By local position they should belong to the western, or Aramaic branch, rather than to the eastern, or Assyro-Babylonian, or to the southern, or Arab.

But the linguistic evidence scarcely lends itself to such a view, while the historic leads decidedly to an opposite conclusion.

There is a far closer analogy between the Palestinian group of languages--Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, and the Assyro-Babylonian, than between either of these and the Aramaic.

The Aramaic is scanty both in variety of grammatical forms and in vocabulary; the Phoenician and Assyro-Babylonian are comparatively copious.[36] The Aramaic has the character of a degraded language; the Assyro-Babylonian and the Phoenician are modelled on a primitive type.[37] In some respects Phoenician is even closer to Assyro-Babylonian than Hebrew is--e.g.

in preferring _at_ to _ah_ for the feminine singular termination.[38] The testimony of history to the origin of the Phoenicians is the following.