Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

A great variety of phonological properties of Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Hebrew but also Tigrinya, Amharic, and Aramaic, have been studied within modern phonological frameworks. In fact, the very first work within the generative phonological tradition (Chomsky 1951) and several works that lead up to that tradition were analyses of Semitic languages. These languages have attracted the attention of phonologists for several reasons: •  Some Semitic languages exhibit phonetic properties, especially the use of the pharynx as a main or secondary place of articulation, that are rare in the languages of the world. •  The Semitic languages are notorious for the discontinuous or nonconcatenative structures that pervade their morphologies and interact in many ways with their phonologies. •  The Semitic family consists of a group of closely related languages which are fundamentally similar but nevertheless exhibit a wide variation in phonological structure; this is especially salient within the Arabic language family, where classical or standard Arabic is essentially identical to the ancestor of the many vernacular dialects, most of which are similar in their inventories of segment types and features but diverse in such properties as syllable structure. •  There is a long history of study of many of these languages, beginning with sophisticated and hotly argued debates among Arabic ... log in or subscribe to read full text