| 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 |
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | sem | |
| ISO 639-3 | obm | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite language, 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;. The main features distinguishing Moabite from fellow Canaanite languages such as Hebrew 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.)
 |
This Afro-Asiatic languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
