The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform abjad used
from around either the fifteenth century BCE
or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest
Semitic language, and discovered in Ugarit
(modern Ras Shamra), Syria, in 1928.
It has 30 letters.
Other languages (particularly Hurrian) were
occasionally written in the Ugaritic script
in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the
earliest evidence of both the North Semitic
and South Semitic orders of the alphabet,
which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of
the reduced Phoenician alphabet and its descendants
(including Greek and Latin) on the one hand,
and of the Ge'ez alphabet on the other.
Arabic and Old South Arabian are the only
other Semitic alphabets which have letters
for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed
proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.
(But note that several of these distinctions
were only secondarily added to the Arabic
alphabet by means of diacritic dots.)
According to Manfried Dietrich and Oswald
Loretz in Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (eds.
Wilfred G.E.
Watson and Nicholas Wyatt, 1999): "The language
they [the 30 signs] represented could be described
as an idiom which in terms of content seemed
to be comparable to Canaanite texts, but from
a phonological perspective, however, was more
like Arabic" (82, 89, 614).
The script was written from left to right.
Although cuneiform and pressed into clay,
its symbols were unrelated to those of Akkadian
cuneiform.
== Function ==
Ugaritic was an augmented abjad.
In most syllables only consonants were written,
including the /w/ and /j/ of diphthongs.
However, Ugaritic was unusual among early
abjads in also writing vowels after the glottal
stop.
It is thought that the letter for the syllable
/ʔa/ originally represented the consonant
/ʔ/, as aleph does in other Semitic abjads,
and that it was later restricted to /ʔa/
with the addition, at the end of the alphabet,
of /ʔi/ and /ʔu/.The final consonantal letter
of the alphabet, s2, has a disputed origin
along with both "appended" glottals, but "The
patent similarity of form between the Ugaritic
symbol transliterated [s2], 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, [s2] is like Ugaritic s, but
only in certain words – other s-words are
never written with [s2]."
The words that show s2 are predominantly borrowings,
and thus it is often thought to be a late
addition to the alphabet representing a foreign
sound that could be approximated by native
/s/; Huehnergard and Pardee make it the affricate
/ts/.
Segert instead theorizes that it may have
been syllabic /su/, and for this reason grouped
with the other syllabic signs /ʔi/ and /ʔu/.Probably
the last three letters of the alphabet were
originally developed for transcribing non-Ugaritic
languages (texts in the Akkadian language
and Hurrian language have been found written
in the Ugaritic alphabet), and were then applied
to write the Ugaritic language.
The three letters denoting glottal stop plus
vowel combinations were used as simple vowel
letters when writing other languages.
The only punctuation is a word divider.
== Origin ==
At the time the Ugaritic script was in use
(ca. 1300–1190 BCE), Ugarit was at the centre
of the literate world, among Egypt, Anatolia,
Cyprus, Crete, and Mesopotamia.
Ugaritic combined the system of the Semitic
abjad with cuneiform writing methods (pressing
a stylus into clay).
However, scholars have searched in vain for
graphic prototypes of the Ugaritic letters
in Mesopotamian cuneiform.
Recently, some have suggested that Ugaritic
represents some form of the Proto-Sinaitic
alphabet, the letter forms distorted as an
adaptation to writing on clay with a stylus.
(There may also have been a degree of influence
from the poorly understood Byblos syllabary.)
It has been proposed in this regard that 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 ṭ, 𐎓 ʕ, and
𐎖 q.
Other letters look similar as well: 𐎅 h
resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while
𐎆 w, 𐎔 p, and 𐎘 θ are similar to
Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.
Jared Diamond believes 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 (abecedaria, singular
abecedarium) have been found in two alphabetic
orders: the "Northern Semitic order" more
similar to the one found in Arabic (earlier
order), 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 the Ge'ez alphabets.
The letters are given in transcription and
in their Arabic and Hebrew cognates; letters
missing from Hebrew are left blank.
North Semitic
South Semitic
== Letters ==
== 
Unicode ==
Ugaritic script was added to the Unicode Standard
in April, 2003 with the release of version
4.0.
The Unicode block for Ugaritic is U+10380–U+1039F:
== See also ==
Old Persian cuneiform – a much later, unrelated
attempt at a cuneiform semi-alphabet.
== References ==
== 
External links ==
Download a Ugaritic font (includes Unicode
font)
Ugaritic cuneiform characters from the Unicode
Ugaritic cuneiform script
Ugaritic cuneiform Omniglot entry on the subject
Ugaritic script (ancientscripts.com)
Ugaritic writing
GNU FreeFont Unicode font family with Ugaritic
range in its sans-serif face.
