UGA: Oracc Linguistic Annotation for Ugaritic

This document provides an overview of language-specific annotation conventions for Ugaritic used in Oracc.

Transliteration

Ugaritic is indicated by the language shift %uga. Ugaritic is written both with Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform (SAC) and Ugaritic Cuneiform (UC): the notation %uga or %uga/g means tells the ATF processor to treat the text as graphemic SAC. The notation %uga-040 tells the ATF processor to treat the text as alphabetic UC.

To write in transcription, use the convention for 'normalized' input, as in Akkadian: i.e., follow the language shift with /n.

Ugaritic Cuneiform Transliteration

The following table shows how to transliterate the UC--for conventions on breakage etc., see the Aramaic notations page. The table contains UC in the first column, so you may need to install a suitable font, such as George Douros's "Aegean".

No ASCII notation is provided at present for UC transliteration.

Lemmatization

Lemmatization of Ugaritic follows the guidelines for Akkadian, with a few adjustments explained below. If you are not familiar with the rules and conventions of Akkadian lemmatization, please consult the Oracc Linguistic Annotation for Akkadian page.

The reference dictionary that is used for Ugaritic is G. Del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, trans. W. G. E. Watson, 2 volumes, Leiden: Brill, 2003

Syllabically written Ugaritic is normalized with vowels and vowel length:

1. ka-al-bu
#lem: klb[dog]N$kalbu

Alphabetically written Ugaritic is normalized without vowels:

2. lmlk
#lem: mlk[king]N$lmlk

Occasionally the dictionary gives two possible reconstructions of the word, for instance ks/śmn "grain similar to wheat." In such cases always use the first option for the Citation Form, and the contextually appropriate form in the normalization:

3. ku-su₂-mu
#lem: ksmn[grain similar to wheat]N$kussumu

For the Part of Speech (POS) abbreviations and the rules for POS and EPOS (Effective Part of Speech) see the documentation for Akkadian.

Steve Tinney

Steve Tinney, 'UGA: Oracc Linguistic Annotation for Ugaritic', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/ugaritic/]