Amorite language

Amorite is considered an archaic Northwest Semitic language.

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.

In 2022, two large, 3,800-year-old, Amorite-Akkadian bilingual tablets were published, yielding a large corpus of Northwest Semitic. The text, in the Amorite/Canaanite languages, bears a recognizable similarity to Hebrew, and demonstrates that a spoken language very close to Hebrew existed by the second millennium BCE, rather than the first millennium BCE. Analyses on the lexicon and verbal morphology reaffirm the Northwest Semitic derivation of the language in the texts and have fine-tuned the current understanding of Amorite's position among the Semitic languages.