A Basic Grammar of Ugaritic Language

By Stanislav Segert

In 1929, the first cuneiform tablet, inscribed with previously unknown signs, was found during archeological excavations at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in northern Syria. Since then a special discipline, sometimes called Ugaritology, has arisen. The impact of the Ugaritic language and of the many texts written in it has been felt in the study of Semitic languages and literatures, in the history of the ancient Near East, and especially in research devoted to the Hebrew Bible. In fact, knowledge of Ugaritic has become a standard prerequisite for the scientific study of the Old Testament.    The Ugaritic texts, written in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B. c., represent the oldest complex of connected texts in any West Semitic language now available (1984). Their language is of critical importance for comparative Semitic linguistics and is uniquely important to the critical study of Biblical Hebrew. Ugaritic, which was spoken in a northwestern corner of the larger Canaanite linguistic area, cannot be considered a direct ancestor of Biblical Hebrew, but its conservative character can help in the reconstruction of the older stages of Hebrew phonology, word formation, and inflection. These systems were later-that is, during the period in which the biblical texts were actually written-complicated by phonological and other changes.    The Ugaritic texts are remarkable, however, for more than just their antiquity and their linguistic witness. They present a remarkably vigorous and mature literature, one containing both epic cycles and shorter poems. The poetic structure of Ugaritic is noteworthy, among other reasons, for its use of the "parallelism of members" that also characterizes such ancient and archaizing poems in the Hebrew Bible as the Song of Deborah (in Judges 5), the Song of the Sea (in Exodus 15), Psalms 29, 68, and 82, and Habakkuk 3.    Textual sources and their rendering  The basic source for the study of Ugaritic is a corpus of texts written in an alphabetic cuneiform script unknown before 1929; this script represents consonants fully and exactly but gives only limited and equivocal indication of vowels. Our knowledge of the Ugaritic language is supple-mented by evidence from Akkadian texts found at Ugarit and containing many Ugaritic words, especially names written in the syllabic cuneiform script. Scholars reconstructing the lost language of Ugarit draw, finally, on a wide variety of comparative linguistic data, data from texts not found at Ugarit, as well as from living languages. Evidence from Phoenician, Hebrew, Amorite, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, Ethiopic, and recently also Eblaitic, can be applied to good effect.    For the student, as well as for the research scholar, it is important that the various sources of U garitic be distinguished in modern transliteration or transcription. Since many of the texts found at Ugarit are fragmentary or physically damaged, it is well for students to be clear about what portion of a text that they are reading actually survives and what portion is a modern attempt to fill in the blanks. While the selected texts in section 8 reflect the state of preservation in detail, in the other sections of the grammar standardized forms are presented, based on all available evidence.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.
In 1929, the first cuneiform tablet, inscribed with previously unknown signs, was found during archeological excavations at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) in northern Syria. Since then a special discipline, sometimes called Ugaritology, has arisen. The impac

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520342101

Stanislav Segert

Stanislav Segert (May 4, 1921 – September 30, 2005) was a prominent scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on North-West Semitic languages.

Book preview

A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language

A BASIC GRAMMAR OF THE UGARITIC LANGUAGE

WITH SELECTED TEXTS AND GLOSSARY

BY

STANISLAV SEGERT

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD.

London, England

Copyright ® 1984 by the regents of the university of California

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Segert, S. (Stanislav)

A basic grammar of the Ugaritic language.

Bibliography: p. xviii Includes index.

1. Ugaritic language—Grammar.

I. Title.

PJ4150.S39 1984 492’.6 83-18055 ISBN 0-520-03999-8

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

123456789

In memoriam

Claude François-Armand Schaeffer-Forrer

Contents 1

Contents 1

I. Introduction

2. Writing

3. Phonology

4. Word Formation

5. Morphology

6. Function of Words in the Sentence

7. Sentence Structure

Part 8 Selected Texts

Part 9 Glossary

91. Arrangement

92. Words and meanings

Part 10 Paradigms and Surveys

101. Paradigms of pronouns, nouns and verbs 101.1. Personal pronouns

I. Introduction

II. The Ugaritic language

11.1. Name

The name of the Ugaritic language is derived from the ancient name of the city of Ugarit, preserved in the alphabetic texts as ugrt /ugarit-/ (1.40:10, 35, 36 etc.) and in the cuneiform syllabary most frequently as u-ga-ri-it (P:III: 16.140:3 (p. 45), etc.).

11.2. City and kingdom of Ugarit

The city of Ugarit was discovered under a mound called in Arabic Ras (esh-) Shamra (Fennel Cape). The mound is located about one kilometer from the Mediterranean Sea and is about ten kilometers north of the city of Ladiqlye (French Lattaquie, ancient Greek Laodikeia) in north Syria. Nearly all the remains of the Ugaritic language have been discovered during excavations carried out at this site since 1929. A small number of Ugaritic texts have been found at Ras Ibn Hani, five kilometers south of Ras Shamra, where excavations began in 1977. A few texts, all short, using the Ugaritic alphabet have been found elsewhere in the western Mediterranean area: on Cyprus (Hala Sultan Tekke, near Larnaca), in Syria (Tell Sukas; Kadesh), Lebanon (Kamid el-Loz; Sarepta), and Palestine (Mount Tabor; Taanach; Beth Shemesh).

It may be supposed that Ugaritic was spoken at least in the territory of the kingdom of Ugarit, an area about sixty square kilometers. The boundaries of the kingdom extended in the north to the area around