Northwest Semitic language in the context of "Hebrew language"

The Punic people, usually known as the Carthaginians (and sometimes as Western Phoenicians), were a Semitic people who migrated from Phoenicia to the Western Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age. In modern scholarship, the term Punic, the Latin equivalent of the Greek-derived term Phoenician, is exclusively used to refer to Phoenicians in the western Mediterranean, following the line of the Greek East and Latin West. The largest Punic settlement was Ancient Carthage, but there were 300 other settlements along the North African coast from Leptis Magna in modern Libya to Mogador in southern Morocco, as well as western Sicily, southern Sardinia, the southern and eastern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, Malta, and Ibiza. Their language, Punic, was a variety of Phoenician, one of the Northwest Semitic languages originating in the Levant.

Literary sources report two moments of Tyrian settlements in the west, the first in the 12th century BC (the cities Utica, Lixus, and Gadir) that hasn't been confirmed by archaeology, and a second at the end of the 9th century BC, documented in written references in both east and west, which culminated in the foundation of colonies in northwest Africa (the cities Auza, Carthage, and Kition on the southern coast of Cyprus) and formed part of trading networks linked to Tyre, Arvad, Byblos, Berytus, Ekron, and Sidon in the Phoenician homeland. Although links with Phoenicia were retained throughout their history, they also developed close trading relations with other peoples of the western Mediterranean, such as Sicilians, Sardinians, Berbers, Greeks, and Iberians, and developed some cultural traits distinct from those of their Phoenician homeland. Some of these were shared by all western Phoenicians, while others were restricted to individual regions within the Punic sphere.

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with the other being Aramaic, still spoken today.

The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as Lashon Hakodesh (לְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶש, lit. 'the holy tongue' or 'the tongue [of] holiness') since ancient times. The language was not referred to by the name Hebrew in the Bible, but as Yehudit (transl. 'Judean') or Səpaṯ Kəna'an (transl. "the language of Canaan"). Mishnah Gittin 9:8 refers to the language as Ivrit, meaning Hebrew; however, Mishnah Megillah refers to the language as Ashurit, meaning Assyrian, which is derived from the name of the alphabet used, in contrast to Ivrit, meaning the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet.

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.

Modern Hebrew (endonym: עִבְרִית חֲדָשָׁה, romanized: 'Ivrit ḥadasha, IPA: [ivˈʁit χadaˈʃa] or [ʕivˈrit ħadaˈʃa]), also known as Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew, is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. It is the only extant Canaanite language, as well as one of the oldest languages to be spoken as a native language in the modern day, on account of Hebrew being attested since the 2nd millennium BC. It uses the Hebrew Alphabet, an abjad script written from right-to-left. The current standard was codified as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now serves as the sole official and national language of the State of Israel, where it is predominantly spoken by over 10 million people. Thus, Modern Hebrew is nearly universally regarded as the most successful instance of language revitalization in history.

A Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family, Hebrew was spoken since antiquity as the vernacular of the Israelites until around the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted by a western dialect of the Aramaic language, the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and other Jewish languages. Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy, poetry and literature, and written correspondence, it became extinct as a spoken language.

The Ugaritic texts are a corpus of ancient cuneiform texts discovered in 1928 in Ugarit (Ras Shamra) and Ras Ibn Hani in Syria, and written in Ugaritic, an otherwise unknown Northwest Semitic language. Approximately 1,500 texts and fragments have been found to date. The texts were written in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE.

The most famous of the Ugarit texts are the approximately fifty epic poems; the three major literary texts are the Baal Cycle, the Legend of Keret, and the Tale of Aqhat. The other texts include 150 tablets describing the Ugaritic cult and rituals, 100 letters of correspondence, a very small number of legal texts (Akkadian is considered to have been the contemporary language of law), and hundreds of administrative or economic texts.