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Edomite was a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language, very similar to Biblical Hebrew, Ekronite, Ammonite, Phoenician, Amorite and Sutean, spoken by the Edomites in Idumea (modern-day southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel) in the 2nd and 1st millennium BCE. It is extinct and known only from an extremely small corpus, attested in a scant number of impression seals, ostraca, and a single late 7th or early 6th century BCE letter, discovered in Horvat Uza.

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. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb ("gave") and tgr/tcr ("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 (for example as in h-ʔkl ‘the food’). The diphthong /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

1. Edomite at MultiTree on the Linguist List
2. ^ Lemaire, André (2013). "Edomite and Hebrew". In Khan, Geoffrey; Bolozky, Shmuel; Fassberg, Steven; Rendsburg, Gary A.; Rubin, Aaron D.; Schwarzwald, Ora R.; Zewi, Tamar (eds.). Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. doi:10.1163/2212-4241_ehll_EHLL_COM_00000499. ISBN 978-90-04-17642-3.
3. Wilson-Wright, Aren M. (2019). "The Canaanite Languages" (PDF). The Semitic Languages. London, Routledge: 509–532. doi:10.4324/9780429025563-20. ISBN 9780429025563. S2CID 189509857 – via utexas.edu.
4. Vanderhooft, David S. (1995). "The Edomite Dialect and Script: A Review of Evidence". p. 142.
5. Young, I. (2011). Diversity in Pre-Exilic Hebrew. Forschungen zum Alten Testament. Eisenbrauns. p. 39. ISBN 978-3-16-151676-4. Retrieved 2023-06-03. While we were fortunate enough to have a major inscription, the Mesha Stone, for Moabite, we are much less fortunate as regards Edomite. Here we are reliant on a few short and fragmentary inscriptions and a number of seals.
6. W. Randall Garr (2004). Dialect Geography of Syria-Palestine, 1000-586 B.C.E. Eisenbrauns. p. 35. ISBN 978-1-57506-091-0. OCLC 1025228731.
7. Ahituv, Shmuel (2008). Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period. Carta. p. 351. ISBN 9789652207081.

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