Talk:Ugaritic alphabet

Not Related to Akkadian Script?

This is my first edit, so I'm not really sure if I'm doing it right, but I have to say that the introductory section is a bit ridiculous when it says that the Ugaritic script "is not related to Akkadain." It most certainly is related to Akkadian in several ways. Obviously the the scribes of Ugarit learned to press a wedge into clay from Akkadain, though they are trying to represent a West Semitic language. The signs themselves do seem to be an attempt to recreate the simplified pictographs of the West Semitic abjad with clay and stylus, but obviously the mechanics are taken directly from the Ugaritic scribes' experience with Akkadian. The text direction also appears to be taken from Akkadian, and it is quite possible that the use of three alephs is the result of the fact that the glottal stop very seldom written at the beginning of a syllable in Akkadian, and the syllable will simply be opened with a vowel to indicate this..

While the forms of the letters do not seem to be related to Akkadian, nor do they give exactly the same type of information, the Ugaritic writing system is clearly and directly related to Akkadian in several ways. It would be more accurate to say that they are related in some areas and not in others (and to specify those areas). 79.179.40.80 (talk) 18:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC) Aaron Christianson

Hey there. Welcome to Wikipedia, and thanks for the informative and balanced answers you provided below. I am no expert on the subject, but in general, I would encourage you to be bold, go ahead and change the article. But please do cite the references for any changes you make by reliable sources, that will make them less likely to be challenged by other users. Again welcome to Wikipedia, hope you'll like it here, and who knows, maybe sign up for a user name, instead of just being an IP. Cheers. Yazan (talk) 18:44, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

Hey Aaron, you're partly right. Most of the very very limited work done on Ugaritic paleography has concentrated on the relationship between the alphabetic Ugaritic (cuneiform) and previous early alphabets. Truth be told, this is probably the correct research direction as there are many essentially irrefutable paleographic coincidences.

However, (and I will retro-cite this later) Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform scribes were trained in 'cuneiform' (Sumero-Akkadian logographic writing). It is possible that some more abstract forms (such as M, from an earlier pictographic 'water') were influenced by their predecessor cuneiform logographic equivalents (M in particular). But if such a relation were supported it would nevertheless support its own intermediate nature having passed through the acrophonic adaptation common basically only to the early alphabetic period (in Sinai and South Egypt, primarily).

The West/East Semitic nature of the language is irrelevant. One might be able to find evidence that 'Ugarites' considered themselves culturally closer to Akkadians - they in one overt case identify themselves clearly as non-Canaanites. And Ugaritic includes a number of cognates with Akkadian, or Akkadian loanwords. However, their alphabet itself is a mixture of cuneiform scribal training and methods (pressing wedges in several ways) and the paleographic antecedent graphemic (non-cuneiform) alphabets. Those predecessor alphabets were probably influenced by cuneiform paleography, but Ugaritic would have been a beneficiary not a benefactor or intermediary. Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:43, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

should be improved

should be improved, drawing on de:Ugaritische Schrift, de:Protosemitisches Alphabet. dab 20:07, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Most of the symbols of these types of alphabets don't show, only boxes or "?" marks. (Boxes=IE, ?=FF). Is that a installed-font issue or...? infinitelink 24 Apr 2006

I have the same issue in IE7, FF and opera. For example in EI each line in the letters listing appears like "𐎁 b Beta" - first character is a box. -Paul- 19:57, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Old Persian Cuneiform

Removed the mention of Old Persian Cuneiform as a possible inspiration for Ugaritic. Absent time travel, a script invented ~500 BC cannot have inspired one introduced about a millennium earlier. 85.8.12.78 18:30, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

From Ángel García, Nuremberg, Bavaria Feb. 2008

The table of characters lacks any source. There is only "Wikinger" uploading it. On research, you find Omniglot.com as a source, but those again cite en.wikipedia.org as their source. So self-referential. The letter names are pure fancy. Inspired from Greek. "Ox" in Ugaritic is '`alpu' not 'alpha', "house" is 'baitu', not 'beta' etc. They need to be deleted.

To the line "NORTH SEMITIC:" the correspondence of Ug. th (interdental voiceless) is only diachronically Hebrew shin - Sound change.

THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT IS NEVER MENTIONED, as visibly all contributors are no linguists: 5 to 6 consonantal phonemes, which Ugaritic still possessed, were later lost due to sound change. Thus Phoen. only 22 phonemes = 22 letters. Hebrew has more, Old Aram. had more sounds, but as the Phoen. abgad was the only extant around 1000, they had to accomodate with it.

The weblinks need a comment: ancientscripts.com has an erroneous graph for ´ayn. And where is proof is use till "800 BCE" ? García Ángel García (talk) 19:06, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

From Ángel García, Nuremberg, Bavaria - Feb. 2008

The PERIOD needs rectification: The abgad was used ca. 1400 to 1195 - but NOT "1800 - 1400 BCE", as Jim CORNWELL pretends in "From the Alpha to the Omega, III, 1999 - www.mazzaroth.com/ChapterThree/UgariticWriting. There, ´ayn is wrongly represented, in fact, it is a wedge.

The source [1] is a link to Brian COLLESS from University Chicago, Nov. 2004. He cites no other source but himself; publishes no book, only articles in the journal ´abr Nahrain {yonder Euphrates and Tigris}. I am sorry I cannot take his contributions seriously: a boomerang in Ugarit? They never existed outside Australia. A signature? In the ancient Fertile Crescent, these were obtained by clay rolling seals. - He pretends that t.ab, mu, pu ("good, water, mouth") had short vowels. I think I need to stress the fact that there is NO Oriental hard evidence of letter names before 250 BCE; the oldest being the Greek letter names. I have the impression that most of those "names" were concocted by non-Semitists, as the pretended names do not fit into Semitic vocabulary.

The chapter "For example..." should delete the [fancy] letter names.

Finally, the letter correspondences are given according to the Semitistic knowledge of AD. 1900. Rather, it is now believed (Source: DIAKONOFF, Afro-Asiatic) thaz "z" was dz, sh was lateral l, z. was emphatic interdental th, "s" was ts and "s." was ts. Cf. Greek Zêta, Mod. Hebrew S.adê.

The whole article should be rewritten accordingly. García Ángel García (talk) 19:35, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

While I agree with some of your points, The last bit about phonemes is kind of meaningless. The fact is that nobody knows how these letters sounded and the top experts are in dispute over reconstructions of phonemes in proto-Semitic, let alone Ugaritic (which has left us no descendent with auditory evidence). Every text book on Ugaritic gives a different answer, and I don't see what the problem is with Wikipedia simply choosing one so long as it is consistent throughout and explains the difficulty. This belongs in the "Nobody could ever know that" file. 79.179.40.80 (talk) 18:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC) Aaron Christianson

Missing information

Maybe this article is too specialist for me...but I read it and couldn't get from it the information that Ugaritic is older than Phoenician and that it is its predecessor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.178.224.163 (talk) 09:27, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

The older stages of "Phoenician" we call Proto-Caananite, because the texts are too sparse to know if they actually recorded Phoenician. Both Ugaritic and Phoen/P-Can are rather sparsely attested c. 1400-1500 BCE. I'm not sure we can say which is older, and if we do, that might change with new discoveries. Maybe someone who knows more about this than me can answer. kwami (talk) 17:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1onTRZlWkLNostA_2w5yzScbDP1-ZrPXU/view? 84.108.10.3 (talk) 13:21, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

I can tell you that the ealiest attestations of the West Semitic alphabet (or abjad, if you like), are from the 17th century BCE, far older than Ugaritic, sometimes called proto-Sinatic. Phoenician is a direct descendent of this system, which appears to be based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, and through Phoenician it came to Europe. Ugaritic seems to be attempt to transfer this older West Semitic alphabet into a cuneiform system of writing. While our earliest attestations of Ugaritic are earlier than Phoenician, and they are close to each other geographically, it is very unlikely that Phoenician descended from Ugaritic. They probably both descend from a common ancestor

79.179.40.80 (talk) 18:00, 21 February 2011 (UTC) Aaron Christianson

letter names

User:Msheflin brought this to my attention: Do we actually know what the names of the letters were in Ugaritic (which I expect is unlikely), or are they reconstructions? Either way, we should explain where they come from. kwami (talk) 19:11, 26 September 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to know that myself. Some of them look a little strange (while the forms of the alleged letter names given in the Unicode Standard are even more peculiar)... AnonMoos (talk) 16:02, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

Feel inclined to completely remove the letter names, if they aren't given a source (not including the Unicode Standard as historically or linguistically relevant in this particular case). AnonMoos (talk) 16:08, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

The short story is they're constructed. Mostly they're taken from Hebrew-Aramaic; there are (maybe 2? maybe 1) some Ugaritic abacedaries partially transliterated with cuneiform - but they are phonetic; so H. = KU (k ~~ h.) and this has been used as evidence for the Canaanite letter names (in their apparent everlasting and primordial nature). But really the only 'evidence' is a single tacked-on vowel based on the syllabic nature of cuneiform. If one took that evidence at face-value, the Ugaritic letter-names are CV combinations (which they probably were not). It's not a mystery likely to be solved in this manner; although some Greek names could provide insight into a divergent Syrian naming system - lambda, for instance, comes from l-b-d but this name is theoretical (being cognate with l-'-m / l-w-y and with interchange to a constructed l-m-d (comprising all the known acrophonic letter-names (lbd felt/ l'm bandage/ lwy cloth respectively). The m in lambda is through a stylized bilabial reduplication, but there is no evidence of an alphabet naming L labda; so it is possible Ugaritic held this key. But this is equally circumstancial with the abacedary or Canaanite-relation cases. There is no explicit evidence regarding the Ugaritic alphabet itself. Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:51, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

deleted links

As much as I would have been overjoyed to see academic citations to work by Colless, these citations have either been removed or were/are spurious.

https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015436.html Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 1) https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015476.html Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 2)

Ugaritic Alphabet or Ugaritic abjad?

First of all thank you for your marvelous works.

This article states that :"The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform (cf. Akkadian-Sumerian) abjad (alphabet without vowels),"

But further it's written:

"Letters Ugaritic alphabet

ʾa alpa

ʾi i

ʾu u"

Means that Ugaritic has 3 vowels so why it's written that Ugaritic is an abjad not an alphabet?

Best regards

Humanbyrace (talk) 21:28, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

The "Ugaritic alphabet" is not an alphabet. An alphabet informs the reader of the sound of the speech behind the writing. The first alphabet was the Greek alphabet. The "Ugaritic alphabet" is a kind of sylabary, as proven by the last three signs which explicitly have syllabic values. With the other signs the reader must supply the syllabic value introduced by this or that consonant. P. T. Daniels has suggested the term "abjad" for this kind of writing, but structurally and functionally it is a syllabary. "abjad" is not an "alphabet without vowels" because there is no such thing. "abjad" is a neologism that means "a syllabary in which only the consonant is expressed" but Wikipedia should avoid such neologisms in the interest of clarity.wakan (talk) 16:25, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

No Ugaritic was an Alphabet, its totally distinct than Sumerian cuneiforms, please read a book about Ugaritic and see some Ugaritic writings. Humanbyrace (talk) 08:00, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

It's an alphabet in the broad sense, subtype abjad. Vowels are only indicated in limited circumstances. I thought the article used to make that pretty clear. — kwami (talk) 08:27, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

The glottal stop issue is quite similar to the Arabic glottal stop which also has 3 or 4 characters (أ ئ ؤ ء). Still Arabic script is considered an alphabet. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.53.90.74 (talk) 04:29, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

It's really both. Ugaritic is far more conservative in its vowel habits than either Aramaic or Hebrew or modern Arabic or Phoenician. In the broad sense, it is an abjad - but it sometimes did use vowels or consonants to indicate inflection and in that sense might be considered alphabetic. Cuneiform is neither abjadic nor alphabetic; it is a logographic system - it does not use 'letters' in writing as we conceive them but syllables not necessarily bound by a CV combination (which would be called an abugida - fyi alphabet means AlphaBeta; abugida means ABuGiDa; and abjad means ABGD... so the distinction may not be entirely practical).

Ugaritic is most definitely not a syllabary - the three syllabic characters would be the alphabetic aspect - functioning similarly to diacritic vowels placed 'around' letters, but in Ugaritic sometimes explicitly written (in an alphabetical manner) - i.e. in Greek you alphabetically write petros with two vowels; in an abjad you would write ptrs - with syllabic Ugaritic you might write ptrus; and in an abugida you write pe-t-ru-s (perhaps), where in a syllabary you might write pe-et-ru-us. Alphabets developed from abjads, as an expansion of the concept - and there is a difference between diacritic vowels and long-vowels (even not voiced) in Semitic languages.

@Sinebot - Quranic Arabic is far more conservative (I have started noticing recently), the dagger aleph means that a great number of 'alephs' are actually unwritten (in plurals, in demonstratives, etc); likewise in certain grammatical cases (I think mansoub) one sometimes drops the vowel out of writing (lem yakun - versus yakoun). Michael Sheflin (talk) 15:11, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

How can Qur'anic Arabic be more conservative than Ugaritic in the use of matres, when Ugaritic pretty much has zero matres in the accepted sense (i.e. a full letter of the alphabet not used to transcribe a consonant sound), while Arabic has plenty of them? AnonMoos (talk) 21:33, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Lol. I meant than in Modern Arabic - in plurals, for instance (أنهر versus أنهار); I apologize, it pertains to a conversation I had been having and I forgot to state my frame of reference; it is still less conservative than Ugaritic, yes. But written Classical Arabic is surprisingly conservative when considering the said dagger alephs and occasionally unwritten possessive cases (رَبِ = ربي). idk if a dagger aleph is really a ...mater (lectionis), but many of MSA's current explicitly written vowels were apparently not originally explicitly written. I wasn't sure if that was obvious so I thought it worth bringing up. Michael Sheflin (talk) 03:56, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Consonantal Letter

Sorry, but I don't understand what this means. Surely in an abjad, the whole list consists of nothing but consonants (including stops). This letter su sounds more like a syllabic letter - a diliteral as I think Egyptologists call it.

Or perhaps I'm just confused. Please help! Nuttyskin (talk) 19:00, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

The letter s₂ or ś was not really used to write Ugaritic, but only for "foreign" words, or when the alphabet was used to write other languages. "śu" is given as the name of the letter (from what source I don't know), not its value... AnonMoos (talk) 16:00, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

2012

S₂ is paleographically common to - in my forthcoming opinion - the South Arabian S₃ and the Phoenician s (a column/pillar). It was likewise used in Arabian for foreign transcription; and I believe it originated as a means of transcribing the Canaanite affricate (which Phoenician s and š are both thought to be).

The current case is that S₂'s paleographic antecedent occurs very infrequently in Proto-Sinaitic (whereas in my opinion not at all in that manner). š and s are common (in this orientation as 'main' characters) to Arabian and Ugaritic (and in my opinion also Proto-Sinaitic and the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions).

I cannot speculate on the Ugaritic names or original phonetic realizations, but the characters' acrophonic antecedents were likely (s) smk 'pillar', with its name possibly shifting to swn 'lap' > syn alongside paleographic changes (not in Ugaritic); (š) šn(t) 'bow' (in relation to Ancient Egyptian seti 'archer' or zyn 'arrow'); and (s₂) smk also 'pillar' (in agreement with Hamilton 2006). These characters should be thought of (in broader comparative Semitic terms) as S₁, S₂, and S₃ respectively - in which Phoenician lacks S₁ but possesses the other two; ironically Hebrew and Aramaic possess three differentiated phonemes but only two differentiated graphemes; Ugaritic possesses three sibilants as do most North and the South Arabian alphabets (with S₃ being the marginal Ugaritic character); modern Arabic possesses two.

So to be more direct; @Nuttyskin (I think...), no it was not syllabic in any way - su is some sort of constructed name I guess. @AnonMoos - it was not only used in foreign transcription (per se). Some words legitimately in Ugaritic, that... in particular (my observation) have a Sumerian origin (specifically) could be only transcribed with S₂ in Ugaritic - śśw is the only obvious example that comes to mind - 'horse' being possibly a word of Sumerian origin through [an$e]ZI.ZI > Old Babylonian sisi / Ug śśw. This particular word did not pass explicitly through Akkadian (that I am aware of) but exists incidentally in several Semitic languages. Michael Sheflin (talk) 15:55, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I got distracted from my point... The weight of this evidence for the usage of ś strongly suggests that it really was a differentiated phoneme (possibly a lateral sibilant?) and that its use in foreign transcription occurred because that phoneme was really only found in Canaanite (whose sibilants' affrications is a chief determinant of linguistic Canaanite) and Sumerian which has a phonetic system of separate origination than Afroasiatic or Semitic languages. Michael Sheflin (talk) 16:03, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if anyone cares but here is another examples; ś also more commonly interchanges with s providing alternate orthographies in Ugaritic: ubś (place name) = cun AIU-bu-ZU (again cun Z > ś). Michael Sheflin (talk) 16:07, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

You're fond of positing direct connections between pre-1000 B.C. forms of early "North Semitic" alphabets with greater than 22 letters and A.D-period expanded alphabets with letters differentiated due to diacritical dotting, but if such putative connections are not already accepted as part of mainstream scholarship, then they are not suitable for Wikipedia articles. In any case, the within-Ugaritic evidence strongly indicates that the three letters ʔi, ʔu, and s₂ were added to the previous basic 27-letter alphabet (originally primarily for the purpose of transcribing languages other than Ugaritic, though of course ʔi, ʔu and sometimes s₂ also came to be used in writing Ugaritic itself -- sorry I slightly oversimplified this in my remarks of August 14 above). And standard handbooks on Ugaritic do not indicate that lateral sibilant phonemes were commonly written distinctly (though they may have existed in at least some dialects, as possibly indicated by certain scribal variations). AnonMoos (talk) 21:00, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, and I am also fond of marking what I posit so I can create a clear enough division between literature and my own opinion rather than misleading people - knowing full-well that OR is unacceptable on Wiki. Please cite your source on the addition of these characters (I'm serious; I would like to know if I am wrong). [Personally I agree with you - both i and u are ultimately paleographic adaptations of h (they are all probably glottals) - note that I bracketed this away from the discussion.]

Otherwise please explain how the common Semitic word for 'finger' us.bc in Ugaritic is written in transcription meant only for foreign dialects; same with ibr 'bull'. There is a debate over Ugaritic phonetic realization unlikely to be solved. However, the question was (I think) whether S₂ was realized (only) as su - i.e. in a syllabic manner, which it was not. The i/u are similar in nature to the hamza over or under aleph in Arabic (that sometimes indicates 'i or 'u in contrast to a simple aleph) to more accurately represent the diacritic over a vowel (aleph). I am unclear on the lateral sibilant issue - this was sort of my point that outside of foreign transcription (where it may have existed in foreign dialects), ś is primarily used in variant orthographies of (primarily) s. That it was not distinct in Ugaritic supports this observation. 41.232.96.56 (talk) 20:45, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

(sorry; log-in issue) Michael Sheflin (talk) 20:49, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

(I don't know if this is or was going to balloon, but let me clarify that I was using hamza as an example of usage; I do not ultimately see an organic relation - but the concept of modifying a glottal and/or vowel is the only frame of reference outside of Ugaritic I thought we might share. I am actually not aware of any syllabic characters like 'i or 'u outside of Ugaritic - but my knowledge of late (or early?) 2nd and 1st millennium alphabets is more fragmentary). Michael Sheflin (talk) 21:15, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

(There are parallels to cuneiform and hieroglyphs in concept (i vs. y in monoconsonantal Egyptian was my thought), but again probably not in relation - although at least one article was written a few decades ago arguing the hieratic relationship to Ugaritic (even at the time it was kind of dated...).) Michael Sheflin (talk) 21:16, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Anonmoos, you need to cite the claim that the glottals 'seem' to have been added, otherwise the picture change is a bit disingenuous and seems to be your OR. Michael Sheflin (talk) 18:09, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

It's really minimally controversial (and much less of "Original Research" than your claims of supposed direct Ugaritic-to-northern-Arabic graphemic connections bypassing normal historical channels of alphabet transmission, by the way). If you've encountered the introductory literature, the idea should not seem strange to you -- you can start with The Early Alphabet by John F. Healey, ISBN 0-520-07431-9, or "Ugaritic" by Dennis Pardee in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages ISBN 0-521-56256-2. It has seemed fairly obvious to many scholars that the first letter started out writing glottal stop [ʔ] like an ordinary Semitic aleph, and it was the addition of the two other letters at the end of the alphabetic ordering (originally presumably to write vowels [i] and [u] in non-Ugaritic languages, then [ʔi] and [ʔu] in Ugaritic) which caused the first letter to take on the specific value [ʔa]. The place of ś or s₂ also at the end of the alphabetic ordering, and its lack of a consistent distinct proto-Semitic correspondence, marks it as another addition. AnonMoos (talk) 18:49, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

http://books.google.com.eg/books?id=b6Gx-MwHvaoC&pg=PA158&dq=glottals+AND+Ugaritic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yUdaT_TNAs7XsgaNwuD_Cw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=glottals%20AND%20Ugaritic&f=false

Powell seems to confirm your view that the vowel-specific glottals were added later, but all the glottals (' , 'u, and 'i) are vowel-specific (i.e. 'a, 'u, and 'i respectively).

http://books.google.com.eg/books?id=L2T_4KVwpTQC&pg=PA149&dq=glottals+AND+Ugaritic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yUdaT_TNAs7XsgaNwuD_Cw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=glottals%20AND%20Ugaritic&f=false

Though in the above respect, not matres lectionis, Schniedewind also supports this view (that they are, in fact "an early application..."), but they are solely applied to the glottal (') and not in the modern sense of being applied broadly to consonants.

http://books.google.com.eg/books?id=vTrT-bZyuPcC&pg=PA8&dq=glottals+AND+Ugaritic&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yUdaT_TNAs7XsgaNwuD_Cw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=glottals%20AND%20Ugaritic&f=false

Pardee, in Woodward (which is the source I generally defer to), confirms your suggestion of the alphabetic order - though not with the obvious division you used to show that these characters were added (since that evidence is not explicit in Ugaritic orders). Pardee also points out that five characters are "dispersed at apparent random", these being “ḫ, ś (our S₂), ḏ, ẓ, and ġ”.

I should point something else out: whereas the first link (Powell) suggests the use of the glottals in transcribing Hurrian, Pardee espouses the (I think) more common view that it may simply have been a syllabic issue - and have been devised to transcribe Akkadian for instance. Pardee also offers the suggestion (that I essentially stole from him) in which "The patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic symbol transliterated ś, 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, ś is like Ugaritic s, but only in certain words - other s-words are never written with ś." Note that Pardee uses 'ś' with the little line sloping the opposite way. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the two alternative cases he sites. So I would really just remove the divider as it does not follow the commonly accepted view. I would also remove the obviously inappropriate caption on the photo to that effect, and maybe we could start discussing how to best open a new section on the debate over the five letters - and the two other glottals - place in the Ugaritic alphabet. Michael Sheflin (talk) 18:34, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

Didn't see your comment of 18:34 until I had already written my comment of 18:49 above. I consider it much more likely that the 27-letter alphabet (in original non-cuneiform form) was earlier than the 22-letter alphabet, in which case there's nothing to explain with respect to the so-called "random" placement of the five letters. Note that Ugaritic letter θ corresponds in order to Phoenician ש, and there was a corresponding θ > š historical sound change. These facts are most simply explained if an alphabet with separate θ and š letters (similar to Ugaritic, but non-cuneiform of course) preceded the Phoenician alphabet, and evolved into it by dropping letters after the mergers of original proto-Semitic fricatives in Canaanite dialects... AnonMoos (talk) 18:56, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

While I agree with you, and there is some direct evidence to this effect, we cannot choose to edit by that which we perceive most likely - even logical extrapolation (that is not present in literature) is OR. You accused me of the same thing re: talk edits (note I have never placed my own views in a page...); and fyi the Ugaritic abacadery in the South Semitic order - not a simple reorganization according to Pardee - does provide tangible evidence for a Ugaritic-South Arabian connection that has been accepted for several decades. What that connection is is unclear; my point is that if I had wanted to muddy the waters I could and would have done so with respect to proper, mainstream academic citations. (Cross comes to mind in this respect.) The historical affrications you indicate are specific to Proto-Canaanite - and are also present in the Ugaritic short alphabet along lines Pardee calls 'Phoenician' - but did not occur (necessarily) in orthographies outside of linguistic Canaanite spheres or culturally Canaanite writing (generally post-Phoenician).

And that is ultimately the biggest problem here. The current academic consensus is that the alphabet was originated by Canaanites, and thus attempting to adopt the logical viewpoint that evidence does not actually correspond to that (in Wikipedia) would be a form of OR. For this specific article, on Ugaritic, I think it would be best to perhaps open a section on non-standard characters (the five dispersed ones and the glottals) if such debate exists in academic literature (which for S₂ and i and u it does). Some work (notably by Pitard) has been done on Ugaritic paleography that can contribute to this, and Hamilton has also offered some suggestions in his 2006 book. I think perhaps broad issues of the origin of characters should (for now at least) be left out of this article. And though S₂ and i and u are at the end of standard North Semitic Ugaritic abacaderies, there really is not evidence (other than paucity of evidence) that they were simply tacked on - they may, for all we know, have been original to the Ugaritic alphabet (but from its inception).

Pardee's account is based on observation, qualification, experience, and finally peer-review - not a lay consideration of what is likely. It's somewhat disappointing that you chose to respond without respect to actual literature on Ugaritic. However, what is clear is that some issues have reached consensus - that i/u and S₂ are 'additional letters' in some respect, but (and) that they occur at the end of alphabet orders. If the first part is interesting to you (it is an item of interest), then we should add a section on 'Letter Peculiarities' or something and discuss the actual academic debates that have not reached consensus - in this case, 'why those letters were placed there.' People have hypotheses, but unfortunately yours and mine really are not relevant to this article. Conversely, though you feel free to attack mine quite regularly, I have never put mine in an article (or tried to slide them into a picture or caption). Michael Sheflin (talk) 19:11, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm finding your charges of "original research" to be quite off-target and unhelpful because: 1) It's NOT in fact original research (I could have multiplied the references I provided, but I feel little urge to do so, since you were dismissive about and didn't take too seriously the references I've already provided); and 2) You use Wikipedia talk pages to advocate for things which are far more "original"... Furthermore, calling the 5 non-Phoenician letters among the 27 the "non-standard characters"[sic], presupposes that the "short" alphabet came first and the "long" alphabet was derived from it by bulking up the 22-letter "short" alphabet. However, it's by no means clear that this is actually the case, and some scholars from Albright on down have thought that it would be more natural to postulate that the "long" alphabet came first, and that the 22-letter alphabet naturally resulted from Canaanite mergers of proto-Semitic fricative sounds -- and there are some pieces of evidence in favor of this hypothesis, such as that the Ugaritic letter θ corresponds in alphabetic order to Phoenician ש. At an absolute minimum, it seems quite useless and counterproductive to indiscriminately lump together ḫ š ḏ ṯ ġ with ʾi ʾu ś as the so-called "non-standard characters"[sic], because the situation of ḫ š ḏ ṯ ġ seems to be quite different from ʾi ʾu ś in certain significant ways... AnonMoos (talk) 02:27, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Then multiply your references, but use appropriate ones - links to specific Ugaritic literature and not broad sources about the alphabet. Please don't continue to provide sub-standard material on my account. Keep in mind I'm not the audience. I'd never actually read the page until last night, and when I did I realized it requires too much work for me to take seriously. Likely the long alphabet did come first... that wasn't my point really - simply that it provides a similar framework to Phoenician. I didn't lump those letters together except to say that there may be debate over them with specific respect to Ugaritic. I wasn't really offering specific content suggestions, so much as I was saying that perhaps the page (with citations - that you will be fruitful and multiply) might be a more appropriate forum for content debates - and hence for those five letters Pardee singles out; and the two glottal-vowel combinations; and the third s. I should also point out that using IPA with regard to a dead language is somewhat tricky as we don't really have any idea how it was pronounced. Michael Sheflin (talk) 11:55, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I really don't understand what the exact or detailed purpose or import of much of your remarks is, but they appear to combine speculations of your own together with some rather dubious and questionable apothegms, such as "we cannot choose to edit by that which we perceive most likely"[sic]. We can certainly report on what scholars "perceive most likely" -- that's what's known as the mainstream scholarly consensus. Meanwhile, I certainly do not feel motivated to provide additional sources when they would probably be given the same rather arbitrary and capricious treatment met with by the sources I previously provided. AnonMoos (talk) 12:51, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Look, I'm not trying to victimize you. I was trying to say two things - 1) you have contributed to a meaningful debate over a series of paleographic and epigraphic peculiarities of Ugaritic - and I think that these things warrant a new section in a pretty poor and uninformative article that needs a huge amount of work - this being one part of that - an actual discussion on the Ugaritic alphabet on its own page. 2) The sources you mentioned were fine. As I pointed out, we actually both cited Pardee - but it is more appropriate to use the chapter from a comparative Semitic book than a broad world languages book. The problem with both sources on the caption is that, when opened, they opened to redacted pages from google books - it wasn't clear what the original citation was to (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sources#When_a_reliable_source_is_required), whereas the link I cited opens to a table of Ugaritic letters. Additionally the rest of the caption was not cited - and based on our discussion clearly needed to be - and so had to be removed pending a citation (that burden being on the person who added it). So the net weight of my remarks have been the suggestion that you cite (in article, not to me), and that we open a section on the differences between the Ugaritic alphabet and other alphabets (vis a vis sub-sections on the glottals, the stray-sibilant, and the non proto-Canaanite letters). The reality is so little has been done with Ugaritic paleography that as subsections these things would wind up being a paragraph or two of work. So we should start compiling (in discussion) a couple of citations relevant to each in preparation for merging them into the article. I'm not sure what of this seems particularly unreasonable, but I'm not an experienced wiki editor.

I have corrected some basic material and touched up the thing about the matres. Michael Sheflin (talk) 13:23, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Number of letters unclear?

Please comment at Talk:Ugarit#Number_of_letters_in_Ugaritic_alphabet. Debresser (talk) 22:20, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Photo and IPA chart

I removed the line inserted in the picture, and the inappropriate caption. I was adding Hebrew shin to the chart of letters for s₂ due to Pardee's suggestion that it is related to this character. I then noticed not only that the IPA equivalents either need to be cited or removed (there are meta-debates in Ugaritic literature over phonetic realization but the story is not simple). I then noticed some serious issues - ṯ in the long alphabet does not orthographically equate with ש - though it may equate as such in the alphabetic order. ש in Hebrew houses two phonemes - sin and shin. Together with samekh, these actually preserve three sibilants. Shin and sin (and here's where someone would have to actually do research on literature rather than simply adding Hebrew letters for effect) reflect ṯ and š probably respectively. The reason is that in Proto-Canaanite these characters merged and hence Hebrew actually doesn't have a ṯ but does have a š (paleographically, especially). For this reason the latter supplanted the former and hence the order in both alphabets is similar. This affrication has been noticed (paleographically) in the Proto-Sinaitic corpuses as well. However, the characters are not equivalent per se, and that ultimately oversimplifies the information that should be present in the page. (Hackett's chapter on Phoenician will have something on this as a first source, and Pardee I'm assuming probably also mentions this - both in Woodward.)

Anonmoos, as for your comments - I actually offered you a link to Pardee's article but in a book specifically on comparative Semitic linguistics. The other was to Schniedewind - a book on Ugaritic; I'm not sure who Powell is. However, in a specialized article - one not on broad alphabetic descent, a history of transmission to the Aegean is more appropriate for other articles, but this is specifically on Ugaritic. The fact that you added two links in a caption attempting to justify your own view that a 27 letter alphabet added three letters may be correct, but remains unsubstantiated (vis a vis lacking citations) and thus must be considered OR.

I could personally send you a longer list of character relations - paleographically - and cite specific Proto-Sinaitic examples in which there appears to be interchange among sibilants and possibly the use of Y and W as matres lectionis (actually probably - in the varying orthographies of 'heifer' 'r5t and 'r5yt) but this would be appropriate for another article; and it would only be appropriate were I or this contention published. Michael Sheflin (talk) 11:43, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually, page 9 of the Pardee chapter uses this IPA schema, so that's appropriate if added in that context. But it's important, and this is where it gets trickier, to acknowledge the complex rules of phonetic interchange in Ugaritic. (Like z. - g/ ; b - p, etc. the IPA must be for a sort of more 'set' identities for each character, but should not specifically be construed as their phonetic values.) At the end of that short consonantal phonology section on page 9 he also explains why shin and thaa seem conflated between the orders of the Ugaritic and Hebrew alphabets (because in Hebrew they were affricated). Michael Sheflin (talk) 12:08, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

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First off, I am not greatly fond of Google books or a proficient user of it, and I do not have a university-type account which would allow unrestricted viewing of academic material. So providing a raw Google Books link without any indication of author or work is really almost useless in the context of the discussions on this page, and almost guarantees that I will not click on the link. However, I have a number of scholarly works here with me, and can easily access many more at the local university library. Second, comparisons of the shapes of the Ugaritic cuneiform letters to the shapes of glyphs of non-Cuneiform alphabets are really quite speculative, and I do not see any indication of a scholarly consensus that such speculations should overturn clearer evidence provided by structural relationships between the alphabets (i.e. comparisons based on the order and values of the letters in the different alphabets). Third, the evidence of such structural comparisons is that Ugaritic θ does in fact correspond to Phoenician ש, for the reasons explained above, as already deduced by Albright in 1950 (Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 118), followed in this by a number of others since. Fourth, if you're referring to the IPA symbols in the new graphic File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart.svg, they were really not intended as any kind of reconstruction of the exact details of Ugaritic pronunciation, but merely as a transcription of specialist Semitological symbols into more widely-understood general linguistic symbols (I give the 18th letter of the Ugaritic alphabet a quasi-IPA transcription of θ with an emphatic dot under it, so right there you know that it's not an attempt at a precise phonetic rendering). Fifth, the various complications can be discussed in an appropriate place, but if a letter has a distinctive proto-Semitic correspondence, then it's conventional to give it a transcription which reflects that correspondence, even if in practice there was confusion or semi-merger between ḏ/d/z, or ẓ/ġ, etc. P.S. Very little about proto-Sinaitic is accepted beyond לבעלת, and a few seem to be even a little skeptical about לבעלת, since it hasn't really led to much further progress in widely-accepted decipherments... AnonMoos (talk) 13:37, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

P.P.S. A θ > š change is not an "affrication", but an assibilation... AnonMoos (talk) 13:40, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I understand, neither am I - and most of my references are in the form of PDF files. However, in the interest of providing material available to both of us and to all users it seemed a necessary evil. But the links I provided are to reputable works and are not in snippet form (most of that Pardee chapter is online - and those relevant to what we had been discussing). I mean, the choices aren't really between abecedaries or forms, however I see your point - but again this wasn't really speculation so much as observation. Hamilton (2006) [The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts] devotes a chapter to this issue through the Egyptian symbol of a djed pillar > smk (to lean on/pillar). It has received some consensus. However it does not appear that Hamilton has offered this explicit link, nor has anyone else. It is generally recognized that "from Proto-Northwest Semitic to Canaanite, Ś [S2] and Ṯ apparently merged into Ṯ/Ś [S2]" (Hackett in ed. Woodward 2008, 87). Albright (1948, 14) treats this reconstruction with Ṯ/Ś and š as dual reflexes (I think) of ש (i.e. shin versus sin) and then s (without associating that (at that point in time)). So in BASOR 118 (2 years later), Albright offers a similar though slightly less precise argument (in which probably he means an assibilation occurred) - but he is also in effect offering the idea that a paleographic affrication occurred following the phonetic affrication conceivably resulting from the assibilation of the Ṯ (specifically in some Canaanite dialects).

That is interesting - I hadn't heard of the term but it makes sense. However, while this is familiar to me from some isolated examples in Egyptian Arabic (and thus I think it is a viable possibility for what happened phonetically), on a structural level it isn't entirely related. This is from Pardee in Woodward (2008) page 7 - "The short alphabet shows merging of phonemes (and thus graphemes) on the Phoenician model (e.g., /s// and /t_/ written t_)..." and the 'structural' relation (though an abecedary does not prove a structural relation per se - you are right it offers evidence) exists due to the non-presence (in non-Ugaritic abecedarian orders) of Ś which is orthographically distinct in Ugaritic. So the logical assumption would be that in other North Semitic orders, this character merged with t_ (on the Phoenician model...) - they merged orthographically - did t_ assibilate? possibly. Albright (Basor 1948, 110: 15) acknowledges "That shin (the bow) corresponds etymologically (in part, at least) to original Semitic t_ (th), which was pronounced s in South Canaanite..." which would suggest an assibilation though he does not explicitly offer that term. The current Albright school generally follows the phono-paleographic affrication schema along the above lines - see, Goldwasser 2006 in Biblical Archaeological Review and Hamilton 2002, in ASOR 65. You are probably right in assuming phonetic assibilation, but the general consensus is that there were phonetic affrications that basically mark the Proto-Canaanite offshoot from Proto-NW Semitic (like Ugaritic), and an important one is the merger of Ṯ/Ś and there was a subsequent merger that I may be forgetting.

Yes, I get your point on IPA, and I found at least one Ugaritic alphabet (modern) that uses them the way you do - it just probably should be cited - as we anyway could add a phonetic reconstruction table (also for that reason) - which Pardee did well. About Proto-Sinaitic - yes I know. And I have a strong bias here as I claim to have translated the bulk of the corpus, and submitted my first paper a while ago. However, I was not the first person (by a long-shot) to make the claim that there was sort of incontrovertible evidence (up until Wadi el-Hol) that the Proto-Sinaitic texts primarily affricate the characters Ṯ and Ś into a bow - which was what Albright (1948) had been discussing - and which is in fact the character in question in Phoenician. Since there are no known proto-Sinaitic or pre-Ugaritic abecedaries one cannot really posit non-paleographic/orthographic (/epigraphic - in terms of grammatical elements perhaps) oriented structural relationships. And in that respect there is as much consensus as can be had in that field (since there is none over translations themselves, but much over extra-translation assumptions) that the two bear evidence of affrication in Proto-Sinaitic leading into the earliest Proto-Canaanite inscriptions. Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:56, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

(PPS, that phrase lbclt doesn't even mean 'For Ba'alat (or For the Mistress)'. In Sinai 345 in the only known (semi-)bilingual Egyptian-Protosinaitic inscription. The Egyptian reads mry Hw.t-Hr mf3k (Beloved of Hathor of [Lady of] Turquoise). The Sinaitic reads -

D_ 'H[BB]cLT

ZNF K . LBcLT

"This, the Beloved of the Mistress

of Turquoise, may she possess [it]."

I just find it ironic that the only consensus-building phrase has frequently been misinterpreted. Though in fairness its usage in verb form was undoubtedly intended as a sort of sacred pun. Michael Sheflin (talk) 15:19, 10 March 2012 (UTC))

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I really don't want to get into an edit war, but the maneuver of replacing an SVG with a PNG was not too great, and I reverted that. I don't know what the "books.google.com.eg" link is (have never followed it, since I am not greatly fond of Google books or a proficient user of it), so do whatever you want with that. P.S. The interpretation of s ṣ z ẓ ḍ as affricates is another separate issue, but θ > š still would not be an affrication, since š is not an affricate under such interpretations... AnonMoos (talk) 17:15, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I see one potential issue - I was using affrication in two ways. I think it might be more appropriate, without knowing the proper linguistics term, that the characters merged - there was a paleographic and orthographic merger - without respect to the phonetics. This explains, however, the structural replacement of T_/$ with $ in the North Semitic order, and particularly in Canaanite languages. As for the phonetics - it's very difficult to know what occurred as the merger could be explained through some form of affrication or assibilation - though I have not ever seen the latter term applied to these Semitic languages. Michael Sheflin (talk) 22:06, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't greatly matter for the purposes of this article, but under the standard analysis, the late Canaanite mergers θ > š , ð > z, ḍ > ṣ , emphatic θ > ṣ , x > ħ , and ɣ > ʕ can be expressed by the simple generalization that all non-sibilant and non-pharyngeal fricatives merged with appropriate sibilants and pharyngeals (of the same voicing and emphatic status). Whether you include affricates in your reconstruction or not doesn't matter too much, since of the six sounds that merged, only "ḍ" (i.e. an emphatic fricative lateral) and emphatic θ (i.e. so-called "ẓ") were possibly affricated... AnonMoos (talk) 22:57, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

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I removed the link in the picture caption, as the citation to Pardee's chart of Ugaritic letters contradicts your chart of letters picture. books.google.com.eg is Egypt Google Books. That chapter is the same one we both provided as a citation. Michael Sheflin (talk) 15:18, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

I really don't understand how my chart substantially diverges from Pardee's chart (in the paper book that I have here -- I haven't viewed it on-line), ignoring slight legitimate differences in transliteration conventions, and given that on the immediately preceding page he refers to "three additional signs... appended to the end of the abecedary". However, I don't care one way or the other about your edit... AnonMoos (talk) 04:42, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

I consider it disingenuous, but it might not be considered a substantial divergence. While you are correct in citing the appending of those characters, no graphical chart of Ugaritic characters places a division between them and the rest of the alphabet. Saba7 el-Ful you've created your own schema in that regard.

I reverted your change of S₂, which I will admit is not a perfect notation, but the ś is actually used differently in the transcription of some Semitic languages - in this citation, Arabian (http://krc.orient.ox.ac.uk/aalc/images/stories/mcam_ancient_north_arabian.pdf). While it is very likely that this is related to the Ugaritic character (as I have repeatedly pointed out), this connection is not established. The one we want for the Ugaritic character is commonly (as in Pardee in that chart) an s with a downward line (or an accent grave - something like that - but it does not seem to be a standard symbol). There is a Ugaritic transcription font but I don't exactly know how easy it would be to incorporate that. In lieu of the actual symbol, it is better to just keep using S₂ as ś is used to reflect the "third sibilant, conventionally written */ś/, the exact nature of which is uncertain but may have been a lateral dental fricative [ɬ]." (Macdonald in Woodward 2008, 499). So using it for Ugaritic would not be standard, and would be inaccurate and confusing. Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:42, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

And I replaced your pictures similarly to before. I had not been familiar with svg files, so I took a screenshot and saved it as a png. It wasn't intended as a reversion. Michael Sheflin (talk) 14:54, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I do not find your combination of bold unorthodox speculations on the one hand, combined with nitpicking pettifogging niggling objections to small inessential issues on the other hand, to add up to a very satisfactory whole. The whole "no original research" thing (and especially the "no original synthesis" thing) applies in a rather different way to images than to article text. In many cases, exactly reproducing the charts, diagrams, and maps in a previously-published book or article would be a copyright violation, but to come up with something which serves the same function without being a copyright violation necessarily involves some element of "originality". The Wikimedia Commons image repository used by Wikipedia doesn't even have a "No Original Research" policy. That being the case, I really don't see why, if Pardee (and many others before him) agree that the last 3 letters were added to a previously-existing 27-letter alphabet, why I can't make a visual distinction between the 27 and the 3 (something which is really very minimally "original"). I find this whole thing to be exceedingly pointless.

As for the transcription of the 30th letter, I really don't see any ground for legitimate confusion between Ugaritic transcriptional s₂ and South Arabian transcriptional s₂. The s-acute vs. s-grave thing is not all that vitally important, but if you really want an s-grave, here it is: s̀ (though it won't display in all browser setups). AnonMoos (talk) 18:46, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Well the issue is that it is not the correct symbol used in the study of Ugaritic - and it is used in transcription for other Semitic languages. So in addition to being incorrect, it could conceivably also be confusing. This particular character shows up in my browser, and is the one that should hypothetically be used in the article.

As for the picture, there really just isn't evidence that anyone but you puts a line there. And we have mentioned in the article that these letters were likely appended. But no distinction is ever explicitly made in graphical form. You can see it in Pardee, so basically find an example that places the line and I will back down and apologize. In lieu, I refer you again to Pardee and also to the 7 entirely or mostly complete abecedaria from the actual corpus (the Roman numerals are line numbers):

1) KTU 5.6 I. a b g h_ d h w z h. t. y k $ l II. m d_ n z. s c p s. q r t_ III. g/ t i u s\

2) KTU 5.12 I. a b g h_ d h w z II. h. t. y k $ l m III. d_ n z. s c p s. q IV. r t_ g/ t i u s\ (V. a b g)

3) KTU 5.13 VII. a b g h_ d h w z h. t. y k $ l VIII. m d_ n z. s c p s. q r t_ g/ IX. t i u s\

4) KTU 5.16 II. [(a) ]b g h_ d h w z h. t. y k III. [($ l) ]m d_ n z. s c p s. q IV. [(r t_ g/) ]t i u s\

5) KTU 5.17 V. a b g h_ d h w z h. t. VI. y k $ l m d_ n z. V. s c p s. q r t_ g/ t i u s\

6) KTU 5.19 I. a b g h_ d h w II. z h. t. y k $ l III. m d_ n z. s c p s. IV. q r t_ g/ t i u s\

7) KTU 5.20 I. a b g h_ d h w z h. t y k $ l m d_ n z. s c p s. II. q r t_ g/ t i u s\

I suspect the picture in Ugaritic language, under the writing system section, of the abecedary is most likely KTU 5.20, in which case you can plainly see that no bar is placed between any of the characters. So the chart should be modified to reflect the ancient and modern consensus, and the article (which it does) should reflect the modern suggestion that these characters were appended.

And in this case, we're reproducing idealized images of the ABCs (because real Ugaritic characters do not appear in the manner of that chart). So there is no copyright issue. So the question is, would an image of the ABCs, with XYZ split off graphically from the rest of the alphabet serve the same function as a picture without that arbitrary addition? Michael Sheflin (talk) 18:54, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/22_alphabet.jpg/250px-22_alphabet.jpg is three lines, so it's actually KTU 5.6. Michael Sheflin (talk) 19:04, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

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I never claimed that there was a vertical line on any cuneiform tablet between t and ʔi (and never claimed that any tablet organized the alphabet into five rows of six, for that matter), and I never claimed to be exactly transcribing any one single cuneiform tablet exactly (though I consulted Healey ISBN 0-520-07431-9, which has a drawing of an alphabetic tablet found in 1948 on p. 216). Rather, I included the vertical line based on textual statements (such as "three additional signs... appended to the end of the abecedary" by Pardee, and a number of other similar statements by other scholars) in order to add additional information to the chart, for general clarity, and for the convenience of the person perusing the chart. It's really not "original research" in any meaningful or valid sense, and if it possibly contains some element of "original synthesis", then the rules about this are a little more relaxed for images than for text. I really don't see what major valid objection there could be to the vertical line (unless you disagree with the standard views of the Ugaritic alphabet according to which the last three came later than the first 27), and unfortunately I find dealing with your mixture of bold free-ranging sweeping grand speculations on some matters combined with nitpicking technicalistic narrow objections to small details on other matters to be rather tedious and tiresome to deal with... AnonMoos (talk) 18:40, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

P.S. The vertical line helps in understanding that the first letter of the alphabet almost certainly originated as an ordinary early Semitic aleph letter (representing the pure consonantal glottal stop sound [ʔ] only), and did not come to have the specific sound-value ʔa until the other two letters (representing vowels [i] and [u] in foreign transcriptions, but ʔi and ʔu in writing Ugaritic) were added. AnonMoos (talk) 20:29, 16 March 2012 (UTC)

Except that in Ugaritic, ʔ is actually specifically ʔa because of the presence of ʔi and ʔu and despite its origin. So in fact, this obfuscates the reality that Ugaritic did not (generally) employ ʔ- (i.e. ʔa or ʔi or ʔu). Of course, ʔ originated in the common manner most likely, but it is not used that way in Ugaritic. It functions in tandem with ʔi and ʔu. It doesn't matter to me ultimately, this is not my source for Ugaritic information. Michael Sheflin (talk) 11:23, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

The red vertical line does absolutely nothing to change the fact that the value of the first letter of the cuneiform alphabet was ʔa (rather than ʔ) in attested Ugaritic texts, but it represents a historical distinction which throws a certain amount of light on the earlier development of the cuneiform alphabet... AnonMoos (talk) 18:57, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Reference added to See Also Section

Thunderer44 added a useful book in the See Also section, but he was using reference tags. I am guessing he was not quite sure on how to add the book to the article.
  Watson, Wilfred G.E. and Nicholar Wyatt, eds. (1999). Handbook of Ugaritic Studies. Leiden: Brill. {{cite book}}: |last= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
In plain text form:
  {{cite book|last=Watson, Wilfred G.E. and Nicholar Wyatt, eds.|title=Handbook of Ugaritic Studies|year=1999|publisher=Brill|location=Leiden}}
Someone should be able to find an appropriate locations to use this as a reference in the text. — al-Shimoni (talk) 23:44, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Ugaritic in terms of Arabic

Arabic

As for comments recently added to the article on the closeness of Ugaritic and Arabic, we have image File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart-Arabic.svg, but otherwise there is not necessarily an especially close relationship between Ugaritic and Arabic. What they have in common is that Ugaritic has letters for 27 of the commonly-reconstructed 29 proto-Semitic consonant contrasts, while Arabic has letters for 28 of them. (Old South Arabian sometimes had letters for all 29...). -- AnonMoos (talk) 19:08, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

Glyphs

I can see the glyphs in the table Ugaritic alphabet#letters but not in the main texts (e.g. Ugaritic alphabet#Origin. How is this possible? 87.202.187.154 (talk) 05:36, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

I assume because your browser can display a PNG rendering of image File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart.svg, but does not have access to a Unicode-encoded Ugaritic font. Some software can't display characters outside the Unicode BMP even if the fonts are available... AnonMoos (talk) 08:19, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

I was having an issue with Unicode fonts with some alphabets (but not all of them) while using Firefox. Seems Firefox has some weird fallback system in place that causes some Unicode fonts to not display despite being installed in the system. If this is what you or others are having issue with on WP, it can be fixed by explicitly adding some of the fonts you need to the four entries { font.name-list.monospace.x-western }, { font.name-list.sans-serif.x-unicode }, { font.name-list.sans-serif.x-western }, and { font.name-list.serif.x-western } in Firefox's about:config. (I don't recall why it is all four, instead of just the unicode entry, but it fixed it.) I have all four set to the value { FreeSans,Code2001,Code2000,Aegean } which covers most of the fonts on Wikipedia and elsewhere that were not working before (you don't need to list all your fonts, most are being seen by Firefox, but these are some of the fonts that the browser, for some reason, wasn't looking at). Make sure you already have the fonts you need installed in your system, too. — al-Shimoni (talk) 10:12, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Abjad?

Is it an abjad or an alphabet? I've seen the word abjad plastered everywhere whenever I come across Semitic articles like it was some sort of consensus. As far as I know it was coined by one guy. Did he actually log in to wikipedia and did all these edits? It's very weird. 183.171.173.149 (talk) 15:11, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

The term "Abjad" in the meaning "consonantal alphabet" only came into use in the 1990s, and it's far from being universally used in all linguistics contexts today. For a long time before the 1990s, scholars were perfectly happy to use the phrase "consonantal alphabet" to express the meaning, and it would be go against general Wikipedia naming policies to change the titles of all relevant articles from "X alphabet" to "X abjad"... AnonMoos (talk) 09:04, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

Ugaritic vs Assyrian (Syriac & Hebrew) alphabet

Adding this due to the changing of Ugaritic *ṯ to t < ܬ ת > instead of š < ܫ ש > for Syrian (Syriac).

If the comparison table is solely making letter equivalents, the Assyrian alphabets are by default the same when none of the diacritics that developed later are added (they are effectively fonts).

If we go toward soundshifts within the languages using these alphabets today, Assyrian (Aramaic) and Hebrew have both merged multiple sounds.

To illustrate several words where Assyrian (Modern, Syr) & Hebrew (Modern, Ivr) overlap:

sun - Syr: sëmsa ܫܡܫܐ שמשא Ivr: semes ܫܡܫ שמש

• the second s was historically another sound before the 22 letter alphabet was adopted and that is not identified in orthography nor sound

apple / quince (Syr / Ivr) - Syr: ḳabūsa ܚܒܘܫܐ חבושא Ivr: ḳabūs ܚܒܘܫ חבוש

five - Syr: ḳemsa ܚܡܫܐ חמש Ivr: ḳames ܚܡܫ חמש

• I am using ḳ for all of the sounds that became guttural /x/. The technical correspondence in the Latin alphabet is h

If someone would like to explain how I am wrong, I will gladly listen.

Additional notes for clarity:

• s above corresponds to sound /š/. since Latin < s > corresponds to the actual Assyrian letter for /š/, I opted to use it above
• Assyrian is the native name of the alphabets in both Assyrian & Hebrew (Ṣurıt, Asurıt), hence calling both Syriac & Hebrew alphabets as Assyrian

Boreocont (talk) 03:47, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm unable to follow much of what you're trying to say, but the significance of the Ugaritic θ correspondence with Phoenician ש, was first noted and explained by William Foxwell Albright in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 118 (1950), as discussed above. Also, the form of the current Hebrew alphabet is traditionally called "square" or "Assyrian" (modern scholars would call it "Aramaic"), but the Assyrian language has nothing whatever to do with anything, as far as I can tell. Anyway, Samaritans to this day do not write Hebrew with the square/"Assyrian"/Aramaic form of the alphabet... AnonMoos (talk) 21:01, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

Ugaritic Script

Wouldn't it be better to change the title, considering that it's actually an abjad? 178.120.61.131 (talk) 01:35, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

"Abjad" in that meaning is a recent neologism; for centuries scholars used the term "consonantal alphabet", and many still use it today. If articles such a "Hebrew alphabet" and "Arabic alphabet" are not changed, then "Ugaritic alphabet" should not be changed either... AnonMoos (talk) 04:49, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Or it can go the other way too, if this article gets renamed, so should Hebrew and Arabic.

Neologisms can be useful. If two words mean the same thing, but one is shorter, which one is more efficient? 178.120.61.131 (talk) 08:13, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

On the other hand, the meaning of "consonantal alphabet" is clear from the meaning of its two words, while the meaning of "abjad" is arbitrary and unguessable. (Knowing the meaning of the word abjad in the Arabic language would not help you too much with the neologistic meaning of "abjad" in the English language.) Such matters are rarely settled by counting syllables... There was previous discussion on "Talk:Arabic alphabet" about changing the title of that article, and the move did not go through. Nothing against you personally, necessarily, but I'm getting quite tired of article reame proposals motivated by the stupid "abjad" neologism. A month or two ago User:AleksiB_1945 proposed the renames of about six articles on this basis, and only one of them went through -- the article about the most obscure of the writing systems. AnonMoos (talk) 16:43, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

The move didn't go through, but the matter is not settled until there is consensus. Even if you don't like the word abjad because "neologisms bad" the word script is uncontroversial in meaning and easily understood. 178.120.61.131 (talk) 23:47, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

For the record, I don't hate the "abjad" neologism nearly as much as I hate the attempt to confine the word "alphabet" to a narrow restricted meaning which is not supported by centuries of scholarly usage. Peter Daniels can coin as many neologisms as he wants, and such words will gain acceptance or become disused on their merits, but the attempt to redefine the word "alphabet" has some obnoxious and stupid aspects... AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 18 September 2023 (UTC)