Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic
The Ugaritic writing system
Script type
Time period
from around 1400 BCE
DirectionLeft-to-right Edit this on Wikidata
LanguagesUgaritic, Hurrian, Akkadian
Related scripts
Parent systems
ISO 15924
ISO 15924Ugar (040), ​Ugaritic
Unicode
Unicode alias
Ugaritic
U+10380–U+1039F
 This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
History of the alphabet

The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE[1] or 1300 BCE[2] for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language. It was discovered in Ugarit, modern Ras Al Shamra, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although 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,[3] 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.

Note that several of these distinctions were only secondarily added to the Arabic alphabet by means of diacritic dots. According to Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies, 1999,: "The language they [the 30 signs] represented could be described as an idiom which in terms of content seemed to be comparable to Canaanite texts, but from a phonological perspective, however, was more like Arabic" (82, 89, 614).

The script was written from left to right. Although cuneiform and pressed into clay, its symbols were unrelated to those of Akkadian cuneiform.[4]

  1. ^ A Primer on Ugaritic, William M. Schniedewind (pg 32)
  2. ^ Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia
  3. ^ Ullendorf, Edward (July 1951). "Studies in the Ethiopic Syllabary". Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. 21 (3). Cambridge University Press: 207–217.
  4. ^ Healey, John F. (1990). "The Early Alphabet". Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet. p. 216. ISBN 0-520-07431-9.