Talk:Ugaritic grammar

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Created a new article on Ugaritic grammar to shorten the

Where does the factoid of /ð/ having such an allophone come from? AFAIK none of the scripts used in the area distinguish this sound. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:51, 6 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed that...it's actually a phonetic shift from the emphatic voiced interdental to the voiced velar fricative ɣ. Xevorim (talk) 21:08, 8 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. Now there's /ʒ/ without any origin stated in there, tho. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 07:35, 15 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Segert writes: "The voiced palato-alveolar fricative /ž/ (ʒ), counterpart of /š/ (ʃ), occurs as a late variant of the voiced interdental /ḏ/ (ð). It is like the sibilant sounds in Eng. "measure' and French "je"." (the IPA characters are added by me).

I'm not sure though where he gets this information from. The other references I listed don't mention this piece of information. However, they do (including Segert) mention the phonetic shift from (ðˁ) to (ɣ). Xevorim (talk) 13:08, 16 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Got my hands on an actual source (still second-hand, but a little more in-detail than what you quote here), and apparently there is no etymological change ḏ > ž; rather, ḏ > d, and after that, the now unused letter was reused for a voiced allophone of š in the cluster /šd/. Saw also a mention of ġ being merely dialectal. More details coming later (I don't have JSTOR access home). --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 20:02, 13 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The phonetical values provided are awfully detailed for a dead language — I get the impression they're not actually reconstructed as much as projected from Arabic. As Proto-Semitic is thought to have still had affricates and ejectives, this page should at least have some explanation on the particular values used. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 17:44, 19 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I'd argue that the Phonology does not belong on this page at all both as it's already covered in the main Ugaritic Language page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic#Phonology), and as it has nothing to do with grammar.199.48.106.4 (talk) 22:35, 8 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

For most linguists (and many others), 'grammar' does in fact include phonology. Johundhar (talk) 05:06, 3 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not a scholar in the Ugaritic field, but reading the patterns mentioned in this article, I can see it is quite like Arabic. As a native speaker of Arabic, I can almost make sense of it and also generate some of the passive forms that were placed with (?) in this section. To make it closer to my understanding, all I had to do is presume the /p/ sound to be /f/ and the /ʃ/ to be /s/, and most of the Patterns mentioned here would be a replica of Arabic (almost). For this, I would like to suggest some of the forms that were placed with (?) in the chart:

1. Gt-Stem: uptaʼala - yuptaʼalu; respectively.

2. tD-Stem: tupuʼʼila - yutapaʼʼalu; repsectively.

3. L-Stem: pūʼila - yupāʼalu; repsectively.

4. Št-Stem: uštupʼila - yuštapʼalu; respectively.

5. R-Stem: puʼlila - yupaʼlalu; respectively.

As for the "C-Stem," I'm not quite sure how it would be reformed in Arabic and it does sound like the word in G-Stem. However, probably it is something distinctive with Ugaritic. Notice please that I'm not claiming my assumption is correct or anything. It is just a suggestion based on my knowledge of "patterns" in classical Arabic as a native speaker and a person who did study Arabic in school. The article did not say exactly what are the (?) for; whether they do not exist linguistically, or simply not known to the scholars, thus because of the apparent similarities to Arabic for me, I did like to give this assumption above. Lonelytj (talk) 13:11, 3 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Calling the aspects of Ugaritic grammar "perfect" and "imperfect" is misleading to non-linguists such as myself. I obviously can't comment on whether it is acceptable within the field of linguistics to use these terms interchangeably, but had I not been somewhat familiar with ancient and classical Semitic languages, I would think that "perfect" meant the perfect tense/aspect as in "I have read the article." Jan sewi (talk) 09:07, 1 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, it's a matter of debate whether the two conjugations of Semitic are best described as aspects or tenses. Analyses and opinions differ by language, while the use of a consistent terminology is obviously desirable. "Perfect" means "completed, past", which fits. Then, different kinds of tenses are called "perfect": the perfect of English or Ancient Greek is in between past and present, while that of Latin or German is a past tense like the Semitic perfect. And finally, Semitic would indeed use the perfect to say "I have read the article." So you wouldn't be that far off. — Actually, I think the term "imperfect" much more problematic, because the imperfect in most languages that have such a tense is another past tense, while in Semitic it's non-past. But again, etymologically speaking, "imperfect" = "uncompleted" works just fine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.206.158.165 (talk) 19:20, 21 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]