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
Writing system	Phoenician alphabet
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. It was written using a variant of the Phoenician alphabet.

Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, which is the only known extensive text in this language. In addition there are the three line El-Kerak Inscription and a few seals. 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.