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Ugaritic languageFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ugaritic language, discovered by French archaeologists in 1928, is known only in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit, near the modern village of Ras Shamra, Syria. It has been used by scholars of the Old Testament to clarify Biblical Hebrew texts and has revealed ways in which ancient Israelite culture finds parallels in the neighboring cultures. Ugaritic was "the greatest literary discovery from antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform[1]". Literary texts discovered at Ugarit include the Legend of Keret, the Aqhat Epic (or Legend of Danel), the Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and the Death of Baal—the latter two are also collectively known as the Baal Cycle—all revealing a Canaanite religion. The Ugaritic language is attested in texts from the 14th through the 12th century BCE.[2] The city was destroyed in 1180–1170 BCE.
Writing systemMain article: Ugaritic alphabet
The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad (alphabet without vowels), used from around 15th century BCE. Although it appears similar to Mesopotamian cuneiform, it was unrelated (see Ugaritic alphabet). It is the oldest example of the family of West Semitic scripts that were used for Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The so-called long alphabet has 31 letters, while the short alphabet has 22. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere. Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the Levantine and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets. The script was written from left to right. PhonologyUgaritic has 28 consonantal phonemes, including two semivowels, and eight vowel phonemes (three short vowels and five long vowels): a ā i ī u ū ē ō. (ē and ō only occur as long vowels and are the result of monophthongization of the diphthongs “ay” and “aw” respectively).
1 The voiced palatal fricative ʒ occurs as a late variant of the voiced interdental fricative ð. 2 The voiced velar fricative ɣ occurs as a late variant of the emphatic voiced interdental ðˤ. The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Ugaritic, Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:
* Sometimes Ugaritic ġ [ɣ] corresponds to Proto-Semitic ṣ́ [ɬˁ]. GrammarMain article: Ugaritic grammar
Ugaritic is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic and Akkadian. It possesses two genders (masculine and feminine), three cases for nouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, and genitive); three numbers: (singular, dual, and plural); and verb aspects similar to those found in Western Semitic languages. The word order for Ugaritic is verb-subject-Object (VSO), possessed–possessor (NG), and noun–adjective (NA). Ugaritic is considered a conservative Semitic language, since it retains most of the Proto-Semitic phonemes, the case system and the word order of the Proto-Semitic ancestor. See also
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