Punic language

The Punic language, also called Phoenicio-Punic or Carthaginian, is an extinct variety of the Phoenician language, a Canaanite language of the Northwest Semitic branch of the Semitic languages. An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, and the Iberian peninsula and several Mediterranean islands such as Malta, Sicily and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}

Punic
Canaanite
Region	Tunisia, coastal parts of Algeria, Morocco, southern Iberia, Balearic islands, Libya, Malta, western Sicily, southern and eastern Sardinia
Era	8th century BC to 6th century AD
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Phoenician Punic
Early form	Phoenician
Writing system	Phoenician alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xpu
Linguist List	xpu
Glottolog	puni1241 neop1239  Neo-Punic

Punic is considered to have separated from its Phoenician parent around the time that Carthage became the leading Phoenician city under Mago I, but scholarly attempts to delineate the dialects lack precision and generally disagree on the classification.^[7]

History

 

An inscription from one of the gates to the theatre at Leptis Magna, in both Latin and Punic script.

The Punics stayed in contact with the homeland of Phoenicia until the destruction of Carthage by the Roman Republic in 146 BC. At first, there was not much difference between Phoenician and Punic, but as time went on Punic began to become influenced less by Phoenicia and more by the coastal Berber languages spoken in and around Carthage by the ancient Libyans.

The term Neo-Punic is used in two senses: One pertaining to the Phoenician alphabet and the other to the language itself. In the present context, Neo-Punic refers to the dialect of Punic spoken after the fall of Carthage and after the Roman conquest of the former Punic territories in 146 BC. The dialect differed from the earlier Punic language, as is evident from divergent spelling compared to earlier Punic and by the use of non-Semitic names, mostly of Libyco-Berber or Iberian origin. The difference was due to the dialectal changes that Punic underwent as it spread among the Berber peoples.^[8] Neo-Punic works include Lepcis Magna N 19 (92 AD).

By around the fourth century AD, Punic was still spoken in what is now Tunisia and Algeria, other parts of Northwest Africa, and the Mediterranean. The Neo-Punic alphabet also descended from the Punic language.^{[clarification needed]} By around 400, the first meaning of Punic^{[clarification needed]} was used mainly for monumental inscriptions, replaced by the cursive Neo-Punic alphabet elsewhere.^[9] Examples of Punic literary works are those of Mago, a Punic general with great notoriety, who spread Carthage's influence as much through writing books as he did fighting. Mago wrote 28 volumes about animal husbandry.

The Roman Senate appreciated the works so much that after taking Carthage, they presented them to Berber princes who owned libraries there. Mago's work was translated into Greek by Cassius Dionysius of Utica. The Latin version was probably translated from the Greek version. Further examples of Punic works of literature include the works of Hanno the Navigator, who wrote about his encounters during his naval voyages around Africa and about the settling of new colonies in Iberia, North Africa and the Mediterranean.^[10]

A third version of Punic, known as Latino-Punic, is Punic written in the Latin alphabet, but with all of the spellings favouring Northwest African pronunciation. Latino-Punic was spoken until the 3rd and the 4th centuries, and was recorded in seventy recovered texts.

Latino-Punic texts include the 1st-century Zliten LP1, or the second-century Lepcis Magna LP1.^{[clarification needed]} They were even written as late as the 4th century, Bir ed-Dreder LP2. Classical sources such as Strabo (63/4 BC – AD 24) mention the Phoenician conquest of Libya.

There is evidence that every form of Punic changed after 146 BC according to Sallust (86 – 34 BC), who claims Punic was "altered by their intermarriages with the Numidians".^[11] That account agrees with other evidence found to suggest a North-African influence on Punic, such as Libyco-Berber names in the Onomasticon of Eusebius.^[ambiguous] The last known testimony reporting Punic as a living language is that of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430).

Today there are a number of common Berber roots that descend from Punic, including the word for "learn" (*almid, *yulmad; compare Hebrew למד).^[12]

There are significant similarities between Neo-Punic and modern Maghrebi Arabic.^[13]

Description

Punic is known from inscriptions (most of them religious formulae) and personal name evidence. The play Poenulus by Plautus contains a few lines of vernacular Punic which have been subject to some research because unlike inscriptions, they largely preserve the vowels.^[14]

Augustine of Hippo is generally considered the last major ancient writer to have some knowledge of Punic and is considered the "primary source on the survival of [late] Punic". According to him, Punic was still spoken in his region (Northern Africa) in the 5th century, centuries after the fall of Carthage, and there were still people who called themselves "chanani" (Canaanite: Carthaginian) at that time.^[8]: 4 He wrote around 401:

Quae lingua si improbatur abs te, nega Punicis libris, ut a viris doctissimis proditur, multa sapienter esse mandata memoriae. Poeniteat te certe ibi natum, ubi huius linguae cunabula recalent.

And if the Punic language is rejected by you, you virtually deny what has been admitted by most learned men, that many things have been wisely preserved from oblivion in books written in the Punic tongue. Nay, you ought even to be ashamed of having been born in the country in which the cradle of this language is still warm.^[15]

Besides Augustine, the only proof of Punic-speaking communities at such a late period is a series of trilingual funerary texts found in the Christian catacombs of Sirte, Libya: the gravestones are carved in Ancient Greek, Latin and Punic. It might have even survived the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, as the geographer al-Bakri describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber, Latin or Coptic in Sirte,^[16] where spoken Punic survived well past written use.^[17] However, it is likely that Arabization of Punic speakers was facilitated by their language belonging to the same group (both were Semitic languages) as that of the conquerors and so they had many grammatical and lexical similarities.^[8]: 71

The idea that Punic was the origin of Maltese was first raised in 1565.^[18] Modern linguistics has proved that Maltese is in fact derived from Arabic, probably Siculo-Arabic specifically, with a large number of loanwords from Italian.^[19] However, Punic was indeed spoken on the island of Malta at some point in its history, as evidenced by both the Cippi of Melqart, which is integral to the decipherment of Punic after its extinction, and other inscriptions that were found on the islands. Punic itself, being Canaanite, was more similar to Modern Hebrew than to Arabic.

Like its Phoenician parent, Punic was written from right to left, in horizontal lines, without vowels.^[9]

Phonology

Punic has 22 consonants.^[20]

Orthography			Name	Transliteration	Pronunciation	Notes
Neo-Punic	Phoenician
		𐤀‎	ʾalp later ʾalf	ʾ	/ʔ/	Sometimes also used for the indication of vowels.
		𐤁‎	Bēt	b	/b/	Some words in Latin transliterations show a spirantization as [v], written indicated by "f" instead of the usual "b".
		𐤂‎	Gaml	g	/ɡ/
		𐤃‎	Dalt	d	/d/
		𐤄‎	He	h	/h/	Under Roman influence often elided but was still pronounced in certain Carthaginian words.
		𐤅‎	Waw	w	/w/	Sometimes also used for the indication of the vowel "u".
		𐤆‎	Zēn	z	/z/	In a few names attested as "sd", like in Hasdrubal for "ʿazrubaʿl", "esde" for heze ("this", used in some Punic dialects), but most texts show a simple "s": "syt" for zut ("this", in Late Punic)
		𐤇‎	Ḥet	ḥ	/ħ/	Seldom used as a vowel for "a, e, i, o, u", the sound of Het was weakened, and words written usually with it were often instead written with the letter Alf in Late Punic inscriptions.
		𐤈‎	Ṭet	ṭ	/tˤ/
		𐤉‎	Yod	y	/j/	Sometimes also used for the indication of the vowel "i" but mostly in foreign names.
		𐤊‎	Kap	k	/k/	Some words in Latin transliterations at the end of a word show a spirantization as [x], written indicated by "h" instead of the usual "ch".
		𐤋‎	Lamd	l	/l/
		𐤌‎	Mēm	m	/m/
		𐤍‎	Nūn	n	/n/
		𐤎‎	Semk	s	/s/
		𐤏‎	ʿēn	ʿ	/ʕ/	Often used for the vowel "a" and "o" in late Punic, mostly for foreign Latin names.
		𐤐‎	Pi later Fi	p f	/p/ /f/	In Late Punic and in Late Phoenician, ⟨p⟩ (/p/) underwent a fricativization to ⟨f⟩ (/f/) in the 3rd century BCE.
		𐤑‎	Tsade	ṣ	/sˤ/	Attested as "ts" mostly as "s" in Latin and Ancient Greek and Hittite, Lydian and Etruscan texts. Attested in some Latin texts as "st".
		𐤒‎	Qop later Qof	q	/q/
		𐤓‎	Rūš	r	/r/
		𐤔‎	Shin	š	/ʃ/
		𐤕‎	Taw	t	/t/

Table of consonant phonemes

	Labial		Alveolar				Palatal / Velar		Uvular / Pharyngeal		Glottal
			plain		emphatic
Nasal		m		n
Stop	p~f	b	t	d	tˤ		k	ɡ	q		ʔ
Fricative			s	z	sˤ		ʃ		ħ	ʕ	h
Approximant		w		l				j
Trill				r

Grammar

The definite article was evolving from Phoenician ha- to an unaspirated article a- by 406 BC, when both variants were attested. In later inscriptions, only a- is used.^[21]

Examples

Act V of Poenulus opens with Hanno speaking in Punic, his native language, in the first ten lines. The language of the next few lines (italicized) is uncertain but is believed to be Hebrew or "Lybic" [sic] (likely a misspelling of Libyc, a reference to one of the Berber languages), if not Punic. Plautus then provides a Latin translation of the preceding lines:^[22]

Yth alonim ualonuth sicorathi symacom syth ⁹³⁰
chy mlachthi in ythmum ysthyalm ych-ibarcu mysehi
li pho caneth yth bynuthi uad edin byn ui
bymarob syllohom alonim ubymysyrthohom
byth limmoth ynnocho thuulech-antidamas chon
ys sidobrim chi fel yth chyl is chon chen liful ⁹³⁵
yth binim ys dybur ch-innocho-tnu agorastocles
yth emanethi hy chirs aelichot sithi nasot
bynu yid ch-illuch ily gubulim lasibithim
bodi aly thera ynnynu yslym min cho-th iusim

Yth alonim ualoniuth sicorathii sthymhimi hymacom syth ⁹⁴⁰
combaepumamitalmetlotiambeat
iulecantheconaalonimbalumbar dechor
bats . . . . hunesobinesubicsillimbalim
esseantidamossonalemuedubertefet
donobun.hun ec cil thumucommucroluful ⁹⁴⁵
altanimauosduberithemhuarcharistolem
sitt esed anec naso ters ahelicot
alemu [y]s duber timur mucop[m] suistiti
aoccaaneclictorbod es iussilim limmim colus

deos deasque veneror, qui hanc urbem colunt, ⁹⁵⁰
ut quod de mea re huc veni rite venerim,
measque hic ut gnatas et mei fratris filium
reperire me siritis, di vostram fidem.
[quae mihi surruptae sunt et fratris filium.]
sed hic mihi antehac hospes Antidamas fuit; ⁹⁵⁵
eum fecisse aiunt, sibi quod faciundum fuit.
eius filium esse hic praedicant Agorastoclem:
ad eum hospitalem hanc tesseram mecum fero;
is in hisce habitare monstratust regionibus.
hos percontabor qui hinc egrediuntur foras.^[23]

An English translation is as follows:

I worship the gods and goddesses who preside over this city, that I may have come hither with good omen as to this business of mine, on which I have come; and, ye gods, lend me your aid, that you may permit me to find my daughters and the son of my cousin; those who were stolen away from me, and his son from my cousin. But here lived formerly my guest Antidamas. They say that he has done that which he was doomed to do. They say that his son Agorastocles lives here. To him am I carrying with me this token of hospitality. He has been pointed as living in this neighbourhood. I'll make enquiry of these who are coming hither out of doors.^[22]

As a Latin transliteration, the text recorded necessarily departs from the original Punic speech. In addition, the "unknown" text differs in different manuscript sources, with the P ("Palatine") script showing some words being split out and some mis-interpretations.^[24] The "unknown" text used here is from the A (Ambrosian Palimpsest) family; both families have lost small chunks of text over time. Some efforts have been made to, among other things, fill in the redactions in the "unknown language" part and to properly split the morphemes. The close mirroring between lines 930-931a/940 and lines 937/947 (underlined above) appear to suggest that the "unknown language" text is also Punic. It is usually assumed that the more corrupted "unknown" form is earlier.^[25][26][27] Some Punic phrases known in the text include:

• 930/940: Yth alonim ualoniuth sicorathii (sthymhimi) hymacom syth = ʾYT ʾLNM WʾLNT ŠQRʾT [940: ŠTMḤW] HMQM ZʾT. The "z" (𐤆) comes from an "esse" kept in the P version. "mucom" in 949 is also MQM.^[25]
• 937/947: yth emanethi hy chirs aelichot / sitt esed anec naso ters ahelicot = ʾT ʾMNTY Hʾ ḤRŠ YŠ HHLYKT / ŠʾTY SʿD ʾNK NŠʾTY TRŠ HHLYKT. Same "esse".^[25]
• "duber" in 940-949: Semitic root DBR "read".^[26] "fel": Semitic root P'L "do".^[25]

References

1. Moscati, Sabatino (2001). The Phoenicians. I.B.Tauris. p. 200. ISBN 9781850435334.
2. Palma, Salvatore Di (2014-11-18). L'Histoire des marques depuis l'antiquité jusqu'au moyen âge (in French). Société des Ecrivains. p. 139. ISBN 9782342031201.
3. Jouhaud, Edmond Jules René (1968). Historie de l'Afrique du Nord (in French). Éditions des Deux Cogs dÓr. p. 22.
4. Camps, Gabriel (2015-10-09). L'Afrique du Nord au féminin (in French). Perrin (réédition numérique FeniXX). p. 45. ISBN 9782262057435.
5. Temporini, Hildegard (2016-09-26). Politische Geschichte (Provinzen und Randvölker: Allgemeines; Britannien, Hispanien, Gallien) (in French). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 664. ISBN 9783110882070.
6. Caruana, A. A. (1852). Report on the Phœnician and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta. U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 50.
7. Guzzo, Maria Giulia Amadasi (2014). "Punic Scripts". In Jo Ann Hackett and Walter Emanuel Aufrecht (ed.). "An Eye for Form": Epigraphic Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-1-57506-303-4. The place to begin is with a definition of what can be called a Punic script in relation to a Punic language. Conventionally, we call "Punic" the writing typical of Carthage, which spread to other colonies when the "New City" became the "capital" of the Phoenician west. Judging from the existing data on the history of the region, Carthage became leader of the other colonies around the middle to the end of the 6th century BC, when we first know of symbola with the Etruscan cities, the first treaty with Rome (ca. 509 BC), and the first Carthaginian involvement in wars in Sardinia and Sicily. One can suppose that, before this period, the Phoenician language, written according to Phoenician orthographic and paleographic conventions, was still in use in the west, with some local changes in the scripts from region to region or from city to city… As for language, the Phoenician-Punic grammars (the authors of which generally do not agree on the classification of the different phases and dialects of Phoenician) make a distinction between Phoenician and Punic. They lack precision, however, when they attempt to define the characteristics of Punic and the period in which it originated… We are able to distinguish Punic from Phoenician (in part) because of the orthography of the written language. The first linguistic characteristic we can recognize is the tendency to drop the pronunciation of the laryngeal ʾalep, followed by he (in Punic), and finally, the whole series of laryngeals and pharyngeals (in late Punic).
8. Jongeling, Karel; Kerr, Robert M. (2005). Late Punic Epigraphy: An Introduction to the Study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic Inscriptions. Mohr Siebeck. ISBN 978-3-1614-8728-6.
9. "Punic". Omniglot. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
10. Rollin, Charles, , archived from the original on 2008-05-09, retrieved 2014-06-18{{citation}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
11. Sall. Iug. 78
12. Blažek, Václav (2014), "Phoenician/Punic Loans in Berber Languages and Their Role in Chronology of Berber" 2019-06-22 at the Wayback Machine, Folia Orientalia, Vol. 51, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.
13. "Jewish Arab Liturgies". The Jewish Quarterly Review. Macmillan. 1894. p. 123. Retrieved 2022-07-10. Whether with Schroeder we have to account for this in the Neo-Punic—and also in the Maghribine Arabic-as due to Barbary influence, is questionable, as this would, even according to him, only hold good for the gutturals. It seems rather to be the result of natural decay, furthered by the contact with alien languages. Many of the features of the Maghribine Arabic are also found in the Maltese dialect, where we cannot well speak of Barbary influence. Without, however, going deeper into this matter, we may be satisfied with establishing the above-mentioned similarity between the orthography of the Neo-Punic and that of the Maghribine Arabic.
14. Sznycer, Maurice (1967). Les passages puniques en transcription latine dans le Poenulus de Plaute [The Punic passages in Latin transcription in Poenulus by Plautus]. Paris: Librairie C. Klincksieck.
15. Augustine of Hippo, Monteverde, Franco (ed.), "Epistola 17" [Letter 17], Sant'Agostino — Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana
16. Dunn, Michael Collins (2013-07-30). "Did Punic Survive Until the Advent of Arabic? Part 4: The Post-Augustine Evidence". MEI Editor's Blog. Retrieved 2019-08-30.
17. Jongeling, Karel. . Dept of Comparative Linguistics, Leiden University. Archived from the original on 9 November 2005.
18. Cassar, Mario. [The History of the Maltese language] (in Maltese). Akkademja tal-Malti. Archived from the original on 2015-09-23.
19. Vella, Alexandra (2004). "Language contact and Maltese intonation: Some parallels with other language varieties". In Braunmüller, Kurt; Ferraresi, Gisella (eds.). Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History. Hamburg Studies on Multiculturalism. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 263. ISBN 978-90-272-1922-0.
20. Segert, Stanislav (1976). A Grammar of Phoenician and Punic. Munich: Beck. ISBN 978-3-406-00724-8.
21. Krahmalkov, Charles. R (2001). A Phoenician-Punic grammar, p. 10. Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section One, the Near East and the Middle East 54. Leiden, The Netherlands:Brill.
22. Riley, Henry Thomas. "The Comedies of Plautus". Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University.
23. Plautus. "Poenulus". The Latin Library.
24. Schröder, Paul (1869). Die phönizische Sprache: Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben : mit einem Anhang enthaltend eine Erklärung der punischen Stellen im Pönulus des Plautus (in German). Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses. p. 287.
25. Krahmalkov, Charles R. (1988). "Observations on the Punic Monologues of Hanno in the "Poenulus"". Orientalia. 57 (1): 55–66. ISSN 0030-5367. JSTOR 43075544.
26. Gratwick, A. S. (1971). "Hanno's Punic Speech in the Poenulus of Plautus". Hermes. 99 (1): 25–45. ISSN 0018-0777. JSTOR 4475664.
27. Rosół, Rafał (2012). "Zum Monolog des Hanno im plautinischen "Poenulus" (V. 930-960)". Hermes. 140 (1): 89–95. doi:10.25162/hermes-2012-0006. S2CID 252444932.

Further reading

• Hoftijzer, Jacob, and Karel Jongeling. 1985. Dictionary of the north-west Semitic inscriptions. With appendices by R. C. Steiner, A. Mosak-Moshavi, and B. Porten. 2 vols. Handbuch der Orienatlistik, Erste Abteilung: Der Nahe und Mittlere Osten 2. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Jongeling, K. 2008. Handbook of Neo-Punic Inscriptions. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
• Jongeling, K., and Robert M Kerr. 2005. Late Punic Epigraphy: An Introduction to the Study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic Inscriptions. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
• Kerr, Robert M. 2010. Latino-Punic Epigraphy: A Descriptive Study of the Inscriptions. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
• Krahmalkov, Charles. 1970. "Studies in Phoenician and Punic Grammar." Journal of Semitic Studies 15, no.2: 181–88.
• --. 2000. Phoenician-Punic dictionary. Studia Phoenicia 15. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters.
• --. 2001. A Phoenician-Punic grammar. Handbook of Oriental Studies: Section One, the Near East and the Middle East 54. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Schmitz, Philip C. "Phoenician-Punic Grammar and Lexicography in the New Millennium." Journal of the American Oriental Society 124, no. 3 (2004): 533-47. doi:10.2307/4132279.
• Segert, Stanislav. 1976. A Grammar of Phoenician and Punic. München: C.H. Beck.
• --. 2003. "Phoenician-punic: Grammar and dictionary." Archiv Orientální 71. no. 4: 551–56.
• Tomback, Richard S. 1978. A comparative Semitic lexicon of the Phoenician and Punic languages. Missoula, MT: Scholars.

External links

• Punic alphabet on Omniglot.com
• Phoenician fonts from unicode