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; 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 ''-în'' rather than ''-îm'' (eg ''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''.)