Edomite language

Edomite
Spoken in	Formerly spoken in southwestern Jordan.
Extinct	from the 6th century BC
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Edomite
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xdm

The Edomite language was a Canaanite language spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan in the first millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Canaanite alphabet; like the Moabite language, it retained feminine -t. However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb ("gave") and tgr "merchant" entered the language, with whb becoming especially common in proper names.

References

• F. Israel in D. Cohen, Les langues chamito-sémitiques. CNRS:Paris 1988.

See also Victor Sasson, "An Edomite Joban Text, with a Biblical Joban Parallel", Zeitschrift fur die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 117 (Berlin, 2006), 601-615.