Quotes from Angel Sáenz-Badillos

Ugarit ... in contrast to later Canaanite languages, there is no article.

When the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made, /Ä¢/ was still a distinct phoneme, but when the remaining books were translated, it may no longer have been pronounced, surviving exclusively in public reading of the Bible before finally disappearing completely.

H. Bauer ... was already arguing that some elements of Hebrew, such as the consecutive tenses, had a close relationship with Akkadian.

The Proto-Canaanite ... seems to have employed 27 different characters. The Ugaritic alphabet from around the 14th century BCE uses 30 characters ... Phoenician had by the 12th century BCE already dropped five characters ... 22 consonantal phonemes.

Palestino-Tiberian tradition ... Ashkenazi opted for it, although they also introduced significant modifications.

The Tiberian system became more and more dominant until it completely ousted its Palestino-Tiberian counterpart around the middle of the fourteenth century.

before the tenth century Hebrew writing, like Phoenician, was purely consonantal, and it was halfway though the ninth century BCE, under the influence of Aramaic.

The 379 letters from Tell el-Amarna ... are cuneiform tablets ... date from around 1385-1355 BCE ... include Canaanite glosses ... from the scribes' mother tongue on the Akkadian which they wrote.

Palmyrene and Nabataean dialects, which use an Aramaic script ... in the opinion of some experts might really be dialects of Arabic.

Sumerian substratum is obvious not only in the use of a cuneiform system of writing, but also in the weakness of Laryngeal and Pharyngeal consonants in Akkadian

The nature of the data we possess suggests we value each and every tradition rather than creating a dichotomy between the normative tradition and the others.

The earliest inscriptions in Hebrew date from the tenth BCE.

The oldest Phoenician inscriptions date from around 1100 BCE.

Hebrew ... linguistic development was far from uniform. Even though they share a number of common tendencies, a variety of Hebrew traditions is seen to have co-existed during this period.

According to some scholars, after 1400 BCE ... Ya'udic and Aramaic separated from ... Canaanite group.

It is noticeable that the Phoenician terms are often shared with Ugaritic.

Expressions used almost exclusively in poetry ... tend to be concentrated in the oldest biblical texts. Generally, it may be said that these items existed during the archaic period of the language, later disappearing from normal use.

The inscription of King Mar'alqais , found south of Damascus and dated at 328 CE, is usually said to be the first document in Arabic.

The most influential figure involved in clarifying the Babylonian pointing system was without doubt Paul Kahle, who in 1902 wrote a study of a manuscript he had found in Berlin and which he correctly classified as Yemenite-Babylonian.

Thus, 'Proto-Semitic' is more a postulate or linguistic convention than an actual ancient language spoken by a recognizable group.

The Proto-Semitic phonological system contains perhaps twenty-nine consonantal phonemes, which despite certain modifications have been conserved with great fidelity in languages like Arabic.

There are difficulties involved in regarding the Babylonian tradition as a single or homogeneous phenomenon following just one line of development. If, despite this, we continue to speak of a Babylonian Hebrew tradition or dialect, we have to add many provisos to our statements.

The Babylonian system of accents is similar to the Tiberian, with small variations.

During its peak in the eighth to ninth centuries, the Babylonian version of Hebrew extended from Persia to Yemen. It declined in the tenth century with the disappearance of the main academies under the weight of Muslim power, and was replaced by the Tiberian system. However, the origins of the Yemenite system are still relatively obscure.