Moabite language
|
|
The Moabite language is an extinct Hebrew Canaanite dialect, 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 (http://www.kchanson.com/ANCDOCS/westsem/elkerak.html); this is sufficient to show that it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, despite a few differences. The main differences noted, in the admittedly short text, are: a plural in -n rather than -m (eg mlkn "kings" for Biblical Hebrew məlākm), like Aramaic and Arabic; retention of the feminine ending -at which Biblical Hebrew reduces to -āh (eg qryt "town", Biblical Hebrew qiryāh); 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.)