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C H A P T E R 5

CANAANITE DIALECTS

D E N N I S P A R D E E

1. HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term Canaanite has two primary usages: (i) to designate the dialects of Northwest

Semitic spoken in the region called Canaan in the second half of the second millennium

BC; and (ii) to differentiate the “Canaanite” dialects of the ﬁrst millennium, primarily

Phoenician and Hebrew, from other Northwest Semitic languages spoken in Canaan after

c. 1000 BC, primarily the Aramaic dialects. The principal feature deﬁning Canaanite is the

so-called Canaanite shift , that is, Proto-Semitic ¤ a realized as o (e.g., Hebrew . ob “good”

corresponds to Aramaic . ab ).

For the Canaanite of the second millennium BC, there are two primary sources: (i) the texts

written in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, by Canaanite scribes and which contain

both Canaanitisms and explicit glosses, i.e., words written in cuneiform script as a gloss in

the local language on a preceding Akkadian word; (ii) the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, that

is, inscriptions written in archaic linear script and apparently recording the local language.

Some controversy surrounds what “Canaan” meant, both politically and geographically,

in the second millennium BC (Na’aman 1994). In the second half of the millennium, the

term was used to designate the area of Asia under Egyptian control, including a number of

city-states. It comprised an area stretching roughly from what is today northern Lebanon to

the border of Egypt, perhaps including some of the arable lands of Transjordan. The term is

already attested in the ﬁrst half of the millennium (eighteenth-century BC texts from Mari)

in regard to cities located in the same general area, and there is no reason to doubt that the

geographical extent of Canaan was already similar to that known several centuries later. The

origin of the term is, however, still unclear.

On the possibility of dividing Canaanite into North Canaanite and South Canaanite , with

the former comprised by Ugaritic, see Tropper 1994 and Pardee 1997c.

For the Canaanite of the ﬁrst millennium BC and later, there are nearly continuous

bodies of inscriptions beginning shortly before 1000 BC. In the case of Phoenician, these

inscriptions are found from Anatolia to Egypt to Mesopotamia during roughly the ﬁrst

half of the millennium, then throughout the western Mediterranean as late Phoenician and

Punic until the latter dies out well into the Christian era. In the case of Hebrew, a long series

of dialects is attested from the tenth century BC down to the present. Canaanite languages

distinct from Hebrew and Phoenician were also spoken in Transjordan during the ﬁrst

millennium BC, i.e., Moabite, Ammonite, and Edomite. The sources for these languages are

very sparse and they cease in the Persian period, replaced by Aramaic; there are thus few data

by which to determine how long they survived as living languages.

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The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia

Because separate articles are devoted to detailed presentations of Hebrew and Phoenician,

this article will deal with the earlier manifestations of Canaanite.

2. WRITING SYSTEMS

The two principal bodies of evidence for Canaanite in the second millennium BC correspond

to two writing systems.

2.1 CUNEIFORM

The greater number of data come from Canaanite features in Akkadian documents that

date for the most part from the early fourteenth century. For the description of Akkadian

cuneiform as a writing system, see WAL Chapter 8, § 2.

The vast majority of these documents, which total nearly four hundred, were discovered

at Tell el-Amarna in Egypt (see WAL Ch. 8, § 1.1). They represent the international corre-

spondence directed to Egyptian pharaohs of the early fourteenth century, from as far away as

Hattusas, the capital of the Hittite empire (north-central Anatolia), and Babylon (southern

Mesopotamia). The Akkadian of these letters varies according to the local scribal schools;

that used by the scribes of the various cities of Canaan is so marked by local features that

it has been described as a scribal “code,” a hybrid language that, though basically Akkadian

and thus incomprehensible to speakers of the local language, would have been understood

only by Akkadian speakers trained in its use (Moran 1987:27; 1992:xxi–xxii; Rainey 1996,

II:1–16, 31–32).

The Canaanite substratum may be derived by triangulation between the written forms,

normative Akkadian of the period, and later Canaanite. The primary difﬁculties with this

derivation are two: (i) problems stemming from the writing system itself, which permits

multiple values for a given sign; and (ii) the very process of describing an unknown language

by assumed parallels from other languages that are only attested half a millennium and more

later. These difﬁculties are palliated in part by the presence of explicit glosses: an Akkadian

word or a Sumerian logogram of known meaning may be followed by one or two oblique

wedges (German Glossenkeil is the technical term for such a wedge) and then by a Canaanite

word. The most famous of these is perhaps SU : zu-ru-u ˘ in EA 287:27, where SU is the

z @ ro ac , Aramaic d @ ra c , and Arabic dira c and illustrating the shift of ¤ a to o (Sivan 1984: 29),

and perhaps of ¤ d to z (Sivan 1984: 41).

As fraught with difﬁculties as the above described derivational process is, we know

much more about Canaanite from these Akkadian texts than we do from the so-called

Proto-Canaanite inscriptions. That is because the latter are far fewer in number and poorly

preserved.

2.2 PROTO-CANAANITE

The problem of the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions is directly linked with that of the Proto-

Sinaitic inscriptions. The latter are a group of inscriptions, numbering about thirty, dis-

covered near Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai, dated variously to the eighteenth

or ﬁfteenth centuries BC, which have been only partially deciphered but which seem

to represent a form of early West Semitic (for a recent overview with bibliography, see

Pardee 1997b). Corresponding to these texts are a group of about twenty texts discovered

logogram for “hand/arm” and zu-ru-u ˘ is the Canaanite gloss, corresponding to Hebrew

CANAANITE DIALECTS

105

in southern Canaan and spread over about ﬁve centuries, from the seventeenth century BC

to the twelfth (Sass 1988, 1991).

The state of preservation of these latter, Proto-Canaanite, inscriptions is even poorer

than is that of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. The identiﬁcation of Proto-Canaanite as

a West Semitic script rests on (i) formal similarity with the earlier Proto-Sinaitic script;

(ii) the decipherment of a minority of these texts; and (iii) the formal evolution towards

Phoenician script. Because of these difﬁculties, the state of decipherment of these inscrip-

tions is even less advanced than in the case of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. The principal

text of one of the best-preserved of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, that from ¨Izbet . ar . ah,

seems not to be Semitic in spite of the fact that it contains a Hebrew/Phoenician-type

abecedary. On the other hand, the well-known Lachish Ewer inscription has been very plau-

sibly deciphered as West Semitic (for an overview, with bibliography, see Pardee 1997a).

Unfortunately, the state of preservation of most of the other inscriptions and their broad

geographical and temporal spread make reliable decipherment in most cases impossible.

These inscriptions, to the extent that they are Semitic, are written in a purely consonan-

tal script, with no use of matres lectionis ; and this feature coupled with the problems

posed by the paucity and state of the texts make it difﬁcult to deﬁne the language rep-

resented. The presence of a Hebrew/Phoenician-type abecedary dating to c. 1200 BC in the

֒ Izbet . ar . ah inscription may be seen as indicating, even if the actual text accompanying

the abecedary is in another language, that the script was used in other cases to write texts

in a language of the Canaanite type. This conclusion is borne out by the Lachish Ewer

inscription.

In addition to these texts from southern Canaan, there are a group of arrowhead inscrip-

tions discovered in southern Canaan and Phoenicia and a very limited number of archaic

Phoenician inscriptions from Byblos that seem to provide a bridge between Proto-Canaanite

and Phoenician. Unfortunately, the small number of texts and the states of preservation

again interfere in determining origins and ﬁliations of the scripts as well as of the languages

represented.

Finally, there is at least one inscription in the Ugaritic cuneiform script that has been

identiﬁed as Phoenician in nature (see Ch. 4, § 2.1).

3. GRAMMAR

From inscriptions that predate the abecedaries of the ֒ Izbet . ar . ah ostracon (twelfth

century BC), some ﬁfteen Proto-Canaanite signs representing consonantal phonemes are

identiﬁable with some degree of certainty. As these match the Proto-Sinaitic data, as well as

the data from the later West-Semitic languages, it may be assumed that the original Proto-

Canaanite consonantal inventory was similar to, if not identical with, the Proto-Sinaitic

inventory and that the two groups of texts represent the same language, or two or more

languages/dialects descended from a common ancestor.

Virtually all other aspects of the linguistic description of Canaanite dialects are derived

from the texts written in Akkadian cuneiform. After a century of research, comprehen-

sive studies of these data have been produced by Sivan 1984 (phonology, morphology, and

lexicon of the Northwest Semitic words in western Akkadian texts of the ﬁfteenth–thirteenth

centuries); Rainey 1996 (a study of the Akkadian of the Amarna texts, with special empha-

sis on Canaanite features, particularly verbal morphosyntax); and Moran 1987 and 1992

(comprehensive translations of the Amarna texts into French and English). Sivan spread his

net a bit wider than he might have done (see Huehnergard 1987); his work is thus useful

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The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia

as a collection of all data furnished by texts written in Akkadian on the various Northwest

Semitic languages from Antioch to the border of Egypt in the period covered, but it is

more difﬁcult to use as a source for deﬁning Canaanite. Rainey 1996, on the other hand,

is speciﬁcally a study of the Akkadian texts written by Canaanite scribes; its goal, however,

was not to present exclusively the extracted Canaanite data as a grammar of Canaanite, but

to present the larger picture, of which the Canaanite part is sometimes quite small. All the

relevant data are, however, gathered in these two works, accompanied by expert analyses

and extensive bibliographical information (including proper credit to earlier scholarship,

particularly Moran’s basic studies).

The following are some of the primary characteristics of Canaanite of c. 1400 BC:

The Canaanite shift of ¤ a to o .

A consonantal inventory that is smaller than that of Ugaritic and different from that

of Aramaic (e.g., ¤ .

A case system marked primarily by sufﬁxed vowels, like that of Ugaritic (see Ch. 2,

§ 4.2.2). Case-vowels have generally disappeared or acquired other functions in the

ﬁrst-millennium Northwest Semitic languages.

A verbal system of which the morphology and morphosyntax are very similar to those

of Ugaritic (see Ch. 2, § 4.4). The ﬁrst-millennium languages have evolved beyond this

stage, often retaining only remnants of the earlier systems.

The probable absence of a S-causative stem (like Phoenician and Hebrew).

Dissimilation of the vowel a in YaQTaL- verbal forms, giving YiQTaL , the so-called

Barth–Ginsberg Law .

Many details of the lexical inventory are known (Sivan 1984), but pieces of systems –

for example, primary verbs of movement – are missing, making comparisons with

later systems difﬁcult.

One may speak of these features as deﬁning Canaanite; it is likely, however, that constel-

lations of less important features characterized a number of local Canaanite dialects.

REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

EA = text citation according to Knudtzon, J. 1915. Die el-Amarna Tafeln mit Einleitung und

Erlauterungen . Leipzig: Hinrichs.

Huehnergard, J. 1987. Review of Sivan 1984. Journal of the American Oriental Society 107:713–725.

Moran, W. 1987. Les lettres d’el Amarna. Correspondance diplomatique du pharaon. Litteratures

Anciennes du Proche-Orient 13. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf.

——— . 1992. The Amarna Letters . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Na’aman, N. 1994. “The Canaanites and their land – a rejoinder.” Ugarit-Forschungen 24:397–418.

Pardee, D. 1997a. “Proto-Canaanite.” In E. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in

the Near East , vol. 4, pp. 354–355. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— . 1997b. “Proto-Sinaitic.” In E. Meyers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the

Near East , vol. 4, pp. 352–354. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— . 1997c. Review of Tropper 1994. Journal of the American Oriental Society 117:375–378.

Rainey, A. 1996. Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets. A Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by

Scribes from Canaan (4 vols.). Handbuch der Orientalistik, 25. Leiden: Brill.

Sass, B. 1988. The Genesis of the Alphabet and Its Development in the Second Millennium BC . Agypten

und Altes Testament 13. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

——— . 1991. Studia Alphabetica. On the Origin and Early History of the Northwest Semitic, South

Semitic and Greek Alphabets . Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 102. Freiburg: Universitatsverlag;

Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht.

! . ).

CANAANITE DIALECTS

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Sivan, D. 1984. Grammatical Analysis and Glossary of the Northwest Semitic Vocables in Akkadian

Texts of the 15th–13th C. BC from Canaan and Syria . Alter Orient und Altes Testament, 214.

Kevelaer: Butzon and Bercker; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag.

Tropper, J. 1994. “Is Ugaritic a Canaanite language?” In G. Brooke, A. Curtis, and J. Healey (eds.),

Ugarit and the Bible . Proceedings of the International Symposium on Ugarit and the Bible,

Manchester, September 1992, pp. 343–353. Ugaritisch-Biblische Literatur 11. M unster:

UGARIT-Verlag.

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