Ugaritic

Ugaritic is an extinct Northwest Semitic language known through the Ugaritic texts discovered by French archaeologists in 1928 at Ugarit, including several major literary texts, notably the Baal cycle. The script is described as “a special alphabetic Cuneiform,” reflecting an idiom related to Canaanite and Hebrew languages.
Like Hebrew the short script of Ugarit has twenty-two characters: nearly identical to Hebrew in terms of their phonetic values if not in terms of the visual elements or media of their inscription. Early samples of Hebrew are scratched on stone or potsherds whereas Ugaritic is punched on clay, like cuneiform.
A scholar of the period hailed Ugaritic as "the greatest literary discovery from antiquity since the deciphering of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform.”

Corpus

The Ugaritic language is attested in texts from the 14th through the early 12th century BC. The city of Ugarit was destroyed roughly 1190 BC.
Literary texts discovered at Ugarit include the Legend of Keret or Kirta, the legends of Danel, the Myth of Baal-Aliyan, and the Death of Baal. The latter two are also known collectively as the Baal Cycle. These texts reveal aspects of ancient Northwest Semitic religion in Syria-Palestine during the Late Bronze Age.
Edward Greenstein has proposed that Ugaritic texts might help solve biblical puzzles such as the anachronism of Ezekiel mentioning Daniel in actually referring to Danel, a hero from the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat.

Phonology

Ugaritic had 28 consonantal phonemes and eight vowel phonemes : a ā i ī u ū ē ō. The phonemes ē and ō occur only as long vowels and are the result of monophthongization of the diphthongs аy and aw, respectively.
The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Ugaritic, Akkadian, Classical Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:

Writing system

The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform script used beginning in the 15th century BC. Like most Semitic scripts, it is an abjad, where each symbol stands for a consonant, leaving the reader to supply the appropriate vowel. Only after an aleph the vowel is indicated. With other consonants one can often guess the unwritten vowel, and thus vocalize the text, from parallel cases with an aleph, texts where Ugaritic words are written in Akkadian cuneiform syllables, comparison with other West-Semitic languages, for example Hebrew and Arabic, generalized vocalization rules, and, in poetry, parallellisms are also helpful to interpret the consonantal skeleton.
Although it appears similar to Mesopotamian cuneiform, its symbols and symbol meanings are unrelated. It is the oldest example of the family of West Semitic scripts such as the Phoenician, Paleo-Hebrew, and Aramaic alphabets. The so-called "long alphabet" has 30 letters while the "short alphabet" has 22. Other languages were occasionally written in the Ugarit area, although not elsewhere.
Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the Levantine ordering of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic order of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets; and the South Semitic order, which gave rise to the order of the Ge'ez script. The script was written from left to right.

Grammar

Ugaritic is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic and Akkadian. It possesses two genders, three cases for nouns and adjectives ; three numbers: ; and verb aspects similar to those found in other Northwest Semitic languages. The word order for Ugaritic is verb–subject–object, possessed–possessor, and noun–adjective. Ugaritic is considered a conservative Semitic language, since it retains most of the Proto-Semitic phonemes, the basic qualities of the vowel, the case system, the word order of the Proto-Semitic ancestor, and the lack of the definite article.
The word order for Ugaritic is verb–subject–object and subject–object–verb, possessed–possessor, and noun–adjective. Ugaritic is considered a conservative Semitic language, since it retains most of the phonemes, the case system, and the word order of the ancestral Proto-Semitic language.

Word order

The word order for Ugaritic is Subject Verb Object, Verb Subject Object, possessed–possessor, and noun–adjective.

Morphology

Ugaritic, like all Semitic languages, exhibits a unique pattern of stems consisting typically of "triliteral", or 3-consonant consonantal roots, from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed in various ways: e.g. by inserting vowels, doubling consonants, and/or adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes.

Verbs

Introduction

Ugaritic verbs are based on mostly three-literal roots . For example, RGM, ‘to say’. By adding prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, and varying the vowels, the various verbal forms are formed..
Verbs can take several of a dozen stem patterns, or binyanim, that change the basic meaning of the verb, and make it for example passive, causative, or intensive. The basic form is the G stem.
The verbal forms for each stem can be divided in five verbal form groups:

the suffix conjugation, also called qtl, or Perfect;
the prefix conjugation, also called yqtl, or Imperfect;
imperatives;
two different infinitives;
an active and a passive participle.

Verbs have one of three different vowel patterns, -a-, -i-, and -u-:

in the qtl : qatala, qatila, or qatula ;
in the yqtl : yiqtalu, yaqtilu, or yaqtulu.

There is no one-on-one link between morphology and tense. This is because Ugaritic is an aspect language: verbal forms do not primarily indicate the timing of activities, but they indicate aspect: the suffix conjugation has perfective aspect, it is used when viewing an activity as having a beginning and an end; the prefix conjugation has imperfective aspect, it is used when it is deemed irrelevant whether the activity has an end or beginning.
Ugaritic verbs can have several moods, both indicative and injunctive. Moods are most clearly visible in the prefix conjugation.

Suffix conjugation

The suffix conjugation has perfective aspect. Taking the root RGM as an example, ragama may be translated as “he says”, or “he has said”.
The vowel between the second and third root consonant can be -a-, -i-, or -u-. Most verbs describe an activity and have -a-. Verbs describing a state or property have -i- or -u-.
The paradigm of the suffix conjugation is as follows for the a-verb RGM, the i-verb ŠB‘, and the u-verb MRṢ :

Prefix conjugation

The prefix conjugation yqtl- takes three forms: yiqtal-, yaqtil-, and yaqtul-. The specific pattern is determined by the stem consonants. Therefore, there is no simple one-on-one relation with the three qtl vowel patterns, qatal, qatil, and qatul, because the qtl vowel pattern depends not on the consonant pattern, but on a verb's meaning.
For example, the following three verbs all have a qtl of the qatal type, but their yqtl patterns differ:
The Imperfect paradigms for the three patterns are as follows, for the verbs RGM, “to say”, Š’iL, “to ask”, and YRD, “to go down” :
The prefix conjugation takes four or five different endings. There are three clear moods. The so-called energic forms, yqtln, with an -n suffix, apparently have the same meaning as the shorter forms without the -n suffix.

Form	Name	Mood	Tense	Aspect	Example	Translation	Notes
yqtlu	Imperfect	Indicative	Present - Future	imperfective	yargumu	“he says, will say”
yqtlu	Imperfect	Indicative	Past	continued action	yargumu	“he used to say, is wont to say”
yqtl	‘short form’	Indicative	Past	imperfective	yargum	“he said”
yqtl	‘short form’	Jussive	—	—	yargum	“may he say, let him say”
yqtla	Volitive	Volitive	—	—	yarguma	“may he say, he shall say”
yqtln	Energic	Jussive	—	—	yarguman	“may he say”
yqtln	Energic #2	Indicative	Past	imperfective	yargumun	“he said, says”	existence doubted

Imperative

The imperative probably takes three forms, qatal, qutul, and *qitil, where the vowels correspond with the vowels in the imperfect.
Examples :

Participles

The paradigm of the active participle of G stems is as follows :

Singular	masculine	māliku	“reigning ”
Singular	feminine	maliktu	“reigning ”
Plural	masculine	malikūma	“reigning ”
Plural	feminine	mālikātu	“reigning ”

The passive participle is quite rare. There seem to be two forms :
Other stems than the G stem form their participles by means of a m- prefix; for example mulaḫḫišu, mušamṭiru.