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The Ugaritic script is a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) abjad used from around either the fifteenth century BCE〔(''A Primer on Ugaritic'', William M. Schniedewind (pg 32) )〕 or 1300 BCE〔(''Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia'' )〕 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 Arabic (starting with the earliest order of its abjad), the reduced Hebrew, and more distantly the Greek and Latin alphabets 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. According to Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz in ''Handbook of Ugaritic Studies'' (eds. Wilfred G.E. Watson and Nicholas Wyatt, 1999): "The language they (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 the Akkadian cuneiform. ==Function== Ugaritic was an augmented abjad. In most syllables only consonants were written, including the and 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 originally represented the consonant , as aleph does in other Semitic abjads, and that it was later restricted to with the addition, at the end of the alphabet, of and .〔Florian Coulmas, 1991, ''The writing systems of the world''〕〔(William Schniedewind, Joel Hunt, 2007. ''A primer on Ugaritic'' )〕 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 (), 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'', () is like Ugaritic s, but only in certain words – other s-words are never written with ()."〔(''Ugaritic, in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia'' )〕 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/.〔Huehnergard, ''An Introduction to Ugaritic'' (2012), p. 21; Pardee, ''Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform in the context of other alphabetic systems'' in ''Studies in ancient Oriental civilization'' (2007), p. 183.〕 Segert instead theorizes that it may have been syllabic /su/, and for this reason grouped with the other syllabic signs /ʔi/ and /ʔu/.〔Stanislave Segert, "The Last Sign of the Ugaritic Alphabet" in ''Ugaritic-Forschugen'' 15 (1983): 201-218〕 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ugaritic alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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