RAS SIIAMRA— HARRIS 497 



form in Hebrew is not a peculiar syntactic construction which gives 

 an imperfect the force of a past tense, but is an actual vestige of an 

 old preterite; the language of Ugarit supplies the missing link of 

 tliis much discussed grammatical peculiarity. 



The present also had the prefixed personal elements , but its vowels 

 were different from those of the preterite. In addition to the indica- 

 tive, endmg in [-u] ([-n] after long vowels), there was a jussive with- 

 out these endings, and apparently a subjunctive ending in [-a]. 

 There was also an energetic formed by the suffix [-anna] or the like. 



The stems of the verb are generally similar to those of Northwest 

 Semitic. There is the common simple stem, known in Hebrew as 

 Qal, and an intensive (Hebrew Piel) with characteristic doubling of 

 the middle consonant of the root. In the causative group there seem, 

 strangely enough, to have been two forms, a vestigial Afel (similar 

 to Aramaic and to Hebrew Hifil), and a Sliafel such as is known in 

 Akkadian but not in West Semitic. All these seem to have had their 

 own inner passive forms. In addition there was the Middle ("Inner 

 Active") Nifal, with the same force as in early Hebrew, and a reflex- 

 ive-reciprocal stem with infixed -t-, such as does not exist in Biblical 

 Hebrew (where there is a prefixed t stem, the Hithpael) but appears 

 in Moabite and in early Palestmian place-names (e. g., Elieqo). 

 There were also some rarer stems, chiefly those used with the weak 

 roots (such as Hebrew Polel). Ugaritic thus does not show affinities 

 with any one language, but has constructions which were preserved 

 or developed here and there by various related dialects. 



The weak verbal roots, those with one or more "weak" radical 

 consonants, conform closely with what we would expect at that 

 stage of Northwest Semitic. The verbs which in Biblical Hebrew 

 end in the vowel-letter -h (e. g., ^dld{h) "he ascended"), still possess 

 in Ugaritic their y and w consonants (7?/ for ['alaya] "he ascended"), 

 for since final short vowels had not yet been lost the y and w have 

 not entered into diphthongs. 



In the nouns we have, as we might expect, generally the same noun- 

 classes as in the other Semitic languages. The case-endings are pre- 

 served; and the rare Hebrew locative ending -a{h) is now explained 

 from Ugaritic, for we find it here written with consonantal h {smmh 

 "heavenward"). The dual, restricted in later dialects to objects 

 which occur in natural pairs, is still used here in its grammatical force. 



The pronouns present dialectal and historical points of interest. 

 The third person pronouns are hitt, hyt, hmt [huwatu, hiyati, humatu?] ; 

 and wo realize that Phoenician hmt, Hebrew hema, are vestiges of a 

 similar pattern. The use of the relative d "which" much as in 

 Arabic shows how general this was in Semitic, and sheds light upon 

 its use in the early Byblos dialect of Phoenician, and in early Hebrew 



31508—38 33 



