Edomite language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edomite | ||
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Spoken in: | Formerly spoken in southwestern Jordan. | |
Language extinction: | from the 6th century BC | |
Language family: | Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Edomite |
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Language codes | ||
ISO 639-1: | none | |
ISO 639-2: | sem | |
ISO 639-3: | xdm | |
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. |
The Edomite language is the extinct Hebrew Canaanite language of 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 probably written with a Canaanite alphabet; like Moabite, it retained feminine -t. However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet, and specifically Arabic elements such as whb "gave" (in names) and tgr "merchant" began showing up in texts.
Biblically, since "Edom" is an alternate name of Esau, who was a descendant of Eber through Abraham, the Edomites are regarded as being a Hebrew people, as are the Moabites and Ammonites. For this reason, the four closely related south Canaanite languages are sometimes termed "Hebrew languages". not very helpful
[edit] Reference
- F. Israel in D. Cohen, Les langues chamito-sémitiques. CNRS:Paris 1988.