File:Ugaritic Chart of Letters.svg

Summary

A table of the letters of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, with corresponding conventional Latin-alphabet transcriptions. Where such specialist "Semitological" symbols are somewhat divergent from more widely-understood general linguistic IPA symbols, an equivalent IPA symbol follows in parentheses (except that no attempt is made to interpret underdots for "emphatic" consonants in terms of IPA; note that the use of IPA symbols is not intended to be any kind of exact phonetic reconstruction of details of ancient Ugaritic pronunciation). The symbols "y" and "š", which are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americanist_phonetic_notation" class="extiw" title="en:Americanist phonetic notation">"Americanist"</a> as well as Semitological, do not have their IPA equivalents [j] and [ʃ] listed in the chart.

The letters ṭ ṣ ẓ q wrote sounds which were the "emphatic" counterparts to "non-emphatic" t s θ k, but it is not known what the exact phonetic nature of such emphasis contrasts was in ancient Ugaritic. Certain confusions or semi-coalescences of letters (such as between ẓ and ġ etc.) hint at sound changes within Ugaritic...

The vertical red line in the last row of the table divides the basic 27 Ugaritic letters (presumably adapted from an early non-Cuneiform alphabet) from the last three letters, which seem to have been added within Ugaritic (originally to transcribe foreign words or languages). [REMOVED IN THIS VERSION OF GRAPHIC]

The only punctuation was a word divider (a short vertical stroke), not shown in the table.

Note that some of the character names included in the Unicode standard (listing at <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10380.pdf">http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10380.pdf</a> ) seem to be rather speculative and hypothetical, while other names are strangely and anachronistically taken from the Greek alphabet etc. These Unicode character names are not useful for linguistic or philological research.

This is a self-made graphic based on fonts and publicly-available information, declared to be in the public domain.

For a version of this chart with Arabic equivalents to Ugaritic letters, see <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart-Arabic.svg" title="File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart-Arabic.svg">File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart-Arabic.svg</a>. For a chart with somewhat different letter-shapes (since based on a more tapering wedge), and including the word-divider, see <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ugaritic_script_sample.svg" title="File:Ugaritic script sample.svg">File:Ugaritic script sample.svg</a>.

Licensing

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