Phoenician was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called "
Put" in
Ancient Egyptian, "
Canaan" in Phoenician,
Arabic,
Hebrew, and
Aramaic, and "
Phoenicia" in
Greek and
Latin. Phoenician is a
Semitic language of the
Canaanite subgroup; its closest living relative is
Hebrew. The area where Phoenician was spoken includes modern-day
Lebanon, coastal
Syria, northern
Israel,
Tunisia,
Algeria, and
Malta.
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 (e.g., Mago's treatise) or in snippets (e.g., in Plautus' plays). The Cippi of Melqart, discovered in Malta in 1694, were inscribed in two languages, Ancient Greek and Carthaginian. This made it possible for French scholar Abbe Barthelemy to decipher and reconstruct the Carthaginian alphabet.[1]
The significantly divergent later-form of the language that was spoken in the Tyrian Phoenician colony of Carthage is known as Punic; it remained in use there for considerably longer than Phoenician did in Phoenicia itself, arguably surviving into Augustine's time. It may have even survived the Arabic conquest of North Africa the geographer al-Bakri 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. [1]. However it is likely that Arabization of the Punics was facilitated by their language belonging to the same group (the Semitic languages group) as that of the conquerors, and thus having many grammatical and lexical similarities.
The ancient Lybico-Berber alphabet still in irregular use by modern Berber groups such as the Tuareg is known by the native name tifinag, possibly a declined form of the borrowed word Punic. Still, a direct derivation from the Phoenician-Punic script is debated and far from established, since both writing systems are very different. As far as language (not the script) is concerned, some borrowings from Punic appear in modern Berber dialects one interesting example is agadir "wall" from Punic gader.
