oriental languages and literature

Oriental languages

Egyptian

Egyptian

See also: Ancient Egyptian Wikisource

Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest known recorded languages.

• An Account of the Battle of Megiddo
• Ancient Egyptian Love Poems
• Charm for the Protection of a Child
• Great Hymn to Aten, 14th century BCE by Akhenaten, translated by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge
• Hymn to Osiris-Sokar
• Hymn to the Nile
• Papyrus of Ani
• Text from the Rosetta Stone
• The Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Own Soul
• The Laments of Isis and Nephthys
• The Magic Book
• The Precepts of Ptah-Hotep
• The Shipwrecked Sailor
• The Victory of Ramses II Over the Khita

Coptic

See also: Coptic Wikisource

Coptic is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century. The new writing system became the Coptic script, an adapted Greek alphabet with the addition of six to seven signs from the demotic script to represent Egyptian sounds the Greek language did not have.

• Coptic Literature as it appeared in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia
• Coptic Versions of the Bible as it appeared in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Akkadian

Akkadian

See also: Akkadian category on central Wikisource

Akkadian (also Accadian, Assyro-Babylonian) is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate.

• Enûma Eliš, 12th-18th century BCE (Akkadian)
• The Code of Hammurabi / Codex Hammurabi, c. 1700s BCE by Hammurabi:
  • Harper translation, translated in 1904 by Robert Francis Harper
  • King translation, translated in 1910 by Leonard William King
  • Codex Hammurabi, transliteration column from Hammurabi's Gesetz by J. von Kohler and A. Ungnad (Akkadian)
• Cyrus cylinder, 539-530 BCE, translated by Robert William Rogers

Moabite

The Méšaʿ Stele, housed in the Louvre

The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, spoken in Moab (modern day central-western Jordan) in the early first millennium BC. It was written using a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, which is the only known extensive text in this language.

• "The Inscription on the Stele of Méšaʿ", 1919 by Herbert Fuller Bright Compston

Hebrew

Hebrew text from the Aleppo Codex, a 10th century Hebrew Bible

See also: Hebrew Wikisource

Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Jews were only part of the whole Hebrew/Canaanian sprachraum.

• Portal:Hebrew language and literature

Yiddish

Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages. It is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

• The Aims of Yiddish Philology, 1913 by Ber Borochov
• Hebraismus Militans, 1913 by Ber Borochov

Aramaic

See also: Aramaic category on central Wikisource

Aramaic is a Semitic language belonging to the Afroasiatic language family (etym. language of Aram,[3] an ancient region in central Syria). Aramaic script was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to both the Arabic and modern Hebrew alphabets.

• Apocrypha-Aramaic Language as it appeared in the 1903 Encyclopaedia Biblica

Syriac

Syriac

Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared around the 1st century C.E., Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the 4th to the 8th centuries, the classical language of Edessa, preserved in a large body of Syriac literature.

Language

• Syriac as it appeared in the 1897 Easton's Bible Dictionary
• Compendious Syriac Grammar, 1904 by Theodor Nöldeke trans. James Alexander Crichton

Literature

• A Short History of Syriac Literature by William Wright (1894) IA
• Arabic Infancy Gospel

See also

• Portal:Amharic literature
• Portal:Arabic literature
• Portal:Hebrew language and literature

Notes

1. The term "Oriental languages" in the Library of Congress Classification system, while "Afroasiatic languages" is of more modern usage, including use on Wikipedia