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The Collaborative International Dictionary
Semitic

Semitic \Sem*it"ic\, a. Of or pertaining to Shem or his descendants; belonging to that division of the Caucasian race which includes the Arabs, Jews, and related races. [Written also Shemitic.]

Semitic language, a name used to designate a group of Asiatic and African languages, some living and some dead, namely: Hebrew and Ph[oe]nician, Aramaic, Assyrian, Arabic, Ethiopic (Geez and Ampharic).
--Encyc. Brit.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Semitic

1797, denoting the language group that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, etc.; 1826 as "of or pertaining to Semites," from Medieval Latin Semiticus (source of Spanish semitico, French semitique, German semitisch), from Semita (see Semite). As a noun, as the name of a linguistic family, from 1813. In non-linguistic use, perhaps directly from German semitisch. In recent use often with the specific sense "Jewish," but not historically so limited.

Wikipedia
Semitic

The term Semitic most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a name used since the 1770s to refer to the language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta.

Semitic may also refer to:

Religions

  • Abrahamic religions, also known as Semitic religions
  • Ancient Semitic religion

Other linguistic terms

  • Proto-Semitic language
  • Semitic root
  • Semitic studies

People

  • Semitic people, an obsolete term for cultures that speak or spoke Semitic languages
  • Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples

Usage examples of "semitic".

One of the Semitic languages, it is related to Aramaic, Phoenician, Syriac, Hebrew, various Ethiopic languages, and the Akkadian of ancient Babylonia and Assyria.

Although we regard the buccina as essentially Roman, an instrument of the same type, but probably straight and of kindred name, was widely known and used in the East, in Persia, Arabia and among the Semitic races.

Were it not that the Chaldaean historian Berossos writes the name Xisuthros, we should have no clue to its Semitic pronunciation.

Asiatic Hamites, and the Semitic adoption of the Hamitic gods and religious system.

Israelitish blood in many of their acquaintances who believe themselves of the purest Japhetic origin, and are full of prejudices about the Semitic race.

Dallas Baptist University as well as a master of divinity and a master of theology degree in Old Testament and Semitics from Talbot Theological Seminary.

Semitic languages not greatly favouring the alphabetisation of vowels.

He watched her large Semitic eyes grow larger still with awe and a kind of terror in learning what Ezekiel had learned.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-7 with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University Providence, Rhode Island.

This, of course, is entirely wrong, Ear the Canaanites, if we go by linguistic divisions, were as Semitic as the Israelites, the Arameans, the Babylonians, and the Arabs.

They in turn were vanquished by the followers of the great desert God, Ashur, who called themselves Assyrians and who made the city of Nineveh the center of a vast and terrible empire which conquered all of western Asia and Egypt and gathered taxes from countless subject races until the end of the seventh century before the birth of Christ when the Chaldeans, also a Semitic tribe, re-established Babylon and made that city the most important capital of that day.

Early Semitic witnesses to our cultural beginnings saw that their neighbors had plucked some memes from the gods’ own tree of wisdom.

It must be borne in mind that the Semitic conquerors of the Sumerians, while they adopted the Sumerian cuneiform script, adapted it to express a Semitic language (Akkadian) totally unlike Sumerian.

Evidence for the Minoan Language) opened up a new field of study by showing that an early Minoan script, called Linear A, represented a Semitic language.

Yes, Donald, Arabic too is a Semitic language and is similarly vowel-shy.