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|name=Phoenician |nativename=dabarīm Pōnnīm/Kana'nīm |states=Formerly spoken in Lebanon , Tunisia , Spain , Malta , Southern France and Sicily and other coastal outposts and islands throughout the Mediterranean. |extinct=continued in its Punic form perhaps as late as 7th Century CE |familycolor=Afro-Asiatic |fam2= Semitic |fam3= West Semitic |fam4= Central Semitic |fam5= Northwest Semitic |fam6= Canaanite |iso2=phn|iso3=phn}} Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called ''Pūt'' in Phoenician, Canaan in Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic , and Phoenicia in Greek and Latin . Phoenician is a Semitic Language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic . This area includes modern-day Lebanon , coastal Syria and northern Israel . Its speakers called their own language ''(dabarīm) Pōnnīm/Kana'nīm'' "Phoenician/Canaanite (speech)". Phoenician is known only from inscriptions such as Ahiram 's coffin, Kilamuwa 's tomb, Yehawmilk 's in Byblos , and occasional glosses in books written in other languages; Roman authors such as Sallust allude to some books written in Punic, but none have survived except occasionally in translation (eg. Mago's treatise) or in snippets (eg. in Plautus ' plays). Punic and its influences The significantly divergent later-form of the language that was spoken in the describes a people speaking a language that was not Berber , Latin or Coptic in the city of Sirt in northern Libya , a region where spoken Punic survived well past written use. {Link without Title} . The ancient Lybico-Berber alphabet derived from the Punic script still in irregular use by modern Berber groups such as the city of ''Cádiz'' ( Latin : ''Gades''), from Punic ''(Qart-)Gadir'' "The Walled (City)". Phonology, grammar and vocabulary It is difficult to evaluate sound-changes in Phoenician dialects over time because writers continued to use archaic "book-spellings" that did not mark vowels in any way. Punic writers fitfully added a system of '' Matres Lectionis '' (vowel letters) at a very late period, but soon thereafter mostly shifted to Latin- or Greek-based scripts, which had their own failings (ie. the inability to mark emphatic, laryngeal and guttural consonants). Certain similarities between Phoenician and its related neighbours include the vowel-shifts known ''en masse'' as the "Canaanite Vowel Shift": Proto-Northwest Semitic ''ā'' became ''ū'' (and Hebrew ''ō''), while stressed Proto-Semitic ''a'' became ''o'' (Hebrew ''å'') as shown by Latin and Greek transcriptions like ''rūs'' for "head, cape" (Hebrew ''rôš''). Despite this regional-specific name, Ancient Egyptian underwent this same vowel shift, which is evident in the spellings of late dialects of this language, particularly Coptic. Phoenician dialects also appear to have merged the three proto-Northwest Semitic sibilants ''sin'', ''shin'' and ''samekh'' at a fairly early stage. This process was irregular in Hebrew and Aramaic (see Shibboleth ), leaving later dialects of those languages with two distinct sounds, ''s'' and ''š''. In later Punic, the gutturals seem to have been entirely lost (thus merging ''tzade'' with unmarked ''s'' as well). The loss of emphatic and laryngeals was also present in certain Roman-era Hebrew dialects (such as at Qumran ) and common to all medieval ("Rabbinical") forms of the language, but not in Aramaic. Unique to Punic of all the Northwest Semitic languages was the shift ''p''>''f'' in all environments (as in proto-Arabic). Phoenician-Punic did ''not'' undergo the consonantal lenition process that most other Northwest Semitic languages did (such as Hebrew and Aramaic) and it maintained many of the "primitive" Northwest Semitic sounds that were merged in other dialects (such as the merger of laryngeals and gutturals as laryngeals). This lenition is visible in the Hebrew verb conjugations listed below, where the underlying ''p''>''f'' (spelled as "ph") in certain forms because of the phonetic environment in which it appears, whereas in Punic the same verb appears simply with an underlying ''f'' in all places.
The earliest known inscriptions in Phoenician come from Byblos and date back to ca. 1000 BCE. Phoenician and Punic inscriptions are found in Lebanon , Syria , Israel , Cyprus , Sardinia , Sicily , Tunisia , Morocco , Algeria , Malta and other locations such as the Iberian Peninsula as late as the early centuries of the Christian Era. Knowledge of Hebrew aided the reconstruction of Phoenician inscriptions. One of the earliest essays in Phoenician language studies was Wilhelm Gesenius ( 1786 - 1842 ), ''Scripturae linguaeque phoeniciae monumenta'', 1837, analyzing texts from coins and monumental inscriptions. Nowadays, one can study Phoenician in the U.S. at Harvard University , Johns Hopkins University , the University Of Michigan and University Of Chicago . See also
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