Edomite language - The Encyclopedia

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Edomite
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
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	None
ISO 639-2:	`sem`
ISO 639-3:	`xdm`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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.

Biblically, "Edom" is an alternate name of Esau, a descendant of Eber through Abraham, and the Edomites are regarded as being a Hebrew people, as are the Moabites and Ammonites.

[edit] References

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

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