query: instance_of central semitic languages
supports: The Canaanite languages or Canaanite dialects are one of the two subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the other being the Aramaic language. They were spoken by the ancient peoples of the Canaan region, the Canaanites, broadly defined to include the Israelites, Phoenicians, Amorites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites. Europe is a continent that comprises the westernmost part of Eurasia. Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. To the east and southeast, Europe is generally considered as separated from Asia by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways of the Turkish Straits. Yet the non-oceanic borders of Europea concept dating back to classical antiquityare arbitrary. The primarily physiographic term "continent" as applied to Europe also incorporates cultural and political elements whose discontinuities are not always reflected by the continent's current overland boundaries. Shem ("Sm"; Ge'ez: , "Sm"; "renown; prosperity; name"; Arabic: "Sm") was one of the sons of Noah in the Hebrew Bible as well as in Islamic literature. Genesis 10:21 refers to relative ages of Shem and his brother Japheth, but with sufficient ambiguity to have yielded different English translations. The verse is translated in the KJV as "Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.". However, the New American Standard Bible gives, "Also to Shem, the father of all the children of Eber, and the older brother of Japheth, children were born." Western Asia, West Asia, Southwestern Asia or Southwest Asia is the westernmost subregion of Asia. The concept is in limited use, as it significantly overlaps with the Middle East (or Near East), the main difference being the exclusion of Egypt (which would be counted as part of North Africa). The term is sometimes used for the purposes of grouping countries in statistics. Ugaritic is a Northwest Semitic language, discovered by French archaeologists in 1929. It is known almost only in the form of writings found in the ruined city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra), Syria. It has been used by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to clarify Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed ways in which ancient Israelite culture found parallels in the neighboring cultures. Aramaic ("Army") is a family of languages or dialects belonging to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic language family. More specifically, it is part of the Northwest Semitic group, which also includes the Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. The Aramaic alphabet was widely adopted for other languages and is ancestral to the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic alphabets. The Iron Age is an archaeological era, referring to a period of time in the prehistory and protohistory of the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) when the dominant toolmaking material was iron. It is commonly preceded by the Bronze Age in Europe and Asia with exceptions and the Stone Age in Africa. Meteoric iron has been used by humans since at least 3200 BC, but ancient iron production did not become widespread until the ability to smelt iron ore, remove impurities and regulate the amount of carbon in the alloy were developed. The start of the Iron Age proper is considered by many to fall between around 1200 BC to 600 BC, depending on the region. In most parts of the world, its end is defined by the widespread adoption of writing, and therefore marks the transition from prehistory to history. Ammon was an Iron Age Semitic-speaking nation occupying the east of the Jordan River, between the torrent valleys of Arnon and Jabbok, in present-day Jordan. The chief city of the country was "Rabbah" or "Rabbath Ammon", site of the modern city of Amman, Jordan's capital. Milcom and Molech (who may be one and the same) are named in the Hebrew Bible as the gods of Ammon. The people of this kingdom are called "Children of Ammon" or "Ammonites". North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of Africa. The United Nations definition of "North Africa" includes seven countries and territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and Western Sahara. The countries of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya are often collectively referred to as the Maghreb, which is the Arabic word for "sunset". Egypt lies to the northeast and encompasses part of West Asia, while Sudan is situated on the edge of the Sahel, to the south of Egypt. The Central Semitic languages are a proposed intermediate group of Semitic languages , comprising the Late Iron Age , modern dialect of Arabic ( prior to which Arabic was a Southern Semitic language ) , and older Bronze Age Northwest Semitic languages ( which include Aramaic , Ugaritic , and the Canaanite languages of Hebrew and Phoenician ) . In this reckoning Central Semitic itself is one of three divisions of Semitic along with East Semitic ( Akkadian ) and South Semitic ( South Arabian , and the Semitic languages of Ethiopia ) . Distinctive features of Central Semitic languages include the following : The realization of the common Semitic emphatic consonants as pharyngealized rather than ejectives : E.g. Proto - Semitic *  ( t ) and *  ( ts ) are realized as ( t ) and ( s ) in Arabic and Neo-Aramaic , in contrast to remaining ejectives in South Arabian and in Ethiopian Semitic . Additionally , Proto - Semitic *  ( k ) becomes a uvular stop ( q ) . An innovative negation marker * bal , of uncertain origin . The generalization of t as the suffix conjugation past tense marker , levelling an earlier alternation between * k in the first person and * t in the second person . A new prefix conjugation for the non-past tense , of the form ya - qtulu , replacing the inherited ya - qattal form ( these are schematic verbal forms , as if derived from an example triconsonantal root q - t - l ) . Levelling of vowels in verb prefixes . The evidence of Akkadian suggests four Proto - Semitic prefixes : * a - , * ta - , * ni - , * yi - . In Central Semitic , all prefixes have the same vowel within a given verb paradigm . This however developed slightly differently in the different languages : Arabic has generalized a in all prefixes , while Northwest Semitic has generalized either a or i , depending on the verb stem in question . Different classification systems disagree on the precise structure of the group . The most common approach divides it into Arabic and Northwest Semitic , while SIL Ethnologue has South Central Semitic ( including Arabic and Hebrew ) vs. Aramaic . The main distinction between Arabic and the Northwest Semitic languages is the presence of broken plurals in the former . The majority of Arabic masculine non-human nouns form plurals in this manner ( called inanimate plural ) , whereas almost all nouns in the Northwest Semitic languages form their plurals with a suffix . For example , the Arabic  bayt ( `` house '' ) becomes  buyt ( `` houses '' ) ; the Hebrew  bayit ( `` house '' ) becomes  battm ( `` houses '' ) . The Middle East is a transcontinental region centered on Western Asia and Egypt. The corresponding adjective is "Middle-Eastern" and the derived noun is "Middle-Easterner". The term has come into wider usage as a replacement of the term Near East (as opposed to Far East) beginning in the early 20th century. The Israelites ("Bnei Yisra'el") were a Semitic-speaking people of the ancient Near East, who inhabited a part of Canaan during the tribal and monarchic periods. The ancient Israelites are considered to be an outgrowth of the indigenous Canaanite populations that long inhabited the Southern Levant, Syria, ancient Israel and the Transjordan. The Caucasus or Caucasia is a region at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and the Caspian seas. The Horn of Africa (, "yäafrika qänd", "al-qarn al-'afrq") (shortened to HOA) is a peninsula in Northeast Africa. It juts hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea and lies along the southern side of the Gulf of Aden. The area is the easternmost projection of the African continent. The Horn of Africa denotes the region containing the countries of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. The Levant (Arabic:  "") is an approximate historical geographical term referring to a large area in the Eastern Mediterranean. In its widest historical sense, the Levant included all of the eastern Mediterranean with its islands, that is, it included all of the countries along the Eastern Mediterranean shores, extending from Greece to Cyrenaica. The term "Levant" entered English in the late 15th century from French. It derives from the Italian "Levante", meaning "rising", implying the rising of the sun in the east. As such, it is broadly equivalent to the Arabic term "Mashriq", meaning "the land where the sun rises". Central Asia or Middle Asia is the core region of the Asian continent and stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also colloquially referred to as "the 'stans" (as the six countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix "-stan", meaning "land of") and is within the scope of the wider Eurasian continent. Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant.
  It would have emerged from Common Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by the Canaanite languages (Phoenician and Hebrew). The Book of Genesis (from the Latin Vulgate, in turn borrowed or transliterated from Greek , meaning "origin" "Brš", "In [the] beginning") is the first book of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament. North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It can also be considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea. The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in often large expatriate communities in North America and Europe, with smaller communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Canaan (Northwest Semitic: ""; Phoenician: ; Biblical Hebrew/ Masoretic: ["; nan]") was a Semitic-speaking region in the Ancient Near East during the late 2nd millennium BC. In the Bible it corresponds to the Levant, in particular to the areas of the Southern Levant that provide the main setting of the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, i.e., the area of Israel, Philistia, Phoenicia, and other nations.
candidates: adjective age area bible book border branch christian collapse concept continent culture day definition division era family geographical group gulf humans language language family literature mediterranean sea name nation ocean part peninsula people region river sea sense six standard statistics stone subcontinent subregion suffix term terminology three time two writing
answer: language family