From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and in this episode, I'd like to revisit something that I've been

thinking about for a while.

And what I mean is that a couple years ago, I did one of our language family shows, and

it was about Semitic.

The Semitic languages include Hebrew and Arabic and Aramea can, across the Red Sea in Ethiopia,

and Tom Haric.

And it's a fascinating group of languages.

Many of you had asked for me to do a show about that, and I did.

But you know what?

I was actually cheating, to an extent, because Semitic is not a language family, technically

speaking.

As I said in the episode, but still, the episode was all about Semitic.

The general implication was that there is endo-European, and then there's Semitic.

It's an easy impression to get.

But really, Semitic is part of a whole language family far beyond itself, that you probably

didn't know existed.

And I acknowledged it in the Semitic show, but just in a drive-by kind of way.

It's time to actually do a show about that family, which is multifarious, large, influential,

utterly fascinating.

It's a family that I remember when I was a kid, and I used to find myself looking through

big old books just for fun, because I was crazy then, like I am now.

...