The Moabite language reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Moabite language

The Moabite language is an extinct Canaanite dialect, spoken in Moab (modern-day northwestern Jordan) in the early first millennium BC. Most of our knowledge about Moabite comes from the Mesha Stele, as well as the El-Kerak Stela; this is sufficient to show that it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, despite a few differences. The main differences noted, in the admittedly short text, are: a plural in -în rather than -îm (eg mlkn "kings" for Hebrew məlÃ¥kîm), like Aramaic and Arabic; retention of the feminine ending -at which Hebrew reduces to -Ã¥h (eg qryt "town", Hebrew qiryÃ¥h; and retention of a verb form with infixed -t-, also found in Arabic and Akkadian (w-ʔltḥm "I began to fight", from the root lḥm.)

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