Ugaritic alphabet

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The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad (alphabet without vowels), used from around 1500 BC for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Canaanite language discovered in Ugarit, Syria in 1928. It has 31 letters. Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were occasionally written in it in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the Levantine and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets on the one hand, and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other.

The script was written from left to right.

Origin

Scholars have searched in vain for cuneiform prototypes of the letters of the Ugaritic alphabet. However, recently some have come to the conclusion that Ugaritic may have been a form of the Semitic alphabet,

the letter forms distorted as an adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus.

For example, the two basic shapes in cuneiform, a linear wedge, as in 𐎂, and a corner wedge, as in 𐎓, 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: 𐎉 Tet, 𐎓 Ain, and 𐎖 Qopa. Other letters look similar as well: 𐎅 Ho resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while 𐎆 Wo, 𐎔 Pu, and 𐎘 Thanna are similar to Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.

Jared Diamond believes the 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 have been found in two alphabetic orders: the "Northern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the Hebrew and Phoenician, and more distantly, the Greek and Latin alphabets; and the "Southern Semitic order" more similar to the one found in the South Arabian, and more distantly, the Ge'ez alphabets. The letters are given in transcription and in their Hebrew cognates; letters missing from Hebrew are left blank.

North Semitic

’a

ṭ

š'

ẓ

ṣ

’i

’u

ח׳

ד׳

ט׳

ע׳

שׂ

South Semitic

’

ẓ

ṭ

ṣ

ח׳

שׂ

ט׳

ע׳

ד׳

Special characters

Letters

𐎀	ʾa	alpa
𐎁	b	beta
𐎂	g	gamla
𐎃	ẖ	ẖa
𐎄	d	delta
𐎅	h	ho
𐎆	w	wo
𐎇	z	zeta
𐎈	ḥ	ḥota
𐎉	ṭ	ṭet
𐎊	y	yod
𐎋	k	kaf
𐎌	š	šin
𐎞	š₂	šinš
𐎍	l	lamda
𐎎	m	mem
𐎏	ḏ	ḏal
𐎐	n	nun
𐎑	ẓ	ẓu
𐎒	s	samka
𐎓	ʿ	ʿain
𐎔	p	pu
𐎕	ṣ	ṣade
𐎖	q	qopa
𐎗	r	raša
𐎘	ṯ	ṯanna
𐎙	ġ	ġain
𐎚	t	to
𐎝	s₂	śu
𐎛	ʾi	i
𐎜	ʾu	u
𐎟	word divider

Ugaritic in Unicode

In Unicode, the Ugaritic alphabet is assigned to U+10380 - U+1039F.

External links

Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 1)
Ugaritic script (Brian Colless - version 2)
Ugaritic writing
Ugaritic script (ancientscripts.com)
Ugaritic cuneiform Omniglot entry on the subject
Download an Ugaritic font (includes Unicode font)
Ugaritic cuneiform characters from the Unicode Ugaritic cuneiform script

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Last updated on Saturday March 08, 2008 at 04:10:00 PST (GMT -0800)
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