Philistine language

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The Philistine language is the extinct language of the Philistines, spoken— and rarely inscribed— along the coastal strip of southwestern Canaan. Very little is known about the language, one dialect of which is referred in the Bible as "Ashdodit" (i.e., from the city Ashdod).

There is not enough information of the language of the Philistines to relate it securely to any other languages: possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, support the independently-held theory that immigrant Philistines originated among "sea peoples". There are hints of non-Semitic vocabulary and onomastics, but the inscriptions are enigmatic: a number of miniature "anchor seals" have been found at various Philistine sites. On the other hand, evidence from the slender corpus of brief inscriptions from Iron Age IIA-IIB Tell es-Safi demonstrate that at some stage during the local Iron Age, the Philistines started using one of the branches (either Phoenician or Hebrew) of the local Canaanite language and script, which in time masked and replaced the earlier, non-local linguistic traditions, reduced to a linguistic substratum. Towards the end of the local Iron Age, in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, the primary written language in Philistia was a Canaanite dialect that was written in a version of the the West Semitic alphabet so distinctive that Frank Moore Cross termed it the Neo-Philistine script. Thus, to judge from the more numerous later inscriptions alone, it could appear that the language is simply part of the local Canaanite dialect continuum. The Ekron inscription, identifying the archaeological site securely as the Biblical Ekron, is the first connected body of text to be identified as Philistine text.

Philistine as an Indo-European language

There is some limited evidence in favor of the suggestion that the Philistines did originally speak some Indo-European language. A number of Philistine-related words found in the Hebrew Bible are not Semitic, and can in some cases, with reservations, be traced back to Proto-Indo-European roots. For example, the Philistine word for captain, seren, may be related to the Greek word tyrannos (which, however, has not been traced to a PIE root). Some Philistine names, such as Goliath, Achish, and Phicol, appear to be non-Semitic in origin, and Indo-European etymologies have been suggested. Recently, an inscription dating to the late 10th/early 9th centuries BC with two names, very similar to one of the suggested etymologies of the popular Philistine name Goliath (Lydian Alyattes) was found in the excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath. The appearance of additional non-Semitic names in Philistine inscriptions from later stages of the Iron Age is an additional indication of the non-Semitic origins of this group.

Notes

External links

• The Canaanite Dialect of the Dedicatory Royal Inscription from Ekron, 2004 - A summary of articles about the Ekron inscription.

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