| Moabite | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Formerly spoken in northwestern Jordan | |
| Language extinction | 5th century BC | |
| Language family | Afro-Asiatic | |
| 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 central-western 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.)
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