The Ammonite Language Of The Iron Age.

In recent years, a number of inscriptions dating to the 1st millennium B.C. have been discovered within the boundaries of the ancient kingdom of Ammon, centered around what is now Amman, the capital city of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. These inscriptions are for the most part short and fragmentary (the longest consists of 11 broken lines). The texts have been published in various scholarly journals, but until now there has not been a synthesizing study of all of them as a whole. It has been the purpose of this study to bring together all of the inscriptions which have been identified on the basis of geography and paleography as Ammonite and to extract from them all of the available linguistic information in order to identify characteristic traits of this language and isolate features which can be called distinctively Ammonite. The goal was to set the linguistic criteria upon which texts found in the future can be classified as belonging to this language. Each of the texts is treated in approximately the same manner. After a philological treatment to establish the best possible translation, a lexicon of the words found in the inscription or corpus of inscriptions is presented. This is followed by a morphological analysis in which the linguistic features are isolated, categorized, and discussed. Next the phonology of the language and the orthographic system are examined, followed by a discussion of the method employed, if any, to separate words. A discussion of the linguistic affiliation of the text or group of texts follows. The same methodology is employed in the final chapter, which deals with all of the information as a whole and presents a complete treatment of all of the known evidence for Ammonite. The conclusions reached in this study can be summarized as follows. The Ammonite language is closely related to contemporary Phoenician, Israelite, Judahite, and Moabite; it is thus a member of the Canaanite branch of Northwest Semitic. It is not possible at this point to align Ammonite more specifically toward any one of the other Canaanite languages, as the isoglosses do not show a clear picture of linguistic affinity.PhDAncient languagesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127536/2/8017284.pd