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

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ay /}ayyu/, “which, any”
7.4 NOUNS AND ADJECTIVES
Ugaritic <strong>Primer</strong>
Nouns and adjectives indicate gender, number, case, and state.
7.4.1 Gender
There are two genders: masculine (generally unmarked) and
feminine (generally marked, usually by -t). The feminine is written
with -t, which reflects both /-t-/ and /-at-/. As in all Semitic
languages, many feminine nouns are not marked as feminine (e.g.,
}um, “mother”; yd, “hand”; }ars, “earth”; npsû, “spirit, throat”).
7.4.2 Number
There are three numbers: singular (unmarked), dual, and plural.
The dual is used widely in pronouns, the nominative declension,
and in verbal conjugations (unlike Hebrew, where it is mostly
confined to natural pairs, e.g., MˆyÅnyó, “two eyes”).
7.4.3 Case
There are three cases: nominative /-u/, genitive /-i/, and accusative
/-a/. The nominative case indicates the subject of a sentence. The
accusative marks the object of the verb. The genitive indicates a
word that is in a dependent relationship to some other element in
the sentence. In the dual and the plural, the genitive and accusative
use the same inflectional ending /-a/, thereby becoming a single
case known as the oblique case (also referred to as the gen-acc.). A
few proper nouns are diptotic, with both the gen. and acc. ending in
/-a/; e.g., h˙myt.ugrt /h˙aœmiyaœtu }ugarˆäta/, “the walls of Ugarit.”
7.4.4 State
There are two states in Ugaritic: construct (or “bound”) and
absolute (or “unbound”). “State” refers to the syntactic position of a
noun within a sentence. The construct/bound form of the noun, as
its name indicates, is attached to a contiguous word in the sentence,
thus creating a syntactic unit. The absolute/unbound form of the
noun is not in such a syntactic relationship. The bound and
unbound forms are only morphologically distinguishable in the dual