Ugaritic language

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Ugaritic

Spoken in

formerly in Ugarit
speaker extinct
Linguistic
classification
Official status
Official language in Ugarit
Language codes
ISO 639 -1

-

ISO 639 -2

uga

ISO 639-3

uga

The Ugaritic language or Ugaritic is a Semitic language , the surviving written documents from the 14th to 12th centuries BC. Come from BC.

The first written documents in the Ugaritic language to be deciphered in modern times were clay tablets with mythological poems that had been discovered in Ras Shamra (Ugarit) in present-day Syria from 1928 onwards . Numerous letters, lists and other written documents were later found and cataloged. Ugaritic is of enormous importance for the research of the Tanakh , as these texts not only clarified ambiguities in Hebrew texts, but also gained a deeper understanding of how standardized phrases, literary idioms and expressions were adopted from the cultures surrounding Israel .

Ugaritic was the most significant literary discovery of antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mesopotamian cuneiform . The literary texts found in Ugarit provide insight into Ugaritic mythology , such as the Legend of Keret , the Aqhat Epic (also known as the Legend of Danel ), the Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and The Death of Baal .

Ugaritic was a Semitic language that was written in the Ugaritic script , an alphabetic cuneiform script with 30 different letters, and not, as is usual for Akkadian texts, in a syllabary . Ugaritic texts are from the 14th century BC to the destruction of the city in 1180/1170 BC. Chr. Attested. Thus, Ugaritic was written with one of the oldest known alphabets.

Table of the Ugaritic alphabet

Ugaritic was the language of a Canaanite culture and is closely related to the other Canaanite languages , even if it is not counted among the Canaanite languages ​​in the narrower sense because the Canaanite sound change from ā> ō was not carried out. Ugaritic is viewed as a close relative of the proto-language that existed at the same time , from which the languages ​​designated as Canaanite (or Canaanite) are derived.

literature

  • Josef Tropper: Small dictionary of Ugaritic (= Elementa Linguarum Orientis. Volume 4). Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-447-05638-0 .
  • Josef Tropper: Ugaritic grammar (= Old Orient and Old Testament. Volume 273). Ugarit-Verlag, Münster 2000, ISBN 3-927120-90-1 (abridged version as Ugaritic. Brief grammar with exercise texts and glossary (= Elementa Linguarum Orientis. Volume 1). Ugarit-Verlag, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-934628-12- 5 ).
  • Dennis Pardee: Ugaritic. In: Stefan Weninger u. a. (Ed.): The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook (= handbooks for linguistics and communication studies. Volume 36). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-025158-6 , pp. 460–472.

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