Moabite language

Moabite
Spoken in	Formerly spoken in northwestern Jordan
Extinct	5th century BC
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Moabite
Language codes
ISO 639-3	obm

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 (e.g. 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.)

Bibliography

• Many comparisons of Biblical Hebrew with the language of the Mêša˓ inscription appear in Wilhelm Gesenius' Hebrew grammar, e.g. §2d, §5d, §7b, §7f, §49a, §54l, §87e, §88c, §117b, etc.