Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 5:30 PM, James Christian wrote:
> P.S.
>
> You have no evidence for the Ugarits to have a perception of three different
> vowels at a level strong enough to make different symbols for. You only have
> evidence to show they had perception of three different aleph starting
> syllables. If they perceived the three different vowels at a high enough
> level then they would have made three vowel symbols and not three syllable
> symbols. The sooner you acknowledge this the sooner we can start having a
> serious linguistic discussion.

James,

Unless you've studied Ugaritic, I don't think you're going to be a good judge
of exactly what evidence we have for Ugaritic.  It just so happens that
the people of Ugarit wrote not only alphabetic cuneiform inscriptions
but also in
syllabic cuneiform.  Now, although they used an alphabet of some 30 letters
or so, the alphabetic system was in cuneiform.  It wasn't the regular ox-head
A, house B system.  It's sort of their own peculiar invention -- a way to 
write
the alphabet, but in cuneiform.  So how come when they invented cuneiform 
signs
for the alphabet, they didn't invent ones for the vowels, if we know they
differentiated them due to the syllabic cuneiform inscriptions that
they left us?

Yitzhak Sapir