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

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Ugaritic <strong>Primer</strong>
Akkadian texts contemporary with Ugaritic alphabetic texts aid
us in developing pronunciation of Ugaritic words. 1 However, the
actual pronunciations remain conjectural. In this context, it is
important to distinguish between graphemes (i.e., the written letter
representing a sound) and phonemes (i.e., the sounds themselves).
Scholars hypothesize about phonemes based on the correlation of
graphemes. The following hypothetical “Proto-Semitic” (*PS)
phonemes have merged into one Ugaritic grapheme: 2
*d and *d usually are represented by the Ugaritic grapheme d; e.g.,
dbh = /dabhu