RAS SHAMRA— HARRIS 493 



ber or some other special mark, and this type of close relation between 

 the two alphabets remains highly doubtful. 



Nevertheless, the consonantal Ugaritic alphabet must have been 

 modeled on the consonantal Phoenician alphabet. Only so can we 

 explain why the Ugaritic alphabet has no signs for vowels even though 

 it was created by people who knew Akkadian cuneiform, and vowels 

 are the only simple sounds for which cuneiform did have separate signs. 

 It may have been made with a sign-for-sign correspondence to the 

 Phoenician, in which case it probably had to continue the list and add 

 some signs for sounds which Phoenician did not have. But more 

 probably it was modeled on the general acrophonic method of the 

 Phoenician alphabet; just as the Phoenician had signs the value of 

 which was the first sound of their names, so here cuneiform signs were 

 made, with fixed names, and with acrophonic alphabetic values. 

 We cannot be at all sure of this, for we do not have the names of the 

 Ugaritic letters, but it is doubtful if the sounds were thought of 

 analytically by themselves ; more probably they were conceived as the 

 different initial sounds of various words which "began differently." 



Either way, the Ugaritic alphabet was probably not a slavish borrow- 

 ing of the Phoenician, but a new creation based on a learning of the 

 general idea or the underlying method of the Phoenician alphabet. 

 We have here a fine example of the learning and independent application 

 of cultural patterns, a type of transfer which often takes place in the 

 spread of cultural forms. This imitating of the cultural pattern has 

 occurred several times in the history of the alphabet — it figures in the 

 very origin of the Phoenician alphabet — and is but another witness to 

 the great adaptability of peoples in assimilating the cultural forms of 

 their neighbors. 



THE LANGUAGE OF UGARIT 

 WORKING OUT THE GRAMMAR 



The language of Ugarit is of great interest for Semitic linguistics. It 

 has brought important new facts to light, and has given body to some 

 hypotheses. But it is not in itself a totally new Semitic language; 

 it is a dialect closely related to other Imown Semitic dialects. When 

 once the values of the alphabetic characters were deciphered, it was 

 possible to understand large portions of the texts. Most of the words 

 were recognizable; they were similar to Hebrew words, or to words 

 laiown from Phoenician inscriptions, and were assumed to have the 

 same meanings as their cognates (words in related languages which 

 have developed from the same common word in the parent speech). 

 Some words could not be made out at first, but were shown to have 

 cognates in Akkadian or Arabic, or other more distant Semitic lan- 

 guages. 



