Talk:Ugaritic alphabet
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should be improved, drawing on de:Ugaritische Schrift, de:Protosemitisches Alphabet. dab 20:07, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Most of the symbols of these types of alphabets don't show, only boxes or "?" marks. (Boxes=IE, ?=FF). Is that a installed-font issue or...? infinitelink 24 Apr 2006
I have the same issue in IE7, FF and opera. For example in EI each line in the letters listing appears like "𐎁 b Beta" - first character is a box. -Paul- 19:57, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Old Persian Cuneiform
Removed the mention of Old Persian Cuneiform as a possible inspiration for Ugaritic. Absent time travel, a script invented ~500 BC cannot have inspired one introduced about a millennium earlier. 85.8.12.78 18:30, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
From Ángel García, Nuremberg, Bavaria Feb. 2008
The table of characters lacks any source. There is only "Wikinger" uploading it. On research, you find Omniglot.com as a source, but those again cite en.wikipedia.org as their source. So self-referential. The letter names are pure fancy. Inspired from Greek. "Ox" in Ugaritic is '`alpu' not 'alpha', "house" is 'baitu', not 'beta' etc. They need to be deleted.
To the line "NORTH SEMITIC:" the correspondence of Ug. th (interdental voiceless) is only diachronically Hebrew shin - Sound change.
THE MOST IMPORTANT FACT IS NEVER MENTIONED, as visibly all contributors are no linguists: 5 to 6 consonantal phonemes, which Ugaritic still possessed, were later lost due to sound change. Thus Phoen. only 22 phonemes = 22 letters. Hebrew has more, Old Aram. had more sounds, but as the Phoen. abgad was the only extant around 1000, they had to accomodate with it.
The weblinks need a comment: ancientscripts.com has an erroneous graph for ´ayn. And where is proof is use till "800 BCE" ?
García Ángel García (talk) 19:06, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
From Ángel García, Nuremberg, Bavaria - Feb. 2008
The PERIOD needs rectification: The abgad was used ca. 1400 to 1195 - but NOT "1800 - 1400 BCE", as Jim CORNWELL pretends in "From the Alpha to the Omega, III, 1999 - www.mazzaroth.com/ChapterThree/UgariticWriting. There, ´ayn is wrongly represented, in fact, it is a wedge.
The source [1] is a link to Brian COLLESS from University Chicago, Nov. 2004. He cites no other source but himself; publishes no book, only articles in the journal ´abr Nahrain {yonder Euphrates and Tigris}. I am sorry I cannot take his contributions seriously: a boomerang in Ugarit? They never existed outside Australia. A signature? In the ancient Fertile Crescent, these were obtained by clay rolling seals. - He pretends that t.ab, mu, pu ("good, water, mouth") had short vowels. I think I need to stress the fact that there is NO Oriental hard evidence of letter names before 250 BCE; the oldest being the Greek letter names. I have the impression that most of those "names" were concocted by non-Semitists, as the pretended names do not fit into Semitic vocabulary.
The chapter "For example..." should delete the [fancy] letter names.
Finally, the letter correspondences are given according to the Semitistic knowledge of AD. 1900. Rather, it is now believed (Source: DIAKONOFF, Afro-Asiatic) thaz "z" was dz, sh was lateral l, z. was emphatic interdental th, "s" was ts and "s." was ts. Cf. Greek Zêta, Mod. Hebrew S.adê.
The whole article should be rewritten accordingly. García Ángel García (talk) 19:35, 9 February 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Missing information
Maybe this article is too specialist for me...but I read it and couldn't get from it the information that Ugaritic is older than Phoenician and that it is its predecessor. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.178.224.163 (talk) 09:27, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
- The older stages of "Phoenician" we call Proto-Caananite, because the texts are too sparse to know if they actually recorded Phoenician. Both Ugaritic and Phoen/P-Can are rather sparsely attested c. 1400-1500 BCE. I'm not sure we can say which is older, and if we do, that might change with new discoveries. Maybe someone who knows more about this than me can answer. kwami (talk) 17:15, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
