496 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1937 



THE SOUNDS (PHONOLOGY) 



The alphabet of Ugarit shows that the language had most of the 

 consonants wliich we assume the parent Semitic speech to have had. 

 The sound ^ (sin) had coalesced \\ith s (sliin), d wdth $, perhaps g 

 (Arabic ghain) with ' (ayin) ; in historical Phoenician and later Canaan- 

 ite dialects we find not only these but also other analogous coales- 

 cences wliich have not yet taken place here. The sound d has coalesced 

 with d (this is the simplest interpretation of their being written 

 similarly), though in Phoenician and Hebrew it moved to z. In 

 Aramaic, too, d became d, but this was over a millennium later. 



We have little evidence for the exact pronunciation of these sounds. 

 But we may assume that Semitic t (as in Enghsh "thing")* although 

 it remained distinct from every other sound in Ugarit, had come to 

 be pronoimced somewhat like s: the f-sign is used in foreign names 

 which probably contained s, as in ally for Alasiya, the name of Cyprus, 



About the vowels, we may make some deductions. Diphthongs 

 were simplified, as in most Canaanite dialects: the word for "house," 

 Semitic *haytu, is here written bt, and so must have been pronounced 

 [betu]. Final short vowels were still preserved, as they were at that 

 time in Cannanite; hence we still have the case-endings as seen above, 

 and the vowels of the indicative and subjunctive verb. The Syrian- 

 Palestinian change of A to 6 did not take place here (as ,yet?), but there 

 is an interesting change of a before aleph (when followed by con- 

 sonant) to e\ this change seems also to have taken place in certain 

 Hebrew dialects, and later on in Aramaic. There is also a greater 

 use of the prothetic vowel, in a few words which do not have it in 

 other Semitic languages. 



THE WORD-FORMS (MORFHOLOGY) 



Ugaritic reveals a relatively cnxXy linguistic stage, vestiges of 

 which are barely discernible in such languages as Biblical Hebrew 

 which are modern in comparison. In the verb, the perfect aspect 

 ("tense") has a nominal, descriptive character, and is used chiefly 

 for stative verbs; in Hebrew it can be used for any verb. We have 

 it here in process of spreading; it is not yet generalized. The usual 

 verbal form is the form with prefixed personal element. Here we 

 have two basic tenses, a narrative preterite, and a present. The 

 narrative preterite is the most common, used to relate past events, 

 and probably had the form yaqtulu ([yis§a'u] "he raised," and so 

 on; by its side there seems to have been a short preterite yaqtul 

 with consecutive and emphatic force used with proclitic elements 

 like [wa-1 "and", [M-] "indeed." This preterite is preserved in 

 Hebrew as the "imperfect with waw consecutive": as Bergstrasser 

 pointed out long before the Ras Shamra finds, this waw-consecutive 



