Ugaritic alphabet
Template:Short description Template:Infobox Writing system Template:Alphabet
The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged Template:Circa<ref>William M. Schniedewind, A Primer on Ugaritic, p. 32</ref> or 1300 BCE<ref>Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia</ref> to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse Template:Cx. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.
Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.
The script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform was pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of Akkadian cuneiform.<ref name="The Early Alphabet' 1990">Template:Cite book</ref>
Function
The Ugaritic writing system was an augmented abjad. In most syllables only consonants were written, including the Template:IPA and Template:IPA of diphthongs. Ugaritic was unusual among early abjads because it also indicated vowels occurring after the glottal stop. It is thought that the letter for the syllable Template:IPA originally represented the consonant Template:IPA, as aleph does in other Semitic abjads, and that it was later restricted to Template:IPA with the addition, at the end of the alphabet, of Template:IPA and Template:IPA.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
The final consonantal letter of the alphabet, s2, has a disputed origin along with both "appended" glottals, but "The patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic symbol transliterated [s2], and the s-character of the later Northwest Semitic script makes a common origin likely, but the reason for the addition of this sign to the Ugaritic alphabet is unclear (compare Segert 1983: 201–218, Dietrich and Loretz 1988). In function, [s2] is like Ugaritic s, but only in certain words – other s-words are never written with [s2]."<ref>Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia</ref>
The words that show s2 are predominantly borrowings, and thus it is often thought to be a late addition to the alphabet representing a foreign sound that could be approximated by native Template:IPA; Huehnergard and Pardee make it the affricate Template:IPA.<ref>Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (2012), p. 21; Pardee, Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform in the context of other alphabetic systems in Studies in ancient Oriental civilization (2007), p. 183.</ref> Segert instead theorizes that it may have been syllabic Template:IPA, and for this reason grouped with the other syllabic signs Template:IPA and Template:IPA.<ref>Stanislave Segert, "The Last Sign of the Ugaritic Alphabet" in Ugaritic-Forschugen 15 (1983): 201–218</ref>
Probably the last three letters of the alphabet were originally developed for transcribing non-Ugaritic languages (texts in the Akkadian language and Hurrian language have been found written in the Ugaritic alphabet) and were then applied to write the Ugaritic language.<ref name="The Early Alphabet' 1990"/> The three letters denoting glottal stop plus vowel combinations were used as simple vowel letters when writing other languages.
The only punctuation is a word divider.Template:Cn
Origin
At the time the Ugaritic script was in use (Template:C.),<ref>Ugaritic, in The Ancient-Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia</ref> Ugarit, although not a great cultural or imperial centre, was located at the geographic centre of the literate world, among Egypt, Anatolia, Cyprus, Crete, and Mesopotamia. Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic abjad with cuneiform writing methods (pressing a stylus into clay). Scholars have searched in vain for graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters in Mesopotamian cuneiform.
Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic script,<ref name="colless">Brian Colless, Cuneiform alphabet and picto-proto-alphabet</ref> the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus. There may also have been a degree of influence from the poorly understood Byblos syllabary.<ref>A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language: With Selected Texts and Glossary, p. 19 by Stanislav Segert, 1985.</ref>
It has been proposed in this regard that the two basic shapes in cuneiform, a linear wedge, as in Template:Script, and a corner wedge, as in Template:Script, may correspond to lines and circles in the linear Semitic alphabets: the three Semitic letters with circles, preserved in the Greek Θ, O and Latin Q, are all made with corner wedges in Ugaritic: Template:Script ṭ, Template:Script ʕ, and Template:Script q. Other letters look similar as well: Template:Script h resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while Template:Script w, Template:Script p, and Template:Script θ are similar to Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.<ref name="colless" /> Jared Diamond<ref>Writing Right | Senses | DISCOVER Magazine</ref> believes the alphabet was consciously designed, citing as evidence the possibility that the letters with the fewest strokes may have been the most frequent.
Abecedaries
Lists of Ugaritic letters, abecedaria, have been found in two alphabetic orders. The "Northern Semitic order" is more similar to the one found in Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic, the earlier, so-called ʾabjadī order, and more distantly, the Greek and Latin alphabets. The "Southern Semitic order" is more similar to the one found in the South Arabian, and the Geʽez scripts. The Ugaritic (U) letters are given in cuneiform and transliteration.
North Semitic
| Letter: | 𐎀 | 𐎁 | 𐎂 | 𐎃 | 𐎄 | 𐎅 | 𐎆 | 𐎇 | 𐎈 | 𐎉 | 𐎊 | 𐎋 | 𐎌 | 𐎍 | 𐎎 | 𐎏 | 𐎐 | 𐎑 | 𐎒 | 𐎓 | 𐎔 | 𐎕 | 𐎖 | 𐎗 | 𐎘 | 𐎙 | 𐎚 | 𐎛 | 𐎜 | 𐎝 |
| Transliteration: | ʾa | b | g | ḫ | d | h | w | z | ḥ | ṭ | y | k | š | l | m | ḏ | n | ẓ | s | ʿ | p | ṣ | q | r | ṯ | ġ | t | ʾi | ʾu | s2 |
South Semitic
| Letter: | 𐎅 | 𐎍 | 𐎈 | 𐎎 | 𐎖 | 𐎆 | 𐎌 | 𐎗 | 𐎚 | 𐎒 | 𐎋 | 𐎐 | 𐎃 | 𐎁 | 𐎔 | 𐎀 | 𐎓 | 𐎑 | 𐎂 | 𐎄 | 𐎙 | 𐎉 | 𐎇 | 𐎏 | 𐎊 | 𐎘 | 𐎕 | [ | 𐎛 | 𐎜 | 𐎝 | ] | |
| Transliteration: | h | l | ḥ | m | q | w | š | r | t | s | k | n | ḫ | b | p | ʾa | ʿ | ẓ | g | d | ġ | ṭ | z | ḏ | y | ṯ | ṣ | [ | ʾi | ʾu | s2 | ] |
Letters
Ugaritic short alphabet
Two shorter variants of the Ugaritic alphabet existed with findspots primarily not in the area of Ugarit. Findspots have included Tel Beit Shemesh, Sarepta, and Tiryns. It is generally found on inscribed objects vs the tablets of the standard Ugaritic alphabet and unlike the standard version it is usually written right to left.<ref>[1]Fossé, Cécile, et al., "Archaeo-Material Study of the Cuneiform Tablet from Tel Beth-Shemesh", Tel Aviv 51.1, pp. 3-17, 2024</ref> One variant contained 27 letters and the other 22 letters. It is not known what the relative chronology of the different Ugaritic alphabets was.<ref>[2]Ferrara, Silvia, "A ‘top-down’ re-invention of an old form: Cuneiform alphabets in context", Understanding Relations Between Scripts II, pp. 15-51, 2020</ref><ref>Bordreuil, P., "Cunéiformes alphabétiques non canoniques", I. La tablette alphabétique sénestroverse RS 22.03’, Syria 58 (3–4), pp. 301–311, 1981</ref><ref>Dietrich, M. and Loretz, O., "Die Keilalphabete. Die phönizisch kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit", Münster, 1988</ref>
Unicode
Ugaritic script was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2003 with the release of version 4.0.
The Unicode block for Ugaritic is U+10380–U+1039F:
Template:Unicode chart Ugaritic
Six letters for transliteration were added to the Latin Extended-D block in March 2019 with the release of Unicode 12.0:<ref name="L217076">Template:Cite web</ref>
- Template:Unichar
- Template:Unichar
- Template:Unichar
- Template:Unichar
- Template:Unichar
- Template:Unichar
See also
- Old Persian cuneiform – a much later, unrelated attempt at a cuneiform semi-alphabet.
References
External links
- Download a Ugaritic font (includes Unicode font)
- Ugaritic cuneiform characters from the Unicode Ugaritic cuneiform script
- Ugaritic cuneiform Omniglot entry on the subject
- Ugaritic script (ancientscripts.com)
- Ugaritic writing
- GNU FreeFont Unicode font family with Ugaritic range in its sans-serif face.