A few weeks after buying Routledge’s Colloquial Persian for that purpose, I was already able to comprehend Persian at least in the basic level. As destiny works in mysterious ways, on May 2000 I suddenly got the feeling that I had to learn Persian. In January that year I bought at Livraria Cultura in São Paulo (my favorite!) the excellent Teach Yourself Arabic, but as I didn’t believe in my own capacity of learning the Arabic script (even though I had managed to master the more intrincate Devanagari of India) I had to learn for a long time from the very few transliterated examples in that book. Until early 1999, I had just learned the Hebrew alphabet (and not too well) and a few words. But then I was too unexperienced at linguistics, I had just learned German and was beginning to explore the Slavic languages, an effort whose reasonable result can be appreciated in my 1998 “ Polish Grammar”, which was the reason I decided to open my own site and discuss linguistics on the Net. My first was the very didactic “Every Day Hebrew” (NTC publ.) at a bookstore called Hugendubel in downtown Munich, Germany. I started off with these two languages not only because they are the most important of their group, but mainly because they were the only ones whose grammars and dictionary I had access to, having purchased several books since as early as 1995. I just wanted to understand what it meant a language to be “Semitic” and to discover by myself how close both languages were from each other. The first version of the present work was written by me in february 1999 it contained but a highlight on some of the features of Arabic and Hebrew and was the result of my first attempt at unravelling the mysteries of these important languages. I work as a language teacher and a tourist receptionist at Santos’ Tourism Bureau. I study languages for the sake of it and attend journalism at the Catholic University of my hometown, Santos, in the State of São Paulo. My name is Maurício Carvalho, I live in Brazil and am 24 years old. This Israeli guy was kind enough to e-mail me some corrections of this essay.Ĭlick here for an introduction to the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets (not very good yet)Īppendix 1: Etymology of Biblical Names from Hebrew and AramaicĪppendix 2: Etymologically Related Words in Arabic and HebrewĪppendix 3: Portuguese Words of Arabic Origin I wrote this essay basically to learn, so every comment, criticism and correction is welcome, and although much of this essay is a summarized reproduction of what I read, some of the conclusions and explanations are mine. Translated into English from the original in Portuguese on August 2000, and then enlarged. Some updates March 25 th, 2001 (William Chomski recognized as Noam’s father, thanks to e-mail) Below it, you can find the shorter Portuguese versionĪnd a Brief Introduction to Semitic Linguisticsīy Maurício Carvalho - Last updated August 19 th 2000. OBS: first part is a longer, more complete version in English.
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