Amorite language

Amorite Spoken in: ancient Mesopotamia, by the Amorites Language extinction: 2nd millennium BC Language family: Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
  West Semitic
   Central Semitic
    Northwest Semitic
     Amorite Language codes ISO 639-1: none ISO 639-2: – ISO 639-3: – Note: This page may contain IPAphonetic symbols in Unicode.

Amorite is an early Northwest Semitic language, spoken by the Amorite tribes prominent in early Near Eastern history. It is known exclusively from non-Akkadian proper names recorded by Akkadian scribes during periods of Amorite rule in Babylonia (end of the 3rd and beginning of the 1st millennium), notably from Mari, and to a lesser extent Alalakh, Harmal, and Khafaya. Occasionally such names are also found in early Egyptian texts; and one place-name — "Snir" (שְׂנִיר) for Mount Hermon — is known from the Bible (Deut. 3:9). Notable characteristics include:

The usual Semitic imperfect-perfect distinction is found — e.g. Yantin-Dagan, 'Dagon gives' (ntn); Raṣa-Dagan, 'Dagon was pleased' (rṣy). It included a 3rd-person suffix -a (unlike Akkadian or Hebrew), and an imperfect vowel -a-, as in Arabic rather than the Hebrew and Aramaic -i-.
There was a verb form with a geminate second consonant — e.g. Yabanni-Il, 'God creates' (root bny).
In several cases where Akkadian has š, Amorite, like Hebrew and Arabic, has h, thus hu 'his', -haa 'her', causative h- or ʔ- (I. Gelb 1958).
The 1st-person perfect is in -ti (singular), -nu (plural), as in the Canaanite languages.

Sources

D. Cohen, Les langues chamito-semitiques, CNRS: Paris 1985.
I. Gelb, "La lingua degli amoriti", Academia Nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti 1958, no. 8, 13, pp. 143-163.
H. B. Huffmon. Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts. A Structural and Lexical Study, Baltimore 1965.
Remo Mugnaioni. "Notes pour servir d’approche à l’amorrite" Travaux 16 – La sémitologie aujourd’hui, Cercle de Linguistique d’Aix-en-Provence, Centre des sciences du langage, Aix-en-Provence 2000, p. 57-65.
M. P. Streck, Das amurritische Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit. Band 1: Die Amurriter, Die onomastische Forschung, Orthographie und Phonologie, Nominalmorphologie. Alter Orient und Altes Testament Band 271/1, Münster 2000.

Categories: Amorites | Northwest Semitic languages | Extinct languages of Asia