Ammonite
Spoken in	Formerly spoken in northwestern Jordan
Language extinction	5th century BC
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic West Semitic Central Semitic Northwest Semitic Canaanite Ammonite
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	sem
ISO 639-3	–
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

For other uses of Ammonite, see Ammonite (disambiguation).

The Ammonite language is the extinct Canaanite language of the Ammonite people mentioned in the Bible, who used to live in modern-day Jordan, and after whom its capital Amman is named. Only fragments of their language survive - chiefly the 9th century BC Amman Citadel Inscription, the 7th-6th century BC Tell Siran bronze bottle, and a few ostraca. As far as can be determined from this small corpus, it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, with some possible Aramaic influence including the use of the verb ‘bd instead of the more common Biblical Hebrew ‘śh for "to work" (a similar Aramaic influence is witnessed in Modern Hebrew in which ‘bd may mean "work", e.g. as in the name of the Israeli Labor Party, `Avoda). The only other notable difference with Biblical Hebrew is the sporadic retention of feminine singular -t (eg ’šħt "cistern", but ‘lyh "high (fem.)".)

[edit] References

• Cohen, D (ed) (1988). "Les Langues Chamito-semitiques". Les langues dans le monde ancien et modern, part 3. Paris: CNRS. 
• Aufrecht, WE (1989). A Corpus of Ammonite Inscriptions. Lewiston: E. Mellen Press. ISBN 0889460892. 

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