| Sabaic | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Ethiopia | |
| Region | Horn of Africa & Arabian Peninsula | |
| Total speakers | Extinct | |
| Language family | Afro-Asiatic
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | sem | |
| ISO 639-3 | xsa | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Sabaean (or Sabaic) language was an Old South Arabian language spoken in Yemen from c. 1000 BC to the 6th century AD, by the Sabaeans; it was used as a written language by some other peoples (sha`bs) of Ancient Yemen, including the Hashidites, Sirwahites, Humlanites, Ghaymanites, Himyarites, Radmanites etc. [1]. It was written in the South Arabian alphabet.
The South Arabic alphabet used in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Yemen beginning in the 8th century BC (all three locations) later evolved into the Ge'ez alphabet. Ge'ez language is no longer thought, as previously assumed, to be an offshoot of Sabaean or Old South Arabian[2], and there is linguistic evidence of Semitic languages being spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia since at least 2000 BC.[3].
References
- ^ *Andrey Korotayev. Ancient Yemen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-19-922237-1[1].
- ^ Weninger, Stefan "Ge'ez" in Encyclopaedia Aethiopica: D-Ha, p.732.
- ^ Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilization of Late Antiquity. Edinburgh: University Press, 1991, pp.57.
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