Hebrew and Arabic much closer than thought.

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[いいですね]

I don't have any specific facts to offer but the issues you're describing in Proto-Semitic linguistics come from the fact that these dialects didn't branch cleanly à la phylogenetic myth of language change. So the evolution of the southern Semitic dialects, like Arabic, aren't so inseparable from the evolution of other Semitic languages because of waves of post-Semitic isoglosses and shared innovations spreading throughout the community over some seven millenia. It's inevitably messy and complicated but that's what makes this puzzle so much fun to solve.

Yeah, absolutely!

I've discussed it with my Comparative Semitics professor the other day. And he indeed also went with 'isoglossic messiness' + A more isolated dialect of Arabic that kept many archaisms that had influence on the Arabic poetic language.

That way Arabic can keep separated from Hebrew a bit more, while retaining the possibility to have it affected by those damn isoglosses.

It's interesting to see that these isoglosses still influence Arabic though, while the separation must have already been quite distinct. But it's possible. Just like we see several sound shifts spread throughout Germanic languages at points in time where the languages must at least up to some point have been quite distinct already.

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