paleolinguistics Paleolinguistics is a term used by some linguists for the study of the distant human past by linguistic means. For most historical linguists there is no separate field of paleolinguistics. Those who use the term are generally advocates of hypothes ...

, a Semitism is a grammatical or syntactical behaviour in a language which reveals that the influence of a

Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant a ...

is present. The most common example is the influence of

Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...

on some texts written in

Jewish Koine Greek Jewish Koine Greek, or Jewish Hellenistic Greek, is the variety of Koine Greek or "common Attic" found in a number of Alexandrian dialect texts of Hellenistic Judaism, most notably in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and associated li ...

.Jonathan T. Pennington Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew - Page 105 - 2007 "This nuanced difference between a “Semitic enhancement” and a “Semitism” enables us to reconsider whether an apparent linguistic anomaly in Greek (such as plural) is truly a "Semitism" and not merely an "enhancement".

References

{{reflist Language contact Semitic languages