Amorite language

Amorite is an extinct early Semitic language, formerly spoken during the Bronze Age by the Amorite tribes prominent in ancient Near Eastern history. It is known from Ugaritic, classed by some as its westernmost dialect and the only known Amorite dialect preserved in writing,[2][3][4] and non-Akkadian proper names recorded by Akkadian scribes during periods of Amorite rule in Babylonia (the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC), notably from Mari and to a lesser extent Alalakh, Tell Harmal and Khafajah. Occasionally, such names are also found in early Egyptian texts; and one placename, "Sənīr" سنير (שְׂנִיר) for Mount Hermon, is known from the Bible (Book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 3:9).[5]

Amorite is considered an archaic Northwest Semitic language, but there is also some evidence for other groupings.

Notable characteristics include the following:

• The usual Northwest Semitic imperfective-perfective distinction is found: 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 — Yabanni-Il, 'God creates' (root bny).
• In several cases that Akkadian has š, Amorite, like Hebrew and Arabic, has h, thus hu 'his', -haa 'her', causative h- or ʼ- (I. Gelb 1958).
• The 1st-person perfect is in -ti (singular), -nu (plural), as in the Canaanite languages.