The Semitic Sibilants

The Semitic Sibilants deals with the diverse hissing and hushing sounds of the Semitic language family in Southwest Asia and North Africa and their complex history. Roey Schneider gathers data from the different ancient and modern Semitic languages while utilizing diverse theoretical linguistic frameworks and in the process coming to a generalization on their development in each language group within the family. Schneider begins with describing these sounds through their traditional analyses and phonetic features. After a comprehensive discussion in function words and on grammatical processes involving these sounds within different Semitic languages, special attention is paid to transcriptions in various ancient Semitic and non-Semitic languages that were in contact with them in order to draw conclusions on the realization of these sounds in these ancient languages. Schneider also includes a quantitative analysis of around 2500 roots containing the three voiceless non-emphatic Semitic s-sounds and concludes with a detailed account of the theoretical issue of Semitic words that in some languages have an unpredictable hissing or hushing sound. In chapter 8, 130 words of this type are collected and analyzed.