Talk:Ugaritic alphabet

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

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Old Persian Cuneiform

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

text: 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)
thread_title:  Missing information 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)

text: 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)
thread_title:  letter names 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Consonantal Letter

message: Please comment at Talk:Ugarit#Number_of_letters_in_Ugaritic_alphabet. Debresser (talk) 22:20, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of letters unclear? 

message: 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.  In plain text form:  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)
thread_title:  Reference added to See Also Section 

message: 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)
thread_title: Arabic

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text:  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)
thread_title:  Glyphs 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Abjad? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Ugaritic vs Assyrian (Syriac & Hebrew) alphabet