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

Interrogative Sentence(s)
Other Topics
Letters 45
Sometimes an Ending follows the final message. Generally, the
writer requests a response to the issues raised in the letter:
Optional Ending
Jussive/Imperative Verbs (SÁ form of twb “return”)
Occasionally impersonal third 3 rd person pronoun endings
Occasionally relative clause at beginning of sentence
3.2 INSTRUCTIONS
For the following letters, transliterate the text (i.e., transcribe the
cuneiform characters into Latin characters using the alphabet chart
provided in §2.5) and then translate it. In this chapter, notes are
arranged according to sense units, which may not be identical with
the arrangement of the signs on the clay tablet. First, translate the
text “woodenly” to indicate that you understand the syntax of a
phrase or sentence, and then smooth out the translation. We
provide guidance for the first few letters. Then, use your
experience, the glossary (Chapter 8), and the grammatical précis
(Chapter 7) to explore the remaining texts. Depending on your
interest, or on that of your professor, it is possible to reconstruct
the vowels in Ugaritic words. This is sometimes an exasperating
enterprise, but one that will help you to grapple with the
interrelationships among the Semitic languages, diachronic
language changes, and the tentativeness of modern scholarly
reconstructions of ancient languages and cultures.