Edomite was a
Northwest Semitic Canaanite language, very similar to
Hebrew, Ekronite, Ammonite, Phoenician, Amorite and Sutean, spoken by the
Edomites in southwestern
Jordan and parts of
Israel in the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE. It is extinct and known only from a very small corpus.
It is attested in a scant number of
impression seals,
ostraca, and a single late 7th or early 6th century BCE letter, discovered in
Horvat Uza
Horvat Uza ( he, חורבת עוזה) is an archaeological site located in the northeast of the Negev desert in Israel. The site is located in the east of the Arad, Israel, Arad Valley and overlooks Nahal Qinah (Qinah Valley). In ancient times, ...
.
Like
Moabite, but unlike Hebrew, it retained the feminine ending ''-t'' in the singular
absolute state. In early times, it seems to have been written with a
Phoenician alphabet. However, by the 6th century BCE, it adopted the
Aramaic alphabet
The ancient Aramaic alphabet was adapted by Arameans from the Phoenician alphabet and became a distinct script by the 8th century BC. It was used to write the Aramaic languages spoken by ancient Aramean pre-Christian tribes throughout the Fertil ...
. Meanwhile,
Aramaic or
Arabic features such as ''whb'' ("gave") and ''tgr'' ("merchant") entered the language, with ''whb'' becoming especially common in proper names. Like many other Canaanite languages, Edomite features a prefixed definite article derived from the presentative particle (''h-ʔkl'' ‘the food’). The
diphthong
A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
/aw/ contracted to
/o/ between the 7th and 5th century BCE, as foreign transcriptions of the divine name "
Qos" indicate a transition in pronunciation from ''Qāws'' to ''Qôs''.
Examples
References
Canaanite languages
Hebrew language
Edom
Languages attested from the 1st millennium BC
Languages extinct in the 6th century BC
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