The Philistine language is the extinct language of the Philistines, spoken? and rarely inscribed? along the coastal strip of southwestern Canaan. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survive as cultural loan-words in Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine Pentapolis, or the ?argáz receptacle in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else,^[1] or the title padî^[2]

There is not enough information of the language of the Philistines to relate it securely to any other languages: possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, support the independently-held theory that immigrant Philistines originated among "sea peoples". There are hints of non-Semitic vocabulary and onomastics, but the inscriptions, not clarified by some modern forgeries,^[3] are enigmatic:^[4] a number of miniature "anchor seals" have been found at various Philistine sites.^[5] On the other hand, evidence from the slender corpus of brief inscriptions from Iron Age IIA-IIB Tell es-Safi demonstrate that at some stage during the local Iron Age, the Philistines started using one of the branches (either Phoenician or Hebrew) of the local Canaanite language and script,^[6] which in time masked and replaced the earlier, non-local linguistic traditions, reduced to a linguistic substratum. Towards the end of the local Iron Age, in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, the primary written language in Philistia was a Canaanite dialect that was written in a version of the the West Semitic alphabet so distinctive that Frank Moore Cross termed it the Neo-Philistine script. ^[7] Thus, to judge from the more numerous later inscriptions alone, it could appear that the language is simply part of the local Canaanite dialect continuum.^[8]

The Ekron inscription, identifying the archaeological site securely as the Biblical Ekron, is the first connected body of text to be identified as Philistine text. However, it is written in a Canaanite dialect similar to Ph?nician. ^{[9] [10]}

Philistine as an Indo-European language

There is some limited evidence in favor of the suggestion^[11] that the Philistines did originally speak some Indo-European language. A number of Philistine-related words found in the Hebrew Bible are not Semitic, and can in some cases, with reservations, be traced back to Proto-Indo-European roots. For example, R.D. Barnett^[12] traced the Philistine word for captain, seren,^[13] may be related to the Greek word tyrannos, borrowed from one of the languages of western Asia Minor.^[14] Some Philistine names, such as Goliath, Achish, and Phicol, appear to be non-Semitic in origin, and Indo-European etymologies have been suggested. Recently, an inscription dating to the late 10th/early 9th centuries BC with two names, very similar to one of the suggested etymologies of the popular Philistine name Goliath (compare Lydian Alyattes^[15], Greek Kalliades) was found in the excavations at Tell es-Safi/Gath. The appearance of additional non-Semitic names in Philistine inscriptions from later stages of the Iron Age is an additional indication of the non-Semitic origins of this group.

Notes

External links

• The Canaanite Dialect of the Dedicatory Royal Inscription from Ekron, 2004 - A summary of articles about the Ekron inscription.

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