S. Segert, A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language with Selected Texts and Glossary (original) (raw)
Related papers
. Aspects of the Ugaritic Verb.
Dissertation Columbia University, 1970
Among the most vexing problems of Ugaritic studies are those concerning its verbal system. Since the efforts of Goetze in 1938 and Hammershaimb in 1941 no one has dealt with the Ugaritic verbal system in detail. The successive series of textbooks by Gordon treats the verb in its barest outline. In fact, apart from a few original studies, roost scholars are continually referring back to these ~ork9. This Dissertation does not purport to deal with all aspects of the Ugaritic verbal system since much is known and generally accepted. rt attempts to tackle afresh only some of those major problems which have never been satisfact orily dealt with before. These are (1) the precative per fect (2) the ~ passive (3) the infinitive absolute (4) the yaqattal tense and (5) the yagtula mood. That these have been unsatisfactorily treated before can be seen from a brief perusal of the works of the aforementioned scholars. In this Dissertation each of these problems is treated seperatedly in individual chapters which can be briefly out Abstract page 2 lined aa follows: (1) ~ Precative Perfect: This chapter is to deter mine whether the Ugaritic perfect, like the Arabic perfect, has at times an optative meaning. Before considering the Ugaritic evidence, this use of the perfect is examined ill Arabic, the Aramaic dialects, Akkadian and Phoenician. (2) The ~ Passive: This chapter concerns the in ternal passive of the first conjugation. While the existence of 8uch a passive has long been accepted, no one has yet proved it by internal evidence. This the writer attempts to do by use of four basic criteria. (3) The Infinitive Absolute: This chapter outlines the exact use of the infinitive absolute in Ugaritic. In an excursus, the question of the past use of the infinitive absolute with nouns and pronouns is discussed in detail. (4) The yagattal Tense: This chapter is to examine the claims of those who maintain that there is evidence for a second prefix tense in Ugaritic. Alongside the Ugaritic material, evidence from the Mari texts, the Amarna letters, Hebrew and Phoenician is considered. (5) The yagtula Hood: This chapter is to determine whether a yagtula mood may be ascertained in Ugaritic. It is the writer1s opinion that a yagtula mood c~n be shown c , •• .J _ ~. , both morphologically and syntactically to exist in Ugaritic.
2007
A Primer on Ugaritic is an introduction to the language of the ancient city of Ugarit, a city that flourished in the second millennium BCE on the Lebanese coast, placed in the context of the culture, literature, and religion of this ancient Semitic culture. The Ugaritic language and literature was a precursor to Canaanite and serves as one of our most important resources for understanding the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Special emphasis is placed on contextualization of the Ugaritic language and comparison to ancient Hebrew as well as Akkadian. The book begins with a general introduction to ancient Ugarit, and the introduction to the various genres of Ugaritic literature is placed in the context of this introduction. The language is introduced by genre, beginning with prose and letters, proceeding to administrative, and finally introducing the classic examples of Ugaritic epic. A summary of the grammar, a glossary, and a bibliography round out the volume.
A Primer on Ugaritic: Language, Culture and Literature
2007
1. Ancient Ugarit 2. School texts: introducing the language and alphabet 3. Letters (KTU 2): an inductive introduction to Ugaritic 4. Administrative texts (KTU 4) 5. Legal texts (KTU 3) 6. Literary texts (KTU 1) 7. Grammatical precis.
Ugaritic Indefinite Pronouns (Analytical Table of Contents, Abstract, References)
Ph.D. dissertation, NELC, University of Chicago, 2021
This PDF provides an analytical table of contents, abstract, and references for the author’s doctoral dissertation, which was submitted to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago and defended during June 2021. Open access to a complete PDF of the dissertation (though without the analytical table of contents!) is available at https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3375\. The dissertation provides a linguistic and textual analysis of Ugaritic indefinite pronouns drawing on typological linguistic, diachronic linguistic, and formal semantic models and tools. The results are evaluated relative to the social and textual distributions in which Ugaritic indefinite pronouns appear in an effort to extend the empirical foundation for considering both Ugaritic grammar and the history of scribal training and textual production at Ugarit during the Late Bronze Age. The dissertation committee consisted of Dennis Pardee (NELC, University of Chicago, Chair), Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (NELC, University of Chicago), Anastasia Giannakidou (Linguistics, University of Chicago), and Carole Roche-Hawley (Scientific Director, IFPO, Beirut).
A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC
And last, but not least at all, to Yonafor support during the last twenty years. May 2004 Marcel Erdal CHAPTER ONE This book deals with the remains of what was written down in the Asian domains of the early Turks, which consists of three corpuses: 1) Two hundred odd inscriptions in the Old Turkic runiform script, presumably 7 th to 10 th century. These were discovered mostly in present day Mongolia (the area covering the territory of the second Türk empire and the Uygur steppe empire following upon it) and in the upper 9 We will, henceforth, use the term Uygur to refer to Old Uygur as being described here, rather than to Modern Uygur now spoken in Xinjiang, Kazakhstan etc., or to Middle Uygur as documented from Ming and other pre-modern sources. 10 There is sometimes some confusion regarding the linguistic assignment of the runiform mss., e.g. in Johanson 1998: 85: These are written in the same language as the rest of Xinjiang Uygur (within which there are dialect differences); the language of the runiform inscriptions of the Uygur Empire found on steles in Mongolia is, on the other hand, practically the same as that of Orkhon Turkic. 11 This term (used by Röhrborn and Laut in a number of their publications at least since 1984) is, I think, unfortunate, as it is misleading to outsiders: Greek means 'common'; koinè diálektos was the name originally given to the relatively late, postclassical variety of Greek which was mostly based on the Ionian dialect and replaced practically all the (other) Greek dialects to serve as common language not only to Greeks but also to others who came under their sway or adopted their culture. The variety of Uygur which is, I think, better just called 'Classical' or 'Standard' is a stage in the development of the language and of its spelling when it had established relatively strong and clear norms. The language apparently was, at this stage, spoken more or less as it was written, which was probably no longer the case for Late Uygur sources. 12 Edited by Arat (1947), translated into English (with important notes) in Dankoff 1983. Tezcan 1981 will also be important for a better edition in the future. 13 Dankoff & Kelly 1982-85 is an edition of the Turkic (transcribed and transliterated), couched in an English translation of the Arabic parts of the text. 14 Erdal 1984. 15 The reliability of the DLT cannot be wholly taken for granted in this specific matter, as Mah m d was not, of course, a field researcher in the modern sense; but his evidence does seem convincing. Most of the information supplied by K š ar on the dialects has not yet been matched with modern and comparative data and there is as yet no conclusive investigation of this question. 22 This distinction later led to the generalization of the person category in verb forms. 23 Small capitals are used for transliterating Semitic alphabets. 31 ävigä 'to his home' in HamTouHou 18,4 is not necessarily an instance of the loss of pronominal n, as 'WXLYK' for oglï a 'to his son' in l.10 shows that the ms. spells / / as K: /g/ would have been spelled as X in a back-harmony word. The genitive form minig for mäni 'mine' in l.6 probably has the same explanation. The 2 nd person imperative CHAPTER ONE a fragment in Sogdian script, shows that what we have here is a rare instance of the so-called n dialect (see section 2.33). Both-dUm and ñ > n are, according to K š ar , characteristics of the speech of the Argu; these Sogdian script mss. may therefore also represent this dialect. Another noteworthy feature of the Sogdian script mss. are several examples of an extended form of the 3 rd person imperative (e.g. artamazunï), found also in the QB. 33 We know that Argu was spoken in Balasagun, and Y suf, the author of the QB, was born in this town. This as well should therefore be an Argu feature. A further feature shared by the Sogdian script mss. with the QB are the fused impossibility forms (alumadï < alï umadï, alkumaz < alka umaz). Balasagun was in West Turkistan; this proximity to the original homeland of the Sogds may explain their Sogdian palaeography and spelling characteristics. On the other hand, the Sogdian script fragments have also retained the pre-classical feature of sporadic and unconditioned vowel lowering. Laut 1986 considers a Buddhist text to be pre-classical also when it has Indian loans in Sogdian shape and adds a further criterion for early dating: the introduction of superfluous alefs, not in the onset and unjustified through any likely pronunciation before vowels within words; e.g. yig'it 'young man' or av'u (the name of a hell called av ci in Sanskrit). For these two reasons he also adds the SP to his list of preclassical texts, although it lacks all other criteria. Superfluous alefs in a Manichaean text and in the Sängim ms. of the Maitr are given in Laut 1986: 69-70; instances in mss. in Sogdian script are listed by Fedakâr in UAJb N.F. 10(1991): 93-94 (to be used together with the glossary in UAJb N.F. 14(1996): 196-201 and the transliterations). The lowering of unrounded high vowels is apparently equally common in the Sängim and Hami mss., though not necessarily in the same words. Gabain in several places expressed the view that the texts written in Br hm script constitute a dialect of their own. According to her they are characterized by (among other things) p in the onset of words and plural form read istäglär in the same line is not necessarily an instance of / / > /g/ either, as it can also be read as ist(ä) lär. 32 The DLT (fol.504) ascribes the pronunciation bardum, käldüm (vs. bardam among the Oguz and bardïm among the other Turks) to the dialect of the Argu. 33 Gabain 1976 expresses the view that this °I is the possessive suffix but there seems to be no sense in that. I could imagine that it is a truncated ïd! 'Let go!', comparable to English 'Let him do this'. ïd-also serves as actionality auxiliary for energetic action which became morphologised in some modern languages, and should also be behind the °I which we find at the end of imperative forms of certain Khaladj verbs. As Doerfer has shown in various places, Argu as described in the DLT shares several linguistic features with Khaladj. 35 We take-gUl to have fused from-gU ol, a marker of impersonal mood, but in some of its instances it appears in parallelism with gIl; the matter is not completely clear. 36 As Zieme 1969: 23 notes in connection with the Pothi book where such confusions are especially prominent, they are referred to as 'Mongolisms' because they generally appear during Mongol domination (which is rather late as far as Old Turkic corpus is concerned); he does not, however, draw the conclusion that the Pothi book must be late. Occasional confusions such as sägiz for säkiz 'eight' in the Xw are called "irrtümliche 40 The ms. edited by Radloff is actually the latest of the three existing mss. of this source and shows certain characteristics of Middle Turkic. Even this ms. is, however, certainly closer to Old Turkic than Chagatay sources, which Thomsen and other scholars otherwise had as guidance for their texts. 41 Scholars are listed more or less in the order of their importance in this domain. CHAPTER ONE Turcology in that country: 45 G.R. Rachmati (also Rachmatullin; in Turkey R.R. Arat), S. Schakir, (later S. Ishaki, in Turkey S. Ça atay) and the younger A.Temir. Rachmati's dissertation (on auxiliary verbs and converbs in Altay Turkic, published in 1928) was fully linguistic, but his significant contribution to Old Turkic studies remains within the domain of philology; an important late (1963) paper documents and describes orientational terminology. Schakir's dissertation (1933) on word formation also covers Old Turkic, and three papers of hers (1940-41 and 1943 respectively) deal with Uygur.
Constraining the Future in Ugaritic Juridical Composition and the Indefinite Semantics of šḥr ṯlṯt
Ougarit, un anniversaire (RSO XXVIII), 2021
The Ugaritic juridical text RS [Varia 31] (AO 29.390; KTU 4.817), first published in 2010, provides a second example of the Ugaritic temporal expression šḥr ṯlṯt, alongside the first attestation of this phrase found in RS 16.382. The use of this Ugaritic expression in a role comparable to that of the phrase urra(m) šēra(m) found in syllabic texts from Ras Shamra and a number of other sites dating to the Middle and Late Bronze Age raises anew questions regarding the relationship between alphabetic Ugaritic legal texts and their syllabic Akkadian counterparts. This study draws on recent formal semantic and typological linguistic research to provide a semantic account of Ugaritic šḥr ṯlṯt in relation to its Akkadian analog and is designed to contribute to our attempts to address these questions, as well as to ongoing study of the unusual syntax and lexicography of RS [Varia 31]. It is suggested that this expression functions as an indefinite temporal expression incorporating exhaustive and scalar semantics, best translated as “at any future time,” and that it accordingly plays an important role in constraining the future in Ugaritic juridical composition.