Phoenician-Punic language

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Phoenician
Period approx. 2nd millennium BC Until 500 AD

Formerly spoken in

Levant, Mediterranean coast
Linguistic
classification
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

phn

ISO 639-3

phn

The language name Phoenician (or Phoenician-Punic language ) represents the mittelkanaanäischen and Semitic dialects in the territory of the northern Ostmittelmeerraums, especially in what is now Lebanon (u. A. Sidon , Tire , Byblos ) and Syria and the Phoenician colonies of the Mediterranean area to Spain and the North African coast and spoken in the early 1st millennium BC. Were also used in Anatolia as a lingua franca. Phoenician is a rubble language that dates back to the 11th century BC. Is documented until late antiquity . Grammatically, Phoenician is closest to ancient Hebrew .

Forms of speech

Spread of the Phoenician language, shown as a yellow outline.
The main Phoenician trade routes and metropolises along the Mediterranean .

The Phoenician-Punic language is closely related to Hebrew as well as to the other Semitic varieties of the Near Eastern Mediterranean coast. Most linguists consider Canaanite, Hebrew, and Phoenician to be the same language with multiple dialects. According to this point of view, Phoenician was in a dialect continuum with the Canaanite languages ​​Hebrew, Moabite , Ammonite , Edomite and probably also Ugarite , which shows an older language level. Phoenician, for its part, consists of a number of very similar, but nevertheless distinguishable, language forms.

Byblisch

Old Byblic, named after the city of Byblos , has clearly archaic features, and the more recent texts also partly deviate from standard Phoenician .

Standard Phoenician

Texts in standard Phoenician have been found throughout the Mediterranean . When Phoenician texts are mentioned, what is usually meant is Standard Phoenician.

Punic

Texts from the western Mediterranean region ( Carthage ) have been considered “Punic” since the 5th century BC. Chr. Designated. Characteristic is the shrinkage of the pharyngals (sounds that are formed in the pharynx), which are important in Semitic . This is probably due to the influence of the substrate .

Neupunisch

The texts from the time after the Punic Wars and the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC are called Neupunian (Neopunian) . They differ in language and writing from Punic and come mainly from Africa , occasionally from Egypt and Lebanon. There are influences of Latin and Berber on Neupunic.

(New) Punic was important until late antiquity and probably only died out with the advent of Arabic . A late form of Punic may have been spoken around 1000.

font

Phoenician was written in the Phoenician script , an alphabet script from which many of the alphabets used today descended. At first it was a pure consonant writing , in later Phoenician and older Punic certain consonants were also used as mater lectionis to write vowels .

In Neupunian, which has largely lost the old pharyngals , these and the half-vowels are used to denote the vowels, but there is no uniform system. The Neupunic script was used until the 1st century, after which the Latin script with additional characters ( Latin -Punic ) was used.

Lore

Phoenician-Punic is almost only passed down in inscriptions, a special case are passages in the Poenulus by the Roman writer Plautus . However, the Roman author Pliny the Elder reports that it was in Carthage before the city was destroyed in 146 BC. Have given extensive libraries. A work by the Punier Mago on agriculture, which had 28 scrolls, was even translated into Latin .

literature

Grammars

  • Charles R. Krahmalkov: A Phoenician-Punic Grammar. BTE I / 54. Brill, Leiden 2001, ISBN 90-04-11771-7
  • Johannes Friedrich, Wolfgang Röllig: Phoenician-Punic grammar. 3rd edition, revised by Maria Giulia Amadasi Guzzo with the collaboration of Werner R. Mayer, Rome 1999 (= Analecta Orientalia. Volume 55), ISBN 88-7653-259-5
  • Stanislav Segert: A Grammar of Phoenician and Punic. Beck, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-406-00724-4

Dictionaries

  • Jacob Hoftijzer / Karel Jongeling: Dictionary of North-West-Semitic Inscriptions. Leiden 1995.
  • Charles R. Krahmalkov: Phoenician-Punic Dictionary (OLA 90). Leuven 2000, ISBN 978-90-429-0770-6 .

Collections of inscriptions

  • Herbert Donner , Wolfgang Röllig : Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions. 2nd Edition. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1966 ff.
  • Karl Jaroš: Inscriptions of the Holy Land from four millennia. CD with text collection for learning purposes. von Zabern, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-8053-2863-X .
  • Karel Jongeling, Robert M. Kerr (Eds.): Late Punic Epigraphy. An Introduction to the Study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic Inscriptions. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 978-3-16-148728-6 .
  • Karel Jongeling: Handbook of Neo-Punic Inscriptions. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-16-149303-4 .

Individual studies

Web links