From Old Babylonian to Levantine

One of the words which were frequently repeated in the film entiltled The Poor Man of Nippur, World s first film in Babylonian, was ENZU, the word for a goat in Old Babylonian´-or-Southern Akkadian. This word is still in use in Levantine, the main spoken lanuage in the Levant.

Indeed, the word found in Levantine and written in Arabic -script- as عنزة is very similar to the Old Babylonian word, Enzu. Comparing between the words for goat in Modern Semitic languages, I have found out that the word in Levantine is the closest for having preserved the consonant (N) which seems to have been lost in all the other Modern Semitic languages apart from Levantine.

Take for exemple the word for goat in Modern Hebrew ע-;-ז-;- , it can be spelled Ez in English. Semilarly, the word for goat in the Aramaic of Maalula,ע-;-ז-;-א-;-, Izah, and in Syriac ܥ-;-ܶ-;-ܙ-;-ܳ-;-ܐ-;-, Izu, have no´-or-have lost the consonant (N). Moreover, there is no surprise that the word for goat in Arabic, ماعز, Maiz, is too different from its counterparts in above-mentioned Modern Semitic´-or-basically Semitic languages. Given Arabic, has been an Imperial language which has absorbed words from many Afroasiatic languages as well as Indo-Iranian languages, it has taken a path which deviates to a certain extent from the Semitic perceived path. Anyway, the equivalent for goat in Modern Standard Arabic does not have the consonant (N) either. Clearly, Levantine seems to have preserved the original pronunciation of the word for goat for thousand of years.

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