Ugaritic Grammar [Hebrew].

• Author: Greenstein, Edward L.

Daniel Sivan, a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva and an accomplished researcher in the Northwest Semitic languages of the second millennium B.C.E., has composed a fundamental presentation of the Ugaritic language in the attractive handbook format of the fine Israeli Biblical Encyclopaedia series. After succinct introductory sections, there follow chapters on writing, phonology, and morphology (pronouns, nouns, numerals, the verb, adverbs, prepositions, particles). Reflecting the pedagogical purpose of the volume, there is a chrestomathy of texts with brief annotations to assist the student and a glossary/index of words that appear in the grammar and/or texts. A bibliography is limited to works cited in the presentation of grammar.

The presentation of grammar is superior to those in other introductions. Most of the analysis is justified, either explicitly through concise discussion or implicitly by means of examples, which are always referenced and glossed, and usually vocalized in a very well founded manner. In addition, the linguistic descriptions reflect the latest scholarly treatments, with pertinent bibliography cited for the benefit of advanced - and skeptical - readers. An obvious lack is a chapter devoted to syntax, although various matters of syntax are taken up in the wide-ranging chapter on morphology.

The volume can serve as an illustrated, readable survey of Ugaritic for the experienced Semitist but can function as a textbook for beginners only with a teacher's instruction. The grammar is presented systematically, not in lessons; there are no exercises; and the texts are given in Roman transliteration, without any cuneiform.

The philological and linguistic study of Ugaritic still abounds in controversy, and no area divides scholars more than that of the verbal system. Sivan's grammar goes its own way, principally in departing from C. H. Gordon's Ugaritic Textbook (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965) and S. Segert's Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1984), in positing two prefixed verb forms, yaqtulu, etc., and yaqtul, etc., in accord with E. Verreet's Modi ugaritici (Leuven: Peeters, 1988), who distinguishes a yaqtul preterite from the supposedly...