(Ne)opravdanost termina semitski kao odrednice za skupinu naroda i jezika
(Un)justifiability of term Semitic as guidelinesfor the group of nations and languages

Summary/Abstract: For religious or academic reasons and colonialist intentions, the peoples and languages now known as Semitic have captured the attention of European scholars for centuries. When studying the Old Testament, European scholars were primarily interested in Hebrew and Aramaic, as the languages in which the Old Testament was written, and in Arabic which, as a closely related language, was of considerable assistance in understanding the more obscure passages of “holy” writ. Guided exclusively by what the Old Testament has to say in regard to the division of nations among the heirs of the three sons of Noah, they dubbed as Semitic these and every other oriental language (and the peoples who spoke them) in which they discerned certain similarities. This is contested by Arab scholars, and some Europeans too, who uphold the prevailing view of the origins of these peoples and their original homeland and insist on the use of the term Arabic or Arabian in this context.

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