Edomite | |
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Region | southwestern Jordan and southern Israel. |
Era | early 1st millennium BCE |
Language family | Afro-Asiatic |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | xdm |
Linguist List | xdm |
Glottolog | edom1234 |
Edomite was a Northwest Semitic Canaanite language, very similar to Biblical 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 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 ("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.
Edomite | Reconstructed transliteration (per Ahituv 2008) | Translation |
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אמר למלך אמר לבלבל | ʾōmēr lammeleḵ ʾĕmōr ləḆīlbēl | (Thus) said to the king: Say to Bilbel, |
השלם את והברכתך | hăšālōm ʾattā wəhīḇraḵəttīḵā | "Are you well?" and "I bless you |
לקוס ועת תן את האכל | ləQōs wəʿattā tēn ʾet hāʾoḵel | by Qos." And now give the food |
אשר עמד אחאמה | ʾăšer ʿīmmaḏ ʾĂḥīʾīmmō | that Ahi'immoh |
והרם של על מזl ʿal mīzl lift (up) upon (the) alחמד האכל | pen ye]ḥmad hāʾoḵel | lest] the food become leavened |
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