A Primer on Ugaritic: Language, Culture, and Literature - enenuru

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Ugaritic <strong>Primer</strong>
order of the Hebrew alphabet with some additions. Furthermore,
by illustrating the Ugaritic alphabet in this abecedary, wesee the
alphabet in its ancient order. This makes it easy to recognize that
the final three letters (}i, }u, sì) were later additions to a system of
writing. The letters }i and }u help distinguish vowels, and the letter
sì accommodates foreign (i.e., Hurrian) words.
There are a few basic shapes of signs. Wedges are usually
made horizonally or vertically t, g and can also be used at an angle
as in the sû ;asecond basic shape is the angle wedge (or the
German “Winkelhaken”) o. The letters of the alphabet are formed
by using combinations of these signs. A small version of the g sign
also serves as a word divider, which is usually marked as a “.” in
transcriptions; thus, bt.mlk is transcribed bt.mlk, “house of the
king.” Although the word divider seems similar to the g sign, it is
consistently smaller and it is clearly differentiated from the g in the
tablets. Be warned, however, that Ugaritic is not completely
consistent in employing word dividers.
2.5.3 An Ugaritic–Akkadian Abecedary Tablet
An indication of the names of the letters may be obtained by the
bilingual Ugaritic-Akkadian Abecedary shown in Figure 2.2. The
left column is the Ugaritic letter and the right column the syllabic
value in Akkadian of the first syllable of the letter name. 3 Part of a
complete transcription of the text on the next page is the
representation of the scribal lines that the scribes used to separate
each letter and column of the text.
publication of a new abecedary by D. Pardee and P. Bordreuil (RS 88.2215)
suggests that there was no reduced southern or Canaanite alphabet.
3 On the names of the West Semitic alphabet also see F. M. Cross and J.
Huehnergard, “The Alphabet on a Late Babylonian Cuneiform School Tablet,”
Orientalia 72 (2003), 223–28.