Moabite language
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| Moabite | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Formerly spoken in northwestern Jordan | |
| Language extinction: | 5th century BC | |
| Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Moabite |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | sem | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | obm | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The Moabite language is an extinct Hebrew Canaanite dialect, spoken in Moab (modern-day northwestern Jordan) in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela; this is sufficient to show that it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, despite a few differences. The main differences noted in the admittedly short text are: a plural in -în rather than -îm (eg mlkn "kings" for Biblical Hebrew məlākîm), like Aramaic and Arabic; retention of the feminine ending -at which Biblical Hebrew reduces to -āh (e.g. qryt "town", Biblical Hebrew qiryāh) but retains in the construct state nominal form (e.g.qiryát yisrael "town of Israel"); and retention of a verb form with infixed -t-, also found in Arabic and Akkadian (w-’ltḥm "I began to fight", from the root lḥm.)
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