1.
Israel
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Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in the Middle East, on the southeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and the northern shore of the Red Sea. The country contains geographically diverse features within its small area. Israels economy and technology center is Tel Aviv, while its seat of government and proclaimed capital is Jerusalem, in 1947, the United Nations adopted a Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an internationalized Jerusalem. The plan was accepted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine, next year, the Jewish Agency declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied territories including the West Bank, Golan Heights and it extended its laws to the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, but not the West Bank. Israels occupation of the Palestinian territories is the worlds longest military occupation in modern times, efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have not resulted in peace. However, peace treaties between Israel and both Egypt and Jordan have successfully been signed, the population of Israel, as defined by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, was estimated in 2017 to be 8,671,100 people. It is the worlds only Jewish-majority state, with 74. 8% being designated as Jewish, the countrys second largest group of citizens are Arabs, at 20. 8%. The great majority of Israeli Arabs are Sunni Muslims, including significant numbers of semi-settled Negev Bedouins, other minorities include Arameans, Armenians, Assyrians, Black Hebrew Israelites, Circassians, Maronites and Samaritans. Israel also hosts a significant population of foreign workers and asylum seekers from Africa and Asia, including illegal migrants from Sudan, Eritrea. In its Basic Laws, Israel defines itself as a Jewish, Israel is a representative democracy with a parliamentary system, proportional representation and universal suffrage. The prime minister is head of government and the Knesset is the legislature, Israel is a developed country and an OECD member, with the 35th-largest economy in the world by nominal gross domestic product as of 2016. The country benefits from a skilled workforce and is among the most educated countries in the world with one of the highest percentage of its citizens holding a tertiary education degree. The country has the highest standard of living in the Middle East and the third highest in Asia, in the early weeks of independence, the government chose the term Israeli to denote a citizen of Israel, with the formal announcement made by Minister of Foreign Affairs Moshe Sharett. The names Land of Israel and Children of Israel have historically used to refer to the biblical Kingdom of Israel. The name Israel in these phrases refers to the patriarch Jacob who, jacobs twelve sons became the ancestors of the Israelites, also known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel or Children of Israel. The earliest known artifact to mention the word Israel as a collective is the Merneptah Stele of ancient Egypt. The area is known as the Holy Land, being holy for all Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam
2.
Palestinian territories
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Palestinian territories and occupied Palestinian territories are descriptions often used to describe the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which are occupied or otherwise under the control of Israel. Israeli governments have maintained that the area involved is within territorial dispute, the extent of the territories, while subject to future negotiations, have frequently been defined by the Green Line. In December 2012, UN Secretariat communications replaced this by the term State of Palestine, the ISO adopted the name change in 2013. But, as of August 2015, the UN Security Council continues to treat Palestine as a non-sovereign entity, Israel occupied the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967 and has since maintained control. Previously, these territories had been occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, in 1980, Israel officially absorbed East Jerusalem and has proclaimed the whole of Jerusalem to be its capital. The inclusion, though never formally amounting to legal annexation, was condemned internationally and declared null, the Palestinian National Authority never exercised sovereignty over the area, although it housed its offices in Orient House and several other buildings as an assertion of its sovereign interests. Israel shut them down in response to the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing, Israeli sovereignty, however, has not been recognized by any country, since the unilateral annexation of territory occupied during war contravenes the Fourth Geneva Convention. The cost of the occupation for Israel over four decades is estimated to amount to $50 billion, the World Bank estimates the annual cost in 2013 to the Palestinian economy of Israeli occupation at $3.4 billion. In 1988, with the Palestine Liberation Organization intention to declare a Palestinian State, Jordan renounced all claims to the West Bank. Since the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988,135 UN Member Nations have recognized the State of Palestine and it has not been recognized by Israel and some Western nations, including the United States. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, parts of the territories politically came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian National Authority, Israel still exercises full military control and, civil control over 61% of the West Bank. The Oslo Accords established access to the sea for Gaza within 20 nautical miles from the shore, the Berlin Commitment of 2002 reduced this to 12 miles. In October 2006 Israel imposed a 6-mile limit, and at the conclusion of the Gaza War restricted access to a 3-nautical-mile limit, as a result, more than 3,000 Palestinian fishermen are denied access to 85% of the maritime areas agreed to in 1995. The majority of the Dead Sea area is off-limits to Palestinian use, Israel disengaged from the Gaza Strip in 2005, however the international community considers the West Bank and the Gaza Strip still to be occupied by Israel. The Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 divided the Palestinian territories politically, abbass Fatah largely ruled the West Bank and was recognized internationally as the official Palestinian Authority. In 2014, the two groups agreed to hold elections and form a compromise unity government. The 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict intervened, however, the unity government survived, there are disagreements over what the Palestinian territories should be called. Other terms used to describe these areas include the disputed territories
3.
Nablus
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Nablus is a city in the northern West Bank, approximately 49 kilometers north of Jerusalem, with a population of 126,132. The city was named by the Roman Emperor Vespasian in 72 CE as Flavia Neapolis, since then, Nablus has been ruled by many empires over the course of its almost 2, 000-year-long history. In 636, Neapolis, along with most of Palestine, came under the rule of the Islamic Arab Caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab, its name Arabicized to Nablus. In 1099, the Crusaders took control of the city for less than a century, leaving its mixed Muslim, after Saladins Ayyubid forces took control of the interior of Palestine in 1187, Islamic rule was reestablished, and continued under the Mamluk and Ottoman empires to follow. Following its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, Nablus was designated capital of the Jabal Nablus district, when Ottoman rule was firmly reestablished in 1841, Nablus prospered as a center of trade. After the city was captured by British forces during World War I, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the city was captured and occupied by Transjordan, which subsequently annexed it unilaterally, until its occupation by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. Today, the population is predominantly Muslim, with small Christian and Samaritan minorities, since 1995, the city has been governed by the Palestinian National Authority. In the Old City, there are a number of sites of archaeological significance, culturally, the city is known for its kanafeh, a popular sweet throughout the Middle East, and its soap industry. Flavia Neapolis was named in 72 CE by the Roman emperor Vespasian and applied to an older Samaritan village, variously called Mabartha or Mamorpha. Located between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, the new city lay 2 kilometers west of the Biblical city of Shechem which was destroyed by the Romans that same year during the First Jewish-Roman War, holy places at the site of the citys founding include Josephs Tomb and Jacobs Well. Due to the citys strategic position and the abundance of water from nearby springs, Neapolis prospered, accumulating extensive territory. Insofar as the topography of the site would allow, the city was built on a Roman grid plan and settled with veterans who fought in the victorious legions. In the 2nd century CE, Emperor Hadrian built a theater in Neapolis that could seat up to 7,000 people. Coins found in Nablus dating to this period depict Roman military emblems and gods and goddesses of the Greek pantheon such as Zeus, Artemis, Serapis, Neapolis was entirely pagan at this time. Justin Martyr who was born in the city c.100 CE, came into contact with Platonism, the city flourished until the civil war between Septimius Severus and Pescennius Niger in 198–9 CE. Having sided with Niger, who was defeated, the city was stripped of its legal privileges by Severus. In 244 CE, Philip the Arab transformed Flavius Neapolis into a Roman colony named Julia Neapolis and it retained this status until the rule of Trebonianus Gallus in 251 CE. The Encyclopaedia Judaica speculates that Christianity was dominant in the 2nd or 3rd century and it is known for certain that a bishop from Nablus participated in the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE
4.
Holon
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Holon is a city on the central coastal strip south of Tel Aviv, Israel. Holon is part of the metropolitan Gush Dan area, in 2015 it had a population of 188,834. Holon has the second-largest industrial zone in Israel, after Haifa, the name of the city comes from the Hebrew word holon, meaning sand. The name Holon also appears in the Bible, And Holon with its suburbs, Holon was founded on sand dunes six kilometers from Tel Aviv in 1935. The Łódzia textile factory was established there by Jewish immigrants from Łódź, Poland, an attack by the Holon-based Haganah militia units on Tel A-Rish was repulsed with considerable losses. After the establishment of the state, Holon expanded to include Tel A-Rish, in February 2001, eight Israelis were killed and twenty-five were injured in a Palestinian attack on a crowded bus stop in Holon. The image of Holon as a bedroom community has changed over the years. A new neighborhood, Migdalim Bashdera, is under construction, with plans for 23 upscale residential towers, a French urban planner was commissioned to design a north-south boulevard with pedestrian walks, bicycle paths, sports fields, parks and waterfalls. Holon hosts a variety of events, including the Yemay Zemer Festival during Passover. Holon is also one of the host cities for the Rhythmic Gymnastics Grand Prix Series in March, Israeli violinist Pinchas Zukerman runs a summer music camp in the city for young violinists. Since the election of Mayor Moti Sasson in 1993, many projects have been inaugurated. Billing itself as a city, Holon is home to the Holon Childrens Museum. Holon also plays host each year to a carnival in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim. Thousands of children dress up in costumes and the close down for a parade featuring colorful floats. The Design Museum Holon, which opened in 2010 near the Médiathèque, in October 2013, Holon hosted major international designers who arrived for Holon Fashion Week, among them milliner Stephen Jones and BioCouture founder Suzanne Lee. Cinematheque Holon hosts the digital arts and media arts festival in Israel. In 1954, the president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, helped to establish a Samaritan quarter on the outskirts of Holon, the quarter was named Neve Pinchas after Pinhas Ben-Abraham, the high priest of the Samaritan community. Holon is one of two cities in the world to have a Samaritan community, the other being the village of Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim above Nablus on the West Bank
5.
Extinct language
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An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, especially if it has no living descendants. A dead language is one that is no longer the language of any community, even if it still in use. A language that currently has living native speakers is called a modern language, as of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Most of these are languages in danger of extinction, one estimate published in 2004 expected that some 90% of the currently spoken languages will have become extinct by 2050. Normally the transition from a spoken to an extinct language occurs when a language undergoes language death while being replaced by a different one. For example, some Native American languages were replaced by English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, such languages are sometimes also referred to as dead languages, but more typically as classical language. g. Old English or Old High German relative to their descendants, English. Minor languages are endangered due to economic and cultural globalization. Second, the gradual process of language death may occur over several generations. The third and most rare outcome is for the group to maintain as much of its native language as possible, while borrowing elements of the dominant languages grammar. Institutions such as the system, as well as forms of media such as the Internet, television. Language revival is the attempt to re-introduce a recently-extinct language in use by a new generation of native speakers. The optimistic neologism sleeping beauty languages has been used to such a hope. Hebrew is an example of a language that has successfully been revived for everyday use. The revival of Hebrew has been successful due to extraordinarily favourable conditions. Revival attempts of minor languages with no status as liturgical language typically have more modest results and this is a list of languages reported as having become extinct after the year 2000. For a more complete list, see List of extinct languages
6.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
7.
Afroasiatic languages
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Afroasiatic, also known as Afrasian and traditionally as Hamito-Semitic, is a large language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. It comprises about 300 or so living languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate and it includes languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. Afroasiatic languages have 350+ million native speakers, the fourth largest number of any language family, the phylum has six branches, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. By far the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic, including literary Arabic and it has around 200 to 230 million native speakers concentrated primarily in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Malta. Modern Aramaic, spoken by about 550,000 people worldwide and this is not just one language — It includes a number of subdivisions, with Assyrian Neo-Aramaic being the most spoken variety. In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and it is uncertain when or where the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family existed. Proposed locations include North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Eastern Sahara, the terms Hamitic and Semitic were etymologically derived from the Book of Genesis, which describes various Biblical tribes descended from Ham and Shem, two sons of Noah. By the 1860s, the constituent elements within the broader Afroasiatic family had been worked out. The scholar Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic for the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. Maurice Delafosse later coined the term Afroasiatic, however, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic spanned the continents of both Africa and Asia, individual scholars have also called the family Erythraean and Lisramic. The term Hamito-Semitic remains in use in the traditions of some European countries. Greenberg and others considered it a subgroup of Cushitic, whereas others have raised doubts about it being part of Afroasiatic at all, Harold Fleming proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands believes the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco, Beja is sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic but is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal diversity. Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a family is sometimes questioned. There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five branches of Afroasiatic. This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families, there are also many disagreements concerning the classification of the Indo-European languages. Meroitic has been proposed as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, because it shares the characteristic of the family
8.
Semitic languages
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The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, the most widely spoken Semitic languages today are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Hebrew, Aramaic and Maltese. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union. The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology and that is, word roots are not themselves syllables or words, but instead are isolated sets of consonants. Words are composed out of not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes. For example, in Arabic, the root meaning write has the form k-t-b, the similarity of the Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic languages was accepted by Jewish and Islamic scholars since medieval times. Almost two centuries later, Hiob Ludolf described the similarities between these three languages and the Ethiopian Semitic languages, however, neither scholar named this grouping as Semitic. Viewed from this too, with respect to the alphabet used. Previously these languages had been known as the Oriental languages in European literature. In the 19th century, Semitic became the name, however. There are several locations proposed as sites for prehistoric origins of Semitic-speaking peoples, Mesopotamia, The Levant, Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The Arabs spread their Central Semitic language to North Africa where it gradually replaced Coptic and many Berber languages, with the patronage of the caliphs and the prestige of its liturgical status, Arabic rapidly became one of the worlds main literary languages. Its spread among the masses took much longer, however, as many of the populations outside the Arabian Peninsula only gradually abandoned their languages in favour of Arabic. As Bedouin tribes settled in conquered areas, it became the language of not only central Arabia, but also Yemen, the Fertile Crescent. Most of the Maghreb followed, particularly in the wake of the Banu Hilals incursion in the 11th century, and Arabic became the native language of many inhabitants of al-Andalus. After the collapse of the Nubian kingdom of Dongola in the 14th century, Arabic began to spread south of Egypt into modern Sudan, soon after, the Beni Ḥassān brought Arabization to Mauritania. Meanwhile, Semitic languages were diversifying in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where, under heavy Cushitic influence, they split into a number of languages, including Amharic, Arabic languages and dialects are currently the native languages of majorities from Mauritania to Oman, and from Iraq to the Sudan
9.
Northwest Semitic languages
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Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It would have emerged from Common Semitic in the Early Bronze Age and it is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by the Canaanite languages. The term was coined by Carl Brockelmann in 1908, who separated Fritz Hommels 1883 classification of West Semitic languages into Northwest and Southwest, brockelmanns Canaanite sub-group includes Ugaritic, Phoenician and Hebrew. Some scholars would now separate Ugaritic as a branch of Northwest Semitic alongside Canaanite. Central Semitic is an intermediate group comprising Northwest Semitic and Arabic. Central Semitic is either a subgroup of West Semitic, or a division of Semitic alongside East Semitic. SIL Ethnologue in its system of classification eliminates Northwest Semitic entirely by joining Canaanite, the time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. The first attestation of a Northwest Semitic language is of Ugaritic in the 14th century BC, during the early 1st millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in todays Tunisia. By the 6th century BC, the use of Aramaic spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region, the ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and parts of the Tanakh are written in it. With the Islamic conquest in the 7th century AD, Arabic began to gradually replace Aramaic throughout the region, Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East. There is an Aramaic substratum in Levantine Arabic, phonologically, Ugaritic lost the sound *ṣ́, replacing it with /sˤ/. That this same sound became /ʕ/ in Aramaic, suggests that Ugaritic is not the parent language of the group, an example of this sound shift can be seen in the word for earth, Ugaritic /ʔarsˤ/, Hebrew /ʔɛrɛsˤ/ and Aramaic /ʔarʕaː/. The vowel shift from *aː to /oː/ distinguishes Canaanite from Ugaritic, also, in the Canaanite group, the series of Semitic interdental fricatives become sibilants, *ð, *θ and *θ̣ became /z/, /ʃ/ and /sˤ/ respectively. The effect of this sound shift can be seen by comparing the words, Blau. Some Difficulties in the Reconstruction of Proto-Hebrew and Proto-Canaanite, in In Memoriam Paul Kahle, pp. 29–43 Cross, F. M.1965. “The Development of the Jewish Scripts, ” in The Bible, reprinted 1965, Anchor Book Edition, New York, pp. 133–202. “The Origin and Early Evolution of the Alphabet, ” EI5, “Alphabets and pots, Reflections on typological method in the dating of human artifacts, ” MAARAV3, 121-136
10.
Biblical Hebrew
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The term Hebrew was not used for the language in the Bible, which was referred to as Canaanite or Judahite, but the name was used in Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. Biblical Hebrew is attested from about the 10th century BCE, and persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, Biblical Hebrew eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the second century CE. There is also evidence of regional dialectal variation, including differences between Biblical Hebrew as spoken in the northern Kingdom of Israel and in the southern Kingdom of Judah. Biblical Hebrew has been written with a number of different writing systems, the Hebrews adopted the Phoenician alphabet around the 12th century BCE, which developed into the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. This was retained by the Samaritans, who use the descendent Samaritan alphabet to this day, however, the Aramaic alphabet gradually displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the Jews, and it became the source for the modern Hebrew alphabet. All of these scripts were lacking letters to represent all of the sounds of Biblical Hebrew, though these sounds are reflected in Greek and these scripts originally only indicated consonants, but certain letters, known by the Latin term matres lectionis, became increasingly used to mark vowels. In the Middle Ages, various systems of diacritics were developed to mark the vowels in Hebrew manuscripts, of these, Biblical Hebrew possessed a series of emphatic consonants whose precise articulation is disputed, likely ejective or pharyngealized. Earlier Biblical Hebrew possessed three consonants which did not have their own letters in the system, but over time they merged with other consonants. The stop consonants developed fricative allophones under the influence of Aramaic, the pharyngeal and glottal consonants underwent weakening in some regional dialects, as reflected in the modern Samaritan Hebrew reading tradition. Biblical Hebrew had a typical Semitic morphology with nonconcatenative morphology, arranging Semitic roots into patterns to form words, Biblical Hebrew distinguished two genders, three numbers. Verbs were marked for voice and mood, and had two conjugations which may have indicated aspect and/or tense, the tense or aspect of verbs was also influenced by the conjugation ו, in the so-called waw-consecutive construction. Default word order was verb–subject–object, and verbs inflected for the number, gender, pronominal suffixes could be appended to verbs or nouns, and nouns had special construct states for use in possessive constructions. The earliest written sources refer to Biblical Hebrew by the name of the land in which it was spoken, the Hebrew Bible also shows that the language was called יהודית Judaean, Judahite. In the Hellenistic period Greek writings use the names Hebraios, Hebraïsti, Jews also began referring to Hebrew as לשון הקדש the Holy Tongue in Mishnaic Hebrew. The term Classical Hebrew may include all pre-medieval dialects of Hebrew, including Mishnaic Hebrew, the term Biblical Hebrew refers to pre-Mishnaic dialects. The archeological record for the prehistory of Biblical Hebrew is far more complete than the record of Biblical Hebrew itself, Early Northwest Semitic materials are attested from 2350 BCE to 1200 BCE, the end of the Bronze Age. Hebrew developed during the half of the second millennium BCE between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, an area known as Canaan. The earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered was found at Khirbet Qeiyafa, the kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians in 722 BCE
11.
Writing system
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A writing system is any conventional method of visually representing verbal communication. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a form of information storage. The processes of encoding and decoding writing systems involve shared understanding between writers and readers of the meaning behind the sets of characters that make up a script, the general attributes of writing systems can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies. Any particular system can have attributes of more than one category, in the alphabetic category, there is a standard set of letters of consonants and vowels that encode based on the general principle that the letters represent speech sounds. In a syllabary, each symbol correlates to a syllable or mora, in a logography, each character represents a word, morpheme, or other semantic units. Other categories include abjads, which differ from alphabets in that vowels are not indicated, alphabets typically use a set of 20-to-35 symbols to fully express a language, whereas syllabaries can have 80-to-100, and logographies can have several hundreds of symbols. Systems will also enable the stringing together of these groupings in order to enable a full expression of the language. The reading step can be accomplished purely in the mind as an internal process, writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, which used pictograms, ideograms and other mnemonic symbols. Proto-writing lacked the ability to capture and express a range of thoughts. Soon after, writing provided a form of long distance communication. With the advent of publishing, it provided the medium for a form of mass communication. Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that a system is always associated with at least one spoken language. In contrast, visual representations such as drawings, paintings, and non-verbal items on maps, such as contour lines, are not language-related. Some other symbols, such as numerals and the ampersand, are not directly linked to any specific language, every human community possesses language, which many regard as an innate and defining condition of humanity. However, the development of writing systems, and the process by which they have supplanted traditional oral systems of communication, have been sporadic, uneven, once established, writing systems generally change more slowly than their spoken counterparts. Thus they often preserve features and expressions which are no current in the spoken language. One of the benefits of writing systems is that they can preserve a permanent record of information expressed in a language. In the examination of individual scripts, the study of writing systems has developed along partially independent lines, thus, the terminology employed differs somewhat from field to field
12.
Samaritan alphabet
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Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned. All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script and that script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known square script Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton, but soon that custom was also abandoned. The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, the table below shows the development of the Samaritan script. On the left are the corresponding Hebrew letters for comparison, column I is the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. Column X shows the form of the letters. Samaritan script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2, the Unicode block for Samaritan is U+0800–U+083F, Flôrenṭîn, Moše. Late Samaritan Hebrew, A Linguistic Analysis Of Its Different Types, a Samaritan Bible, at the British library Omniglot. com - Samaritan alphabet Link to free Samaritan font
13.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
14.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
15.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
16.
Hebrew language
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Hebrew is a language native to Israel, spoken by over 9 million people worldwide, of whom over 5 million are in Israel. Historically, it is regarded as the language of the Israelites and their ancestors, the earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date from the 10th century BCE. Hebrew belongs to the West Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language left, and the only truly successful example of a revived dead language. Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining since the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Aramaic and to a lesser extent Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among elites and it survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived as a spoken and literary language, and, according to Ethnologue, had become, as of 1998, the language of 5 million people worldwide. After Israel, the United States has the second largest Hebrew-speaking population, with 220,000 fluent speakers, Modern Hebrew is one of the two official languages of the State of Israel, while premodern Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world today. Ancient Hebrew is also the tongue of the Samaritans, while modern Hebrew or Arabic is their vernacular. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Leshon Hakodesh, the modern word Hebrew is derived from the word Ivri, one of several names for the Israelite people. It is traditionally understood to be a based on the name of Abrahams ancestor, Eber. This name is based upon the root ʕ-b-r meaning to cross over. Interpretations of the term ʕibrim link it to this verb, cross over, in the Bible, the Hebrew language is called Yәhudit because Judah was the surviving kingdom at the time of the quotation. In Isaiah 19,18 it is called the Language of Canaan, Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages. In turn, the Canaanite languages are a branch of the Northwest Semitic family of languages, according to Avraham ben-Yosef, Hebrew flourished as a spoken language in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew was a vernacular in ancient times following the Babylonian exile. In July 2008 Israeli archaeologist Yossi Garfinkel discovered a ceramic shard at Khirbet Qeiyafa which he claimed may be the earliest Hebrew writing yet discovered, dating around 3000 years ago. The Gezer calendar also dates back to the 10th century BCE at the beginning of the Monarchic Period, classified as Archaic Biblical Hebrew, the calendar presents a list of seasons and related agricultural activities. The Gezer calendar is written in an old Semitic script, akin to the Phoenician one that through the Greeks, the Gezer calendar is written without any vowels, and it does not use consonants to imply vowels even in the places where later Hebrew spelling requires it
17.
Samaritans
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The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious group of the Levant originating from the Israelites of the Ancient Near East. Samaritans used to include descendants who ascribed to the Benjamin tribe, in the Talmud, a central post-exilic religious text of Rabbinic Judaism, the Samaritans are called Cutheans, referring to the ancient city of Kutha, geographically located in what is today Iraq. In the Biblical account, however, Kuthah was one of cities from which people were brought to Samaria. Genetically, modern Samaritan populations are found to have greater affinity genetically to Jews than to neighbouring Palestinian Arabs. This suggests that the Samaritans remained an isolated population. The Samaritans are adherents of Samaritanism, a closely related to Judaism. The Samaritans believe that Mount Gerizim was the original Holy Place of Israel from the time that Joshua conquered Canaan, once a large community, the Samaritan population appears to have shrunk significantly in the wake of the bloody suppression of the Samaritan Revolts against the Byzantine Empire. Conversion to Christianity under the Byzantines also reduced their numbers, conversions to Islam took place as well, and by the mid Middle Ages Benjamin of Tudela estimated only around 1,900 Samaritans remained in Palestine and Syria. As of January 1,2015, the population was 777, most Samaritans in Holon and Qiryat Luza today speak Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew and later Aramaic were languages in use by the Jewish, Samaritans have a standalone religious status in Israel, and there are occasional conversions from Judaism to Samaritanism and vice-versa due to marriages. One example is Israeli TV personality Sofi Tsedaka, who converted to Rabbinic Judaism at the age of 18. Samaritans with Israeli citizenship are obligated to undertake service in the Israel Defense Forces. There is conflict over the etymology of the name for the Samaritans in Hebrew and this has accompanied controversy over whether the Samaritans are named after the geographic area of Samaria, or whether the area received its name from the group. This distinction is controversial in part because different interpretations can be used to justify or deny claims of ancestry over this region, Biblical Hebrew Šomerim ) Guardians comes from the Hebrew Semitic root שמר, which means to watch, guard. Historically, Samaria was the key geographical concentration of the Samaritan community, thus, it may suggest the region of Samaria is named after the Samaritans, rather than the Samaritans being named after the region. In Modern Hebrew, the Samaritans are called Shomronim, which would appear to mean inhabitants of Samaria. This is a politically sensitive distinction, according to Samaritan tradition, Mount Gerizim was the original Holy Place of the Israelites from the time that Joshua conquered Canaan and the tribes of Israel settled the land. The two mountains were used to symbolize the significance of the commandments and serve as a warning to whoever disobeyed them
18.
Samaritan Pentateuch
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The Samaritan Pentateuch, also known as the Samaritan Torah, is a text of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, written in the Samaritan alphabet and used as a scripture by the Samaritans. It constitutes their entire biblical canon, some six thousand differences exist between the Samaritan and the Masoretic Text. Nearly two thousand of these textual variations agree with the Koine Greek Septuagint and some are shared with the Latin Vulgate. Throughout their history, Samaritans have made use of translations of the Samaritan Pentateuch into Aramaic, Greek, some Pentateuchal manuscripts discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls have been identified as bearing a pre-Samaritan text type. Samaritans believe that God authored their Pentateuch and gave Moses the first copy along with the two containing the Ten Commandments. They believe that they preserve this divinely composed text uncorrupted to the present day, Samaritans commonly refer to their Pentateuch as קושטה. Samaritans include only the Pentateuch in their biblical canon and they do not recognize divine authorship or inspiration in any other book in the Jewish Tanakh. A Samaritan Book of Joshua partly based upon the Tanakhs Book of Joshua exists, according to a view based on the biblical Book of Ezra, the Samaritans are the people of Samaria who parted ways with the people of Judah in the Persian period. The Samaritans believe that it was not they, but the Jews, modern scholarship connects the formation of the Samaritan community with events which followed the Babylonian Captivity. One view is that the Samaritans are the people of the Kingdom of Israel who separated from the Judaites, others believe that the real schism between the peoples did not take place until Hasmonean times when the Gerizim temple was destroyed in 128 BCE by John Hyrcanus. The script of the Samaritan Pentateuch, its connections at many points with the Septuagint. Manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch are written in a different Hebrew script than is used in other Hebrew Pentateuchs, Samaritans employ the Samaritan alphabet which is derived from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet used by the Israelite community prior to the Babylonian captivity. Afterwards, Jews adopted a script based on the Aramaic alphabet that developed into the Hebrew alphabet, originally all manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch consisted of unvocalized text written using only the letters of the Samaritan alphabet. Beginning in the 12th century, some show a partial vocalization resembling the Jewish Tiberian vocalization used in Masoretic manuscripts. More recently a few manuscripts have produced with full vocalization. However, many extant manuscripts show no tendency towards vocalization, the Pentateuchal text is divided into 904 paragraphs. Divisions between sections of text are marked with various combinations of lines, dots or an asterisk, the critical apparatus accompanying the London Polyglots publication of the Samaritan Pentateuch lists six thousand instances where the Samaritan differs from the Masoretic Text. However, as different printed editions of the Samaritan Pentateuch are based upon different sets of manuscripts, only a minority are significant, most can be categorized as one of the following types, More matres lectionis in the Samaritan Pentateuch to indicate vowels compared with the Masoretic
19.
Torah
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The Torah is the central reference of Judaism. It has a range of meanings and it can most specifically mean the first five books of the twenty-four books of the Tanakh, and it usually includes the rabbinic commentaries. In rabbinic literature the word Torah denotes both the five books and the Oral Torah, the Oral Torah consists of interpretations and amplifications which according to rabbinic tradition have been handed down from generation to generation and are now embodied in the Talmud and Midrash. According to the Midrash, the Torah was created prior to the creation of the world, traditionally, the words of the Torah are written on a scroll by a scribe in Hebrew. A Torah portion is read publicly at least once every three days in the presence of a congregation, reading the Torah publicly is one of the bases for Jewish communal life. The word Torah in Hebrew is derived from the root ירה, the meaning of the word is therefore teaching, doctrine, or instruction, the commonly accepted law gives a wrong impression. Other translational contexts in the English language include custom, theory, guidance, the earliest name for the first part of the Bible seems to have been The Torah of Moses. This title, however, is neither in the Torah itself. It appears in Joshua and Kings, but it cannot be said to refer there to the entire corpus, in contrast, there is every likelihood that its use in the post-Exilic works was intended to be comprehensive. Other early titles were The Book of Moses and The Book of the Torah, Christian scholars usually refer to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible as the Pentateuch, a term first used in the Hellenistic Judaism of Alexandria, meaning five books, or as the Law. The Torah starts from the beginning of Gods creating the world, through the beginnings of the people of Israel, their descent into Egypt, and it ends with the death of Moses, just before the people of Israel cross to the promised land of Canaan. Interspersed in the narrative are the teachings given explicitly or implicitly embedded in the narrative. This is followed by the story of the three patriarchs, Joseph and the four matriarchs, God gives to the patriarchs a promise of the land of Canaan, but at the end of Genesis the sons of Jacob end up leaving Canaan for Egypt due to a regional famine. They had heard there was a grain storage and distribution facility in Egypt. Exodus begins the story of Gods revelation to his people of Israel through Moses, Moses receives the Torah from God, and teaches His laws and Covenant to the people of Israel. It also talks about the first violation of the covenant when the Golden Calf was constructed, Exodus includes the instructions on building the Tabernacle and concludes with its actual construction. Leviticus begins with instructions to the Israelites on how to use the Tabernacle, leviticus 26 provides a detailed list of rewards for following Gods commandments and a detailed list of punishments for not following them. Numbers tells how Israel consolidated itself as a community at Sinai, set out from Sinai to move towards Canaan, even Moses sins and is told he would not live to enter the land
20.
Arabic
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Arabic is a Central Semitic language that was first spoken in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. Arabic is also the language of 1.7 billion Muslims. It is one of six languages of the United Nations. The modern written language is derived from the language of the Quran and it is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is the language of 26 states. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the standards of Quranic Arabic. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-Quranic era, Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics. As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Many words of Arabic origin are found in ancient languages like Latin. Balkan languages, including Greek, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has also borrowed words from languages including Greek and Persian in medieval times. Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include, The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense, the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense. The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms, the development of an internal passive. These features are evidence of descent from a hypothetical ancestor. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family were spoken and it is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hijaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages, in Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested
21.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
22.
Varieties of Arabic
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There are many varieties of Arabic in existence. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated on the Arabian Peninsula, the largest divisions occur between the spoken languages of different regions. Some varieties of Arabic in North Africa, for example, are incomprehensible to an Arabic speaker from the Levant or the Persian Gulf, within these broad regions further and considerable geographic distinctions exist, within countries, across country borders, even between cities and villages. The regionally prevalent variety is learned as the speakers first language while the language is subsequently learned in school. Many Arabic dialects, North African Arabic in particular also have significant vowel shifts, unlike other dialects, in Moroccan Arabic first person singular verbs begin with a n-. Further substantial differences exist between Bedouin and sedentary speech, the countryside and major cities, ethnicities, religious groups, social classes, men and women, and the young and these differences are to some degree bridgeable. Arabic is characterized by a number of varieties, however. An important factor in the mixing or changing of Arabic is the concept of a prestige dialect and this refers to the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect within a speech community. The formal Arabic language carries a considerable prestige in most Arabic-speaking communities and this is not the only source of prestige, though. Many studies have shown that for most speakers, there is a variety of vernacular Arabic. In Egypt, for non-Cairenes, the dialect is Cairo Arabic. For Jordanian women from Bedouin or rural background, it may be the urban dialects of the big cities, especially including the capital Amman. Moreover, in contexts, a dialect relatively different from formal Arabic may carry more prestige than a dialect closer to the formal language—this is the case in Bahrain. Language mixes and changes in different ways, Arabic speakers often use more than one variety of Arabic within a conversation or even a sentence. This process is referred to as code-switching, for example, a woman on a TV program could appeal to the authority of the formal language by using elements of it in her speech in order to prevent other speakers from cutting her off. Another process at work is leveling, the elimination of very localised dialectical features in favour of more general ones. This can affect all linguistic levels—semantic, syntactic, phonological, etc and this process of accommodation sometimes appeals to the formal language, but often does not. Moreover, given the prevalence of movies and TV shows in Egyptian Arabic, the greatest variations between kinds of Arabic are those between regional language groups
23.
Modern Hebrew
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Modern Hebrew or Israeli Hebrew, generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It was revived as a language in the 19th and 20th centuries and is one of the two official languages of Israel, along with Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Hebrew is spoken by about nine people, counting native, fluent. The organization that directs the development of the Modern Hebrew language. The most common term for the language is Modern Hebrew. Most people refer to it simply as Hebrew, the term Modern Hebrew has been described as somewhat problematic as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew. Rosén supported the now widely used term Israeli Hebrew on the basis that it represented the nature of Hebrew. In 2006, Israeli linguist Ghilad Zuckermann proposed the term Israeli to represent the origins of the language. Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a language in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity, Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated the population of Judea. After the exile Hebrew became restricted to liturgical use, the revival of the Hebrew language was led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes, Mishnaic spelling, and Sephardic pronunciation, idioms and calques were made from Yiddish. Ben-Yehuda used a stock of 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries and codified and planned the new language, some words he invented, such as ḥatzilīm for eggplants and ḥashmal for electricity. Sometimes, old Hebrew words took on different meanings altogether, for example, the Hebrew word kǝvīš, which now denotes a street or a road, is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning trodden down, blazoned, rather than a common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazoned trail, for a simple comparison between the Sephardic version of Mishnaic Hebrew and the Yemenite version of the same, see Yemenite Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family, although it has been influenced by non-Semitic languages, Modern Hebrew retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax. A minority of scholars argue that the language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. These theories have not been met with acceptance, and Modern Hebrew continues to be considered a Semitic language by most experts
24.
Shechem
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Traditionally associated with Nablus, it is now identified with the nearby site of Tell Balata in Balata al-Balad in the West Bank. The site of Shechem in patristic sources is almost invariably identified with, or located close to, the old city of Shechem dates back to about an estimated four thousand years. Shechem is mentioned in the third-millennium Ebla tablets found at Tell Mardikh in the context of a city of which Rasap is the patron deity, Shechem was a commercial center due to its position in the middle of vital trade routes through the region. It traded in local grapes, olives, wheat, livestock, Shechem had been a Canaanite settlement, first mentioned in Egyptian texts on the Sebek-khu Stele, an Egyptian stele of a noble at the court of Senusret III. In the Amarna Letters of about 1350 BC, Šakmu was the center of a carved out by Labaya. It may be identical to the Sakama mentioned in an account dated to the 19th Egyptian dynasty, Shechem first appears in the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 12, 6-8, which records how Abraham reached the great tree of Moreh at Shechem and offered sacrifice nearby. Genesis, Deuteronomy, Joshua and Judges hallow Shechem over all other cities of the land of Israel, at Shechem, Abram built an altar to the Lord who had appeared to him. And had given land to his descendants. The Bible states that on occasion, God confirmed the covenant he had first made with Abraham in Harran. In Jewish tradition, the old name was understood in terms of the Hebrew word shékém — shoulder, saddle, the oak is associated with the Oak of Moreh where Abram had set up camp during his travels in this area. Shechem and its lands were given as a Levitical city to the Kohathites. The city, including its Bronze Age temple, fell to the Israelites sometime before 1000 BC, jerubbaal, whose home was at Ophrah, visited Shechem, and his concubine who lived there was mother of his son Abimelech. She came from one of the leading Shechemite families who were influential with the Lords of Shechem, after Gideons death, Abimelech was made king. Jotham, the youngest son of Gideon, made a speech on Mount Gerizim in which he warned the people of Shechem about Abimelechs future tyranny. When the city rose in rebellion three years later, Abimelech took it, utterly destroyed it, and burnt the temple of Baal-berith where the people had fled for safety, from the excavations, it was learned that the city was destroyed in 1100 BC. The city was rebuilt in the 10th century BC and was probably the capital of Ephraim, when the kings of Israel moved first to Tirzah, and later on to Samaria, Shechem lost its importance, and we do not hear of it until after the fall of Jerusalem. The events connected with the restoration were to bring it again into prominence, in Acts 7,16 the place is called Sychem. It is not known whether Sychar in the Gospel of John 4,5 refers to Shechem or to a nearby village, Shechem is also the location of Jacobs Well, where John 4, 5–6 describes Jesus meeting with the woman of Samaria
25.
West Bank Areas in the Oslo II Accord
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The Oslo II Accord divided the West Bank into three administrative divisions, the Areas A, B and C. Area A comprises approximately 18% of the West Bank and Area B about 22%, as of 2015, Area C is home to 150,000 Palestinians in 532 residential areas. It also is home to 389,250 Israelis, in 135 settlements, Area C forms a contiguous territory, administered via the Judea and Samaria Area administration. In contrast, under the Oslo Accords the Areas A and B were subdivided into 165 separate units of land that have no territorial contiguity. The Oslo II Accord stipulated that during the first phase of redeployment the jurisdiction over the Areas A and B would be transferred to the Palestinian Council. Article XI.2. a reads, Land in populated areas, including government and Al Waqf land, the populated areas were defined by delineations on a map attached to the document. Area C comprised the areas of the West Bank outside Areas A and B, Area A, initially, circa 3% of the West Bank, exclusive East Jerusalem. As of 2013, Area A formally comprised about 18% of the West Bank and this area includes eight Palestinian cities and their surrounding areas, with no Israeli settlements. Entry into this area is forbidden to all Israeli citizens, as of 2013, Area B formally comprised about 22% of the West Bank. This area includes some 440 Palestinian villages and their surrounding lands, under the 1998 Wye River Memorandum, Israel would further withdraw from some additional 13% from Area C to Area B, which officially reduced Area C to circa 61% of the West Bank. Israel, however, withdrew from only 2%, and during Operation Defensive Shield, as of 2013, Area C formally comprised about 63% of the West Bank, including settlements, outposts and declared state land. Including or excluding annexed East Jerusalem, no-mans land and the Palestinian part of the Dead Sea also determines the percentage, all Israeli settlements, including those in and around East Jerusalem, are located in Area C. Oslo II, Article XII, for example, states, For the purpose of this Agreement, the Settlements means, in the West Bank the settlements in Area C, in 1972, there were 1,000 Israeli settlers living in what is now Area C. By 1993, their population had increased to 110,000, as of 2013, an estimated 350,000 Jewish settlers lived in Area C in Israeli settlements and outposts. In 2013, some 300,000 Palestinians lived in Area C, parts of Area C are military area closed for Palestinians. Part of Area C was intended to be handed to Palestinians by the end of 1999, Israel promised to redeploy its troops from Areas A and B before the elections. After the inauguration of an elected Palestinian parliament, the Israeli Civil Administration would be dissolved, the Council would get some powers and responsibilities. Israel shall transfer powers and responsibilities as specified in this Agreement from the Israeli military government, Israel shall continue to exercise powers and responsibilities not so transferred. ″″5
26.
Guillaume Postel
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Guillaume Postel was a French linguist, astronomer, Cabbalist, diplomat, professor, and religious universalist. Born in the village of Barenton in Basse-Normandie, Postel made his way to Paris to further his education. Postel was adept at Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac and other Semitic languages, as well as the Classical languages of Ancient Greek and Latin, and soon came to the attention of the French court. Postel was also assigned to gather interesting Eastern manuscripts for the royal library. In 1543, Postel published a criticism of Protestantism, and highlighted parallels between Islam and Protestantism in Alcorani seu legis Mahometi et Evangelistarum concordiae liber, in 1544, in De orbis terrae concordia, Postel advocated a universalist world religion. He believed these foundations to be the love of God, the praising of God, the love of Mankind, in his De la République des Turcs Postel makes a rather positive description of the Ottoman society. This tendency led him to work with the Jesuits in Rome and then Venice, Postel is believed to have spent the years 1548 to 1551 on another trip to the East, traveling to the Holy Land and Syria to collect manuscripts. After this trip, he earned the appointment of Professor of Mathematics and he took an interest in geography in his course of lectures at the Collège Royal from 1537. In 1557, he published a short compendium under the name, De Universitate Liber and this geographer had drawn two polar projections which remained in manuscript. The Cosmographicae Disciplinae had an index of 600 names, which Postel put into his 1578 world map, Polo aptata Nova Charta Universi. On his map, the Terre Australe is called Chasdia in three places, under Africa, under America, and under the Moluccas, where it is joined to an unnamed New Guinea with its Rio S. Augustin. Between South America and Chasdia is found the mention of the Fretum Martin Bohemi, Chasdia was a term forged by Postel, Chasdia qui est vers le Gond ou Pole Austral ainsi appellée à cause que de la Meridionale partie ou Australe procede la Misericorde dicte Chassed. Another legend on the map over the southern continent reads, CHASDIA seu Australis terra. Postel’s world map strongly influenced Gerard de Jode and others of the Antwerp school, after several years, however, Postel resigned his professorship and traveled all over Central Europe, including Austria and Italy, returning to France after each trip, often by way of Venice. Among these texts are, Euclids Elements, in the version of the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, An astronomical work by al-Kharaqī, Muntahā al-idrāk fī taqāsīm al-aflāk, disputing Ptolemys Almagest. To Postel, the soul is composed of intellect and emotion. And the souls triadic unity is through the union of two halves. The mind by its purity makes good errors of the heart, the power that has invaded the brain and binds the spirit is not that of the good, understanding and long-suffering God, it is wicked, imbecilic and cowardly
27.
Jean Morin (theologian)
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Jean Morin was a French theologian and biblical scholar. He was born in Blois, from Calvinist parents and he learned Latin and Greek at La Rochelle, and continued his studies in Leiden, subsequently moving to Paris. His conversion to the Roman Church is ascribed to Cardinal du Perron, in 1618 he joined the congregation of the Oratory, and in due course took priests orders. In 1625 he visited England in the train of Henrietta Maria, in 1640 he was at Rome, on the invitation of Pope Urban VIII and he was, however, soon recalled to Paris by Richelieu, and the rest of his life was spent in incessant literary labor. Morin is best known for his biblical and critical work, not unnaturally, he formed a very exaggerated view of the value of the Samaritan tradition of the text. Histoire de la délivrance de lÉglise par lempereur Constantin, et de la grandeur et souveraineté temporelle donnée à lÉglise romaine par les rois de France, dissertationibus Epistolicis enucleatae, Nunc ex Ipsis Autographis Editae. Commentarius de sacris Ecclesiae ordinationibus secundum antiquos et recentiores Latinos, Graecos, Syros et Babylonios in tres partes distinctus, commentarius historicus de disciplina in administratione sacramenti Poenitentiae XIII primus saeculis, *Commentarius sacris Ecclesiae ordinationibus. This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh. Works by Jean Morin at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
28.
Pietro Della Valle
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Pietro della Valle was an Italian composer, musicologist, and author who traveled throughout Asia during the Renaissance period. His travels took him to the Holy Land, the Middle East, Northern Africa, Pietro Della Valle was born in Rome on 2 April 1586, to a wealthy and noble family. His early life was spent in the pursuit of literature and arms and he was a cultivated man, who knew Latin, Greek, classical mythology, and the Bible. He also became a member of the Roman Accademia degli Umoristi, when Pietro was disappointed in love and began to consider suicide, Mario Schipano, a professor of medicine in Naples, suggested the idea of traveling in the East. It was Schipano who received a sort of diary in letters from Pietros travels, before leaving Naples, Pietro took a vow to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He left Venice by boat on the 8th of June 1614 and reached Constantinople, he remained there for more than a year and acquired a knowledge of Turkish. On the 25th of September,1615, he went to Alexandria, because he was a nobleman of distinction, he traveled with a suite of nine persons, and with every advantage due to his rank. From Alexandria he went on to Cairo, and, after an excursion to Mount Sinai and he arrived there on the 8th of March,1616, in time to take part in the Easter celebrations at Jerusalem. After visiting the sites, Pietro traveled from Damascus to Aleppo. After seeing a portrait of the beautiful Assyrian Christian Sitti Maani Gioerida, he went to Baghdad, while in the Middle East, he made one of the first modern records of the location of ancient Babylon and provided remarkable descriptions of the site. He also brought back to Europe inscribed bricks from Nineveh and Ur, at that time Baghdad was being contested between Turkey and Iran during the frequent Ottoman-Persian Wars, so he had to leave Baghdad on the 4th of January,1617. Accompanied by his wife Maani, he proceeded to Persia, in the summer of 1618, he joined Shah Abbas in a campaign in northern Persia. Here he was received at court and treated as the shahs guest. On his return to Isfahan he began to think of going back home through India, however, the state of his health and the war between Persia and the Portuguese at Ormuz generated problems. In October 1621 he left Isfahan, visited Persepolis and Shiraz, but it was not until January 1623 that he found a passage for Surat on the English ship Whale, Captain Nicolas Woodcock. He sojourned in India until November 1624, his headquarters being Surat, in India Pietro Della Valle was introduced to the King Vekatappa Nayaka of Keladi, South India by Vithal Shenoy, the chief administrator of those territories. The accounts of his travels are one of the most important sources of history for the region and he was at Muscat in January 1625, and at Basra in March. In May he started by the route to Aleppo
29.
Damascus
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Damascus is the capital and likely the largest city of Syria, following the decline in population of Aleppo due to the ongoing battle for the city. It is commonly known in Syria as ash-Sham and nicknamed as the City of Jasmine, in addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major cultural and religious centre of the Levant. The city has an population of 1,711,000 as of 2009. Located in south-western Syria, Damascus is the centre of a metropolitan area of 2.6 million people. The Barada River flows through Damascus, first settled in the second millennium BC, it was chosen as the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate from 661 to 750. After the victory of the Abbasid dynasty, the seat of Islamic power was moved to Baghdad, Damascus saw a political decline throughout the Abbasid era, only to regain significant importance in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods. Today, it is the seat of the government and all of the government ministries. The name of Damascus first appeared in the geographical list of Thutmose III as T-m-ś-q in the 15th century BC, the etymology of the ancient name T-m-ś-q is uncertain, but it is suspected to be pre-Semitic. It is attested as Dimašqa in Akkadian, T-ms-ḳw in Egyptian, Dammaśq in Old Aramaic, the Akkadian spelling is found in the Amarna letters, from the 14th century BC. Later Aramaic spellings of the name include a intrusive resh, perhaps influenced by the root dr. Thus, the English and Latin name of the city is Damascus which was imported from originated from the Qumranic Darmeśeq, and Darmsûq in Syriac, meaning a well-watered land. In Arabic, the city is called Dimašqu š-Šāmi, although this is shortened to either Dimašq or aš-Šām by the citizens of Damascus, of Syria and other Arab neighbours. Aš-Šām is an Arabic term for Levant and for Syria, the latter, the Anti-Lebanon mountains mark the border between Syria and Lebanon. The range has peaks of over 10,000 ft. and blocks precipitation from the Mediterranean sea, however, in ancient times this was mitigated by the Barada River, which originates from mountain streams fed by melting snow. Damascus is surrounded by the Ghouta, irrigated farmland where many vegetables, cereals, maps of Roman Syria indicate that the Barada river emptied into a lake of some size east of Damascus. Today it is called Bahira Atayba, the hesitant lake, because in years of severe drought it does not even exist, the modern city has an area of 105 km2, out of which 77 km2 is urban, while Jabal Qasioun occupies the rest. The old city of Damascus, enclosed by the city walls, to the south-east, north and north-east it is surrounded by suburban areas whose history stretches back to the Middle Ages, Midan in the south-west, Sarouja and Imara in the north and north-west. These neighbourhoods originally arose on roads leading out of the city and these new neighbourhoods were initially settled by Kurdish soldiery and Muslim refugees from the European regions of the Ottoman Empire which had fallen under Christian rule
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Paris
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Paris is the capital and most populous city of France. It has an area of 105 square kilometres and a population of 2,229,621 in 2013 within its administrative limits, the agglomeration has grown well beyond the citys administrative limits. By the 17th century, Paris was one of Europes major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, and it retains that position still today. The aire urbaine de Paris, a measure of area, spans most of the Île-de-France region and has a population of 12,405,426. It is therefore the second largest metropolitan area in the European Union after London, the Metropole of Grand Paris was created in 2016, combining the commune and its nearest suburbs into a single area for economic and environmental co-operation. Grand Paris covers 814 square kilometres and has a population of 7 million persons, the Paris Region had a GDP of €624 billion in 2012, accounting for 30.0 percent of the GDP of France and ranking it as one of the wealthiest regions in Europe. The city is also a rail, highway, and air-transport hub served by two international airports, Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly. Opened in 1900, the subway system, the Paris Métro. It is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro, notably, Paris Gare du Nord is the busiest railway station in the world outside of Japan, with 262 millions passengers in 2015. In 2015, Paris received 22.2 million visitors, making it one of the top tourist destinations. The association football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris, the 80, 000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros, Paris hosted the 1900 and 1924 Summer Olympics and is bidding to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The name Paris is derived from its inhabitants, the Celtic Parisii tribe. Thus, though written the same, the name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. In the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps, since the late 19th century, Paris has also been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in English as Parisians and in French as Parisiens and they are also pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the areas major north-south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité, this place of land and water trade routes gradually became a town
31.
Wilhelm Gesenius
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Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius was a German orientalist, Lutheran, and Biblical critic. In 1806, shortly after graduation, he became Repetent and Privatdozent at Göttingen and he taught with great regularity for over thirty years. He became the most popular teacher of Hebrew and of Old Testament introduction and exegesis in Germany, during his later years his lectures were attended by nearly five hundred students. Among his pupils the most eminent were Peter von Bohlen, C. P. W. Gramberg, A. G. Hoffmann, Hermann Hupfeld, Emil Rödiger, J. F. Tuch, Johann Karl Wilhelm Vatke and Theodor Benfey. W. Hengstenberg and his party in the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, on account of his rationalism, Gesenius died at Halle and is buried near the university. According to tradition, theology students in Halle put stones on his grave as a token of respect every year before their examinations, as an exegete he exercised a powerful influence on theological investigation. He may be too considered as a founder of Phoenician studies, in the same year appeared the first volume of the Hebräisches u. Chaldäisches Handwörterbuch, completed in 1812. Revised editions of this appear periodically in Germany, of particular interest to English-speaking students of Hebrew are two related works, which arrived on modern library shelves through parallel paths. The Lexicon Manuale was subsequently translated to English in America by Edward Robinson D. D. in 1836, with the Lexicon Manuale as a starting point, it drew heavily from the Hebräisches und Chaldäisches as well as Gesenius Hebrew Grammar and Thesaurus. Since then, both the Tregelles Lexicon and the BDB have been reissued with Strongs numbering system to aid in navigating their contents. The Hebräische Grammatik, published in 1813, was followed in 1815 by the Geschichte der hebräischen Sprache, the first volume of his well-known commentary on Isaiah, with a translation, appeared in 1821, but the work was not completed until 1829. The Thesaurus philologico-criticus linguae Hebraicae et Chaldaicae Veteris Testamenti, begun in 1829, he did not live to complete, for many years he also edited the Halle Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung. A sketch of his life was published anonymously in 1843, and another by Hermann Gesenius, Wilhelm Gesenius, chisholm, Hugh, ed. Gesenius, Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm. Scripturæ linguæque phoeniciæ monumenta quotquot supersunt edita et inedita ad autographorum optimorumque exemplorum fidem edidit additisque de scriptura et lingua phoenicum commentariis
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Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
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The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, also spelt Palaeo-Hebrew alphabet, is a variant of the Phoenician alphabet. Like the Phoenician alphabet, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet contains 22 letters, all of which are consonants, the term was coined by Solomon Birnbaum in 1954, he wrote, To apply the term Phoenician to the script of the Hebrews is hardly suitable. Still, the script is nearly identical to the Phoenician script, archeological evidence of the use of the script by the Israelites for writing the Hebrew language dates to around the 10th century BCE. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet began to fall out of use by the Jews in the 5th century BCE, the present Jewish square-script Hebrew alphabet evolved from the Aramaic alphabet. The Samaritans, now fewer than 1000 people, have continued to use a derivative of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, the chart below compares the letters of the Phoenician script with those of the Paleo-Hebrew and the present Hebrew alphabet, with names traditionally used in English. According to contemporary scholars, the Paleo-Hebrew script developed alongside others in the region during the course of the late second and it is closely related to the Phoenician script. The earliest known inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew script was the Zayit Stone discovered on a wall at Tel Zayit, the 22 letters were carved on one side of the 38 lb stone - which resembles a bowl on the other. The find is attributed to the mid-10th century BCE, the script of the Gezer calendar, dated to the late 10th century BCE, bears strong resemblance to contemporaneous Phoenician script from inscriptions at Byblos. Clear Hebrew features are visible in the scripts of the Moabite inscriptions of the Mesha Stele, in 1855 a Phoenician inscription in 22 lines was found among the ruins of Sidon. Each line contained about 40 or 50 characters, a facsimile copy of the writing was published in United States Magazine in July 1855. The inscription was on the lid of a stone sarcophagus carved in fine Egyptian style. The writing was primarily a history of a king of Sidon buried in the sarcophagus. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was in use in the ancient Israelite kingdoms of Israel. Following the exile of the Kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BCE, in the Babylonian exile, Jews began using a form of the Assyrian script, the Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet. After the fall of the Persian Empire, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form, for a limited time thereafter, the use of the Paleo-Hebrew script among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton. The independent Hebrew script evolved by developing numerous cursive features, the features of the Phoenician alphabet being ever less pronounced with the passage of time. The aversion of the script may indicate that the custom of erecting stelae by the kings. Even the engraved inscriptions from the 8th century exhibit elements of the style, such as the shading
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Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
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Jews
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The Jews, also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jews originated as a national and religious group in the Middle East during the second millennium BCE, the Merneptah Stele appears to confirm the existence of a people of Israel, associated with the god El, somewhere in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. The Israelites, as an outgrowth of the Canaanite population, consolidated their hold with the emergence of the Kingdom of Israel, some consider that these Canaanite sedentary Israelites melded with incoming nomadic groups known as Hebrews. The worldwide Jewish population reached a peak of 16.7 million prior to World War II, but approximately 6 million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. Since then the population has risen again, and as of 2015 was estimated at 14.3 million by the Berman Jewish DataBank. According to the report, about 43% of all Jews reside in Israel and these numbers include all those who self-identified as Jews in a socio-demographic study or were identified as such by a respondent in the same household. The exact world Jewish population, however, is difficult to measure, Israel is the only country where Jews form a majority of the population. The modern State of Israel was established as a Jewish state and defines itself as such in its Declaration of Independence and its Law of Return grants the right of citizenship to any Jew who requests it. The English word Jew continues Middle English Gyw, Iewe, according to the Hebrew Bible, the name of both the tribe and kingdom derive from Judah, the fourth son of Jacob. The Hebrew word for Jew, יְהוּדִי ISO 259-3 Yhudi, is pronounced, with the stress on the syllable, in Israeli Hebrew. The Ladino name is ג׳ודיו, Djudio, ג׳ודיוס, Djudios, Yiddish, ייִד Yid, ייִדן, Yidn. The etymological equivalent is in use in languages, e. g. but derivations of the word Hebrew are also in use to describe a Jew, e. g. in Italian. The German word Jude is pronounced, the corresponding adjective jüdisch is the origin of the word Yiddish, in such contexts Jewish is the only acceptable possibility. Some people, however, have become so wary of this construction that they have extended the stigma to any use of Jew as a noun, a factual reconstruction for the origin of the Jews is a difficult and complex endeavor. It requires examining at least 3,000 years of ancient human history using documents in vast quantities, as archaeological discovery relies upon researchers and scholars from diverse disciplines, the goal is to interpret all of the factual data, focusing on the most consistent theory. In this case, it is complicated by long standing politics and religious, Jacob and his family migrated to Ancient Egypt after being invited to live with Jacobs son Joseph by the Pharaoh himself. The patriarchs descendants were later enslaved until the Exodus led by Moses, traditionally dated to the 13th century BCE, Modern archaeology has largely discarded the historicity of the Patriarchs and of the Exodus story, with it being reframed as constituting the Israelites inspiring national myth narrative. The growth of Yahweh-centric belief, along with a number of practices, gradually gave rise to a distinct Israelite ethnic group
35.
Hebrew alphabet
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Historically, there have been two separate abjad scripts to write Hebrew. In the remainder of this article, the term Hebrew alphabet refers to the Jewish square script unless otherwise indicated, the Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. It does not have case, but five letters have different forms used at the end of a word. Hebrew is written right to left. Originally, the alphabet was an abjad consisting only of consonants, as with other abjads, such as the Arabic alphabet, scribes later devised means of indicating vowel sounds by separate vowel points, known in Hebrew as niqqud. In both biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, the letters א ה ו י are also used as matres lectionis to represent vowels. There is a trend in modern Modern Hebrew toward the use of matres lectionis to indicate vowels that have traditionally gone unwritten, the paleo-Hebrew alphabet was used in the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The Samaritans, who remained in the Land of Israel, continued to use the paleo-Hebrew alphabet, after the fall of the Persian Empire in 330 BCE, Jews used both scripts before settling on the Assyrian form. The square Hebrew alphabet was adapted and used for writing languages of the Jewish diaspora – such as Karaim, the Judeo-Arabic languages, Judaeo-Spanish. In the traditional form, the Hebrew alphabet is an abjad consisting only of consonants and it has 22 letters, five of which use different forms at the end of a word. Also, a system of points to indicate vowels, called niqqud, was developed. In modern forms of the alphabet, as in the case of Yiddish and to some extent Modern Hebrew, today, the trend is toward full spelling with the weak letters acting as true vowels. When used to write Yiddish, vowels are indicated, using letters, either with or without niqqud-diacritics, except for Hebrew words. To preserve the proper vowel sounds, scholars developed several different sets of vocalization, one of these, the Tiberian system, eventually prevailed. Aaron ben Moses ben Asher, and his family for generations, are credited for refining and maintaining the system. These points are used only for special purposes, such as Biblical books intended for study. The Tiberian system also includes a set of marks, called trope. These are shown below the normal form in the following table, although Hebrew is read and written from right to left, the following table shows the letters in order from left to right
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Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
37.
Babylonian captivity
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The Babylonian captivity or Babylonian exile is the period in Jewish history during which a number of Judahites of the ancient Kingdom of Judah were captives in Babylonia. After the Battle of Carchemish in 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, besieged Jerusalem, the dates, numbers of deportations, and numbers of deportees given in the biblical accounts vary. These deportations are dated to 597 BCE for the first, with others dated at 587/586 BCE, after the fall of Babylon to the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, exiled Judeans were permitted to return to Judah. According to the book of Ezra, construction of the second temple in Jerusalem began around 537 BCE. All these events are considered significant in Jewish history and culture, the return of the exiles was a gradual process rather than a single event, and many of the deportees or their descendants did not return. In the late 7th century BCE, the kingdom of Judah was a client state of the Assyrian empire, in the last decades of the century, Assyria was overthrown by Babylon, an Assyrian province. Egypt, fearing the rise of the Neo-Babylonian empire, seized control of Assyrian territory up to the Euphrates river in Syria. In the process Josiah, the king of Judah, was killed in a battle with the Egyptians at the Battle of Megiddo, after the defeat of Pharaoh Nechos army by the Babylonians at Carchemish in 605 BCE, Jehoiakim began paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. Some of the nobility of Judah were taken to Babylon. In the following years, the court of Jerusalem was divided into two parties, in support of Egypt and Babylon, after Nebuchadnezzar was defeated in battle in 601 BCE by Egypt, Judah revolted against Babylon, culminating in a three-month siege of Jerusalem beginning in late 598 BCE. Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, died during the siege and was succeeded by his son Jehoiachin at the age of eighteen. The city fell on 2 Adar 597 BCE, and Nebuchadnezzar pillaged Jerusalem and its Temple and took Jeconiah, his court, jehoiakims uncle Zedekiah was appointed king in his place, but the exiles in Babylon continued to consider Jeconiah as their Exilarch, or rightful ruler. Despite warnings by Jeremiah and others of the party, Zedekiah revolted against Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar returned, defeated the Egyptians, and again besieged Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city wall and the Temple, together with the houses of the most important citizens. Zedekiah and his sons were captured, the sons were executed in front of Zedekiah, Judah became a Babylonian province, called Yehud, putting an end to the independent Kingdom of Judah. Some time later, a member of the royal family assassinated Gedaliah and his Babylonian advisors. According to the book of Ezra, the Persian Cyrus the Great ended the exile in 538 BCE, the exile ended with the return under Zerubbabel the Prince and Joshua the Priest and their construction of the Second Temple in the period 521–516 BCE. He appointed there a king of his own choice and taking heavy tribute brought it back to Babylon, one of the tablets refers to food rations for Ya’u-kīnu, king of the land of Yahudu and five royal princes, his sons
38.
Achaemenid Empire
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The Achaemenid Empire, also called the Persian Empire, was an empire based in Western Asia, founded by Cyrus the Great. The empires successes inspired similar systems in later empires and it is noted in Western history as the antagonist of the Greek city-states during the Greco-Persian Wars and for the emancipation of the Jewish exiles in Babylon. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was built in a Hellenistic style in the empire as well. By the 7th century BC, the Persians had settled in the portion of the Iranian Plateau in the region of Persis. From this region, Cyrus the Great advanced to defeat the Medes, Lydia, Alexander, an avid admirer of Cyrus the Great, conquered the empire in its entirety by 330 BC. Upon his death, most of the former territory came under the rule of the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Seleucid Empire. The Persian population of the central plateau reclaimed power by the second century BC under the Parthian Empire, the historical mark of the Achaemenid Empire went far beyond its territorial and military influences and included cultural, social, technological and religious influences as well. Many Athenians adopted Achaemenid customs in their lives in a reciprocal cultural exchange. The impact of Cyruss edict is mentioned in Judeo-Christian texts, the empire also set the tone for the politics, heritage and history of modern Iran. Astronomical year numbering Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details Due to the duration of their reigns, Smerdis, Xerxes II. The Persian nation contains a number of tribes as listed here, the Pasargadae, Maraphii, and Maspii, upon which all the other tribes are dependent. Of these, the Pasargadae are the most distinguished, they contain the clan of the Achaemenids from which spring the Perseid kings. Other tribes are the Panthialaei, Derusiaei, Germanii, all of which are attached to the soil, the Achaemenid Empire was created by nomadic Persians. The Achaemenid Empire was not the first Iranian empire, as by 6th century BC another group of ancient Iranian peoples had established the short lived Median Empire. The Iranian peoples had arrived in the region of what is today Iran c.1000 BC and had for a number of centuries fallen under the domination of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, based in northern Mesopotamia. However, the Medes and Persians, Cimmerians, Persians and Chaldeans played a role in the overthrow of the Assyrian empire. The term Achaemenid means of the family of the Achaemenis/Achaemenes, despite the derivation of the name, Achaemenes was himself a minor seventh-century ruler of the Anshan in southwestern Iran, and a vassal of Assyria. At some point in 550 BC, Cyrus rose in rebellion against the Medes, eventually conquering the Medes and creating the first Persian empire
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Old Aramaic language
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Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, considered to give way to Middle Aramaic by the 3rd century. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum, Ancient Aramaic refers to the earliest known period of the language, from its origin until it becomes the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent and Bahrain. It was the language of the Aramaean city-states of Damascus, Hamath, there are inscriptions that evidence the earliest use of the language, dating from the 10th century BCE. The inscriptions are mostly diplomatic documents between Aramaean city-states, the alphabet of Aramaic then seems to be based on Phoenician, and there is a unity in the written language. It seems that in time, a more refined alphabet, suited to the needs of the language, distinctive royal inscriptions at Samal have led to some scholars suggesting a distinctive Samalian or Yaudic variant of Old Aramaic. From 700 BCE, the language began to spread in all directions, different dialects emerged in Assyria, Babylonia, the Levant and Egypt. However, the Akkadian-influenced Aramaic of Assyria, and then Babylon, as described in 2 Kings 18,26, Hezekiah, king of Judah, negotiates with Assyrian ambassadors in Aramaic so that the common people would not understand. Around 600 BCE, Adon, a Canaanite king, used Aramaic to write to the Egyptian Pharaoh, chaldee or Chaldean Aramaic used to be common terms for the Aramaic of the Chaldean dynasty of Babylonia. It was used to describe Biblical Aramaic, which was, however and it is not to be confused with the modern language Chaldean Neo-Aramaic. The first old Aramaic inscription to be found in Europe was the Carpentras stele, frye reclassifies Imperial Aramaic as the lingua franca of the Achaemenid territories, suggesting then that the Achaemenid-era use of Aramaic was more pervasive than generally thought. For centuries after the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, Imperial Aramaic or a similar dialect would remain an influence on the various native Iranian languages, Aramaic script and, as ideograms, Aramaic vocabulary would survive as the essential characteristics of the Pahlavi writing system. One of the largest collections of Imperial Aramaic texts is that of the Persepolis fortification tablets, many of the extant documents witnessing to this form of Aramaic come from Egypt, Elephantine in particular. Of them, the best known is the Wisdom of Ahiqar, Achaemenid Aramaic is sufficiently uniform that it is often difficult to know where any particular example of the language was written. Only careful examination reveals the occasional loanword from a local language, a group of thirty Aramaic documents from Bactria has been discovered, and an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC Achaemenid administration of Bactria and Sogdiana. Old Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew both form part of the group of Northwest Semitic languages, and during antiquity, there may still have been substantial mutual intelligibility. In the Pesahim, Tractate 87b, Hanina bar Hama said that God sent the exiled Jews to Babylon because language is akin to the Leshon Hakodesh, the conquest by Alexander the Great did not destroy the unity of Aramaic language and literature immediately. Aramaic that bears a close resemblance to that of the 5th century BC can be found right up to the early 2nd century BCE
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Aleph
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Aleph is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Ālep, Hebrew Ālef א, Aramaic Ālap
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Bet (letter)
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This letters name means house in various Semitic languages, and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek Beta, Latin B, the Arabic letter ب is named باء bāʾ. For /p/, it may be used interchangeably with the Persian letter پ - pe in this case, Hebrew spelling, בֵּית The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes, a b sound and a v sound. The two are distinguished by a dot in the centre of the letter for /b/ and no dot for /v/ and it is also named beth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles. In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of bet, out of all the letters, is 4. 98%, when the Bet has a dot in its center, known as a dagesh, then it represents /b/. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used, when this letter appears as ב without the dagesh in its center then it represents a voiced labiodental fricative, /v/. Bet in gematria symbolizes the number 2, as a prefix, the letter bet may function as a preposition meaning in, at, or with. Bet is the first letter of the Torah, as Bet is the number 2 in gematria, this is said to symbolize that there are two parts to Torah, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. In set theory, the numbers stand for powers of infinite sets. In the Syriac alphabet, the letter is ܒ — Beth. It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds, when Beth has a hard pronunciation it is a. When Beth has a soft pronunciation it is pronounced as a. However, in dialects, the soft Beth is more often pronounced as a. Whether Beth should be pronounced as a hard or soft sound is determined by its context within a word. However, wherever it is traditionally geminate within a word, even in dialects that no longer distinguish double consonants, in the West Syriac dialect, some speakers always pronounce Beth with its hard sound. Beth, when attached to the beginning of a word, represents the preposition in, with, as a numeral, the letter represents the number 2, and, using various systems of dashes above or below, can stand for 2,000 and 20,000
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Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Samaritan Language and Literature". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "