#ancient-south-arabian — Public Fediverse posts

Some talks from EABS and NACAL

Today’s deal: 2-for-1 on conference reports.

European Association for Biblical Studies Annual Conference, 20-23 July 2026, Leuven

This was my first time visiting this conference, prompted by co-chairing (with Nili Samet) the new research unit Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics. This research unit will return for next year’s EABS in London (CfP to go public by the end of October). For those who are already interested in submitting an abstract:

The Biblical Hebrew Language and Linguistics research unit invites submissions for the 2027 London meeting in two areas:

1. An open session (or several open sessions) exploring Biblical Hebrew, broadly defined, from both traditional and innovative research perspectives. This includes various methodologies such as classical philology, linguistic analyses informed by both established and up-and-coming linguistic theories, emerging digital research methods, and others.
2. A special session focused on non-Tiberian traditions of Biblical Hebrew, whether attested in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, or the Modern period.

For all sessions, we especially encourage young researchers to present their work in progress or recent findings and are open to dedicated panels on the topic of ongoing research projects within the field of Biblical Hebrew. Abstracts should clearly state the presentation’s research question, (anticipated) conclusion, and relevance.

Revisiting Leuven for this year’s edition was a lot of fun and I think our first BHLL sessions went very well. At some point after getting back, however, I lost the little notebook I brought to the talks. So here are some vague recollections, going by the programme.

Kristin Weingart (LMU Munich) talked about the sources for royal reigns mentioned in Kings and Chronicles. She plausibly distinguished between “real, reconstructed, and imagined sources”. The book of Kings’ “Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah” etc. probably refers to historically real documents. The “Book of the Acts of Solomon” (1 Kgs 11:41), however, stands out and was probably made up or inferred by a later writer as the source behind the data on Solomon’s reign. The biblical book of Chronicles, in turn, cites all kinds of sources like “the miḏrāš of the Prophet Iddo” that are probably not real and may have been motivated by the Greek tradition of sources-based historiography. I actually wonder whether this use of miḏrāš (from d-r-š ‘to seek, investigate’) is a calque of Greek ἱστορία.

Na’ama Pat-El (UT Austin) elaborated on her idea that the *-t- in some BH weak verb infinitives is historically unrelated to the feminine suffix. Historically I’m not sure, but she presents very compelling evidence that at least synchronically it’s not a feminine marker.

Tania Notarius (University of the Free State/Polis Institute) argued that the Ugaritic function of ṯʿy-priest, held by the most important scribe of the preserved Ugaritic corpus (Ilimilku), was related to the cult of the rpu͗m (Rephaim).

Svenja Lueg (VU Amsterdam), who unfortunately couldn’t make it in person, talked about differential object marking with ditransitive verbs, an underexplored part of BH syntax.

Geoffrey Khan (University of Cambridge) presented on the question of narrative yiqṭol and weqaṭal in BH.

Raanan Eichler (Bar-Ilan University), also online, showed that the ləḇīḇōṯ that Amnon had Tamar prepare him probably derive their name from lēḇ in the sense of ‘(female) chest’ and were most likely intended as suggestively breast-shaped dumplings.

The last morning saw our special session on new advances in linguistic periodization of BH:

Aaron Hornkohl (University of Cambridge) continued the debate over the validity of linguistic periodization, especially (if I recall correctly) in light of his own recent work.

I presented a case study of a method developed by Chiara Bozzone to employ Homeric formulas for dating purposes and whether it can be applied to BH, using the example of a certain formula in the Holiness Code (H) and (arguably) post-H texts.

John Screnock (University of Oxford) highlighted some statistical arguments against the periodization model that emerge from a full consideration of the data.

Natascha Grabowsky (Technical University Dortmund) examined the distribution of different year-dating formulas and the possible implications for the dating of the relevant texts.

Harald Samuel (University of Tübingen), also on the sceptical side, noted some changes that don’t behave neatly and ways in which the complicated history of redaction and vocalization plays tricks on us.

Finally, Nili Samet (Bar-Ilan University) presented some of the same kind of complex changes and, among other things, introduced what I think she called the Late Spelling Paradox: increasing plene spelling in Late Biblical Hebrew sometimes disambiguates archaic forms that could be plastered over by the reading tradition in earlier texts where they were spelled defectively. As a result, sometimes archaic features seem to increase in frequency in late texts, if you identify them based on the vocalized Masoretic Text.

And beyond our research unit, I enjoyed the last talk of the conference (one of several in parallel) by Innocent Himbaza (University of Fribourg), who suggested that Psalm 37 is half early and half late, with late additions alternating with parts of the early base text.

49th North Atlantic Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics, 30 September-2 October 2026, Paris

Probably my favourite conference, which I hadn’t attended since covid, in one of my favourite cities, let’s gooo

Lots and lots of interesting talks and conversations here, but for the sake of brevity I’m just going to mention the ones I took notes on and my own.

The talks were off to a strong start with Simon Korneev‘s (University of Cambridge) argument for epiglottal, rather than pharyngeal consonants in Semitic. This can explain the vowel fronting effects they cause in various languages and traditions. Handy rule of thumb for identification in the field: “If it sounds like Louis Armstrong, it’s probably epiglottal.”

Maarten Kossmann (Leiden University) compared the consonantal phonemes of two corpora of Eastern Libyco-Berber inscriptions to his reconstruction of Proto-Berber (Proto-Amazigh) and found that the represented LB is neither an ancestor nor a descendant of Proto-Berber, but likely a sister language. We miiight be able to make it ancestral to PB if we assume they didn’t write glottal stops (realized as creaky voice or some other suprasegmental feature on the vowel?).

Lior Laks, also presenting on behalf of Maha Nassar (both Bar-Ilan University) presented their research into Western European (especially English) loanwords into Palestinian Arabic as seen online and tried to explain why you sometimes get doublets like kōran vs. tkōran ‘to get covid’. The availability and productivity of periphrastic alternatives (e.g. axad dūš ‘to take a shower’ competing with tdawwaš) plays a large part in explaining how loanwords are adapted.

Matthew Morgenstern (Tel Aviv University) presented a talk he had wanted to give at our DOT workshop on Semitic reading traditions, speaking on Mandaic. Looking at spelling, it’s important to note that published Mandaic texts are almost all from manuscripts that postdate the 16th century CE. The earlier (5th-7th c. CE), magical texts often show more conservative from an Aramaic perspective, defective spelling. But interestingly, what is now identified as the ancestor of the Mandaic script, that of Elymaean Aramaic (early 2nd-early 3rd c. CE), already has widespread plene spellings of word-internal long a. So this was not a Mandaic innovation. In other ways, the Mandean tradition, which never developed a full vocalization system, largely relied on oral transmission of how to pronounce the texts. Only after the disastrous cholera epidemic of 1831 was this partially supported by Arabic transcriptions.

Mila Neishtadt (recently Tel Aviv University) very deftly combined two earlier ideas and lots of data on the representation of Aramaic š as either š or s in Arabic place names. In a nutshell, earlier borrowing gives s (as expected) and later borrowing gives š, with the geographic distribution (mostly š in Lebanon and the Galilee) resulting from mountain villages sticking to Aramaic for longer.

Julien Dufour (École normale supérieure) presented some very compelling but hard to interpret evidence that Modern South Arabian derived verbs used to have a voiceless consonant prefix wherever Arabic and Akkadian have u prefix vowels, notably in the D-stem as well as the C-stem. Dufour suggests these are ultimately all the same prefix, but that the one on the D-stem (and some other places) was already partially lenited in Proto-Semitic. Full, detailed handout presumably forthcoming on his Academia page.

I presented my ongoing work on reconstructing the North Semitic letter names as part of our alphabet project. Lots of great feedback on traditions I had missed and questionable steps in my argumentation.

Ahmad Al-Jallad (Ohio State University) and Alessia Prioletta (CNRS) argued that the Ge’ez script does not descend from Ancient South Arabian but is just one member of the larger South Semitic script family, closer in some ways to various Ancient North Arabian varieties (which just means everything apart from Ancient South Arabian). Only took them two slides to flip me from very sceptical to fully convinced. (Ahmad is giving a related talk in Leiden in two weeks, details upon request.)

Enam al-Wer‘s (University of Essex) keynote address gave an overview of the sociolinguistic research into Arabic conducted by her and her students over the past decades. One interesting coincidence that stood out to me is that the border between what they call Horani and Mu’abi dialects in Jordan pretty much aligns with the Moabite border before Mesha’s revolt, which was not the Arnon. I don’t think there’s a direct historical connection, but I wonder what in the landscape there makes Wadi al-Hedan (pronunciation corrected by Prof. al-Wer) a more natural border than Wadi Mujib.

Hugo Cartwright (independent researcher) kindly provided a talk to fill a gap in the program, presenting his computational research on alphabetic orders in abjads. You can check out his work at www.abjads.org.

Maarten Mous (Leiden University) and five not physically present co-authors presented a big finding from the Cushitic realm. The Mbugu people of Tanzania speak both “Normal Mbugu”, a not very exciting Bantu language, and “Inner Mbugu”, which has large-scale lexical replacement and is often cited as a mixed language. Mous et al. now find that the most archaic layer of the Inner Mbugu lexicon is closely related to Dahalo, the phonologically very exotic (East? South? Narrow?) Cushitic language spoken by a hunter-gatherer group in Kenya. They posit that a now extinct “Old Dahaloan” language, spoken by pastoralists, provided both the core Inner Mbugu lexicon and the target of shift for the ancestors of the present-day Dahalo, who quite probably originally spoke some other language.

Finally, Massinissa Garaoun (CNRS) presented an in-depth investigation of the toponymy of the Canary Islands. By connecting features in the landscape to Amazigh words for body parts, he was able to show to the full satisfaction of those audience members who know what they are talking about that they are etymologically Amazigh (Berber), not para-Berber or something else.

Greatly enjoyable as both of these conferences were, they will also remain linked in my memory to the passing of three individuals. Hector Patmore, one of the organisers of the Leuven EABS meeting, tragically and suddenly passed away on 13 September 2026; see In Memoriams here. Harry Stroomer, Leiden University professor emeritus of Afro-Asiatic languages and cultures, died on 19 July 2026 (In Memoriam here); NACAL opened with a presentation in his memory by Marijn van Putten (Leiden University). Furthermore, Marijn’s own talk (on the apparently irregular preservation of a verbal noun prefix in Berber) was based in part on comments made by, and formally co-presented with, brilliant NACAL-goer Adam Strich (Harvard University), who died on 10 January 2019. זֵכֶר צַדִּיק לִבְרָכָה (Proverbs 10:7).

New paper on ordinals

This blog post is now a paper, which came out unexpectedly soon: ‘Ordinal Numerals as a Criterion for Subclassification: The Case of Semitic’.

Abstract: This article explores how ordinal numerals (like first, second and third) can help classify languages, focusing on the Semitic language family. Ordinals are often formed according to productive derivational processes, but as a separate word class, they may retain archaic morphology that is otherwise lost from the language. Together with the high propensity of ‘first’ and, less frequently, ‘second’ to be formed through suppletion, this makes them highly valuable for diachronic linguistic analysis. The article identifies four main patterns of ordinal formation across different Semitic languages. Together with innovations in the lowest two ordinals, these can be correlated with more and less accepted subgroupings within Semitic as a whole. Concretely, they offer support for the widely accepted West Semitic, Northwest Semitic and Abyssinian (Ethio-Semitic) clades as well as the recently proposed Aramaeo-Canaanite clade and provide new evidence for the further subclassification of Abyssinian that matches other recent proposals. However, no evidence was found to support the debated Central Semitic or South Semitic groupings. Given the accurate identification of accepted subgroupings and high level of detail, this approach holds promise for the classification of other language families, especially where other linguistic data are scarce.

Enjoy!

#Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

New publications and podcast

Busy year for publications (think that’s it for me this year):

Semitic *ʾilāh- and Hebrew אלהים‎: From plural ‘gods’ to singular ‘God’ (Open Access)

Abstract: The Biblical Hebrew word אלהים‎ is plural in form. Semantically and syntactically, however, it can be plural or singular. The stem of this noun can be reconstructed as * ʾilāh-. As already noted by Wellhausen, this looks like a broken plural of *ʾil-, the Proto-Semitic word for ‘god’. This article takes Wellhausen’s observation and uses it to explain the plural morphology of Hebrew אלהים‎. I argue that *ʾilāh- should be reconstructed with redundant plural suffixes in some parts of the paradigm. This reconstructed paradigm is preserved virtually unchanged in Archaic Biblical Hebrew. The reconstructed paradigm also explains the almost complete replacement of *ʾil- by *ʾilāh- in Aramaic and Arabic and allows us to reassess the reasons for the association between the lexeme ‘god’ and plural number. Consequently, earlier suggestions that see אלהים‎’s plural number as a reflection of pre-Yahwistic polytheism or as a marker of abstractness are no longer tenable.

The varying size of the Sodom coalition in Genesis 14 (in FS Tigchelaar; email me for a PDF)

Trying my hardest to find something that might interest newly retired KU Leuven professor Eibert Tigchelaar, I used some Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature as well as other textual and linguistic evidence to seek for order in the number of kings on Sodom’s side in Gen 14. Turns out that this closely aligns with other indications of different layers in this fascinating chapter: one about a local raid, one that may be a reworking of a lost epic, and a third one building on the combination of the first two. If you understand Dutch (or want to practice!), also check out this brand new episode of Timo Epping’s Oudheid, all about this question.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Canaanite #GeEz #Genesis #Hebrew #Hosea #linguistics #news #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic

Two new chapters

Earlier this year, two chapters I wrote a while back appeared in print. A third one should come out any moment now and I was waiting to combine all three in a single post, but it’s taking longer than expected, so here they are. Abstracts by (some of) the respective volume editors:

‘The Shape of the Teen Numerals in Central Semitic’ (Open Access)

This study reconstructs the morphology of teen numerals in Central Semitic languages, covering Northwest Semitic, Arabic, and Sabaic. The formation follows a digit-teen order with gender agreement, unlike many other Semitic languages. The digit stems largely align with previous reconstructions, but significant attention is given to the numeral ‘one’, posited as *ʿist-ān- for masculine and *ʿist-ay- for feminine forms, derived from a Proto-Semitic root distinct from the later adjectival *ʾaḥad-. The paper also examines the endings in the teen numerals, showing that the uninflecting *-a likely preserves an ancient feature. The distinct morphology of feminine forms, especially the Northwest Semitic *ʿiśrihi, reflects an innovative feminine suffix *-ihi, also evidenced in Arabic demonstratives. The study concludes that many features of the teen numerals result from both inherited and innovative elements within the linguistic group.

‘Sound Change in the Hebrew Reading Tradition’ (email me for the PDF)

Benjamin D. Suchard’s contribution (…) investigates for Biblical Hebrew “to what degree this corpus retained its phonological independence from the vernacular forms of Hebrew and Aramaic spoken by the people who transmitted it”. The text of the Hebrew Bible was fixed early on, but it does not write vowels and has a simplified spelling also in other respects. On the other hand, vocalizations as codified in the Tiberian reading tradition show that the text of the Hebrew Bible was also orally transmitted. Suchard argues that these vocalizations provide evidence for two categories of sound change affecting the orally transmitted text: vowel changes that also occurred in the (Hebrew or Aramaic) vernacular, and vowel changes that have no parallel in the vernacular. According to Suchard, then, there is evidence that the Hebrew reading tradition resisted vernacular sound changes, and even that it underwent sound changes that did not take place in the vernacular. Suchard proposes that these changes took place while Hebrew was still a spoken language.

#AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Bible #Hebrew #linguistics #news #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic

Trying to learn more about Ethiopia(n Semitic languages), I just finished reading William A. Shack’s The Central Ethiopians. Amhara, Tigriňa and related peoples (1974; London: International African Institute). It’s 50 years old, many of the sources it uses are over 100 years old, and I’m sure it’s full of inaccuracies I didn’t recognize besides the ones I did, but it’s a place to start.

On the traditional religion of the Western Gurage, Shack writes (p. 113):

Yəgzär is the supreme god of the Gurage, the creator of the world. However, there is no cult addressed to Yəgzär, as there are to lesser deities, the most important of which are the cults of Waq, the male “Sky-god,” of Dämwamwit, the female deity, and Božä, the ‘Thunder-God.” Each clan has its own local Waq; Dämwamwit and Božä are central deities for the säbat bet federation. … In Gurage belief, Yəgzär handed over to Božä the responsibility of regulating the daily conduct of Gurage and affording ritual protection against theft and the destruction of property by arson.

Two things stand out to me here:

1. The creator god as a “high god” who is not the most commonly worshiped one and has handed over control to another god, specifically the god of thunder. This mirrors the relationship between Ilu and Ba’lu at Ugarit. But also compare Kronos and Zeus in Greek mythology, or maybe Odin and Thor in Germanic religion.
2. “Each clan has its own local Waq“.1 This sounds very Iron Age West Semitic to me. Think of Israel and Judah worshiping YHWH, the Ammonites worshiping Milkom, the Moabites and Kemosh, the Edomites and Qaws… We also find this in Ancient South Arabia, as I learned from Imar Koutchoukali during the last Leiden Summer School: there, everyone venerated Athtar, but each kingdom again had its own particular tutelary deity, like Almaqah for the Sabaeans and Wadd for the Minaeans. We seem to have an explicit description of this theology in Deut 32:8–9:

When Elyon apportioned the nations,
    when he divided humankind,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
    according to the number of the children of God;2
YHWH’s portion was his people,
    Jacob his allotted share.

(adapted from NRSV)

Feature (1) occurs in some shape or another in a lot of religions, especially ones from the Near East, and it may well have spread through contact. The Gurage Zone is far enough away, though, that I wonder whether this points to an inheritance from Proto-West-Semitic times. Feature (2) seems less common to me, although that could just be my ignorance speaking. Also, I’m not really sure how the difference between a thunder god and a sky god works out in practice; maybe I should read the other publications by Shack he refers to in this passage. But for now, creator-god-appoints-thunder-god-as-ruler and each-political-unit-has-its-tutelary-sky-god as reconstructible elements of Proto-Semitic religion makes for an exciting hypothesis.

1. The name Waq is borrowed from (Lowland?) East Cushitic, but from what I’ve read on Wikipedia he’s more important there and the localized aspect may be missing. ↩︎
2. MT: “the children of Israel”; commonly reconstructed like this based on LXX “the angels of God” ↩︎

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/10/20/gurage-evidence-for-proto-semitic-religion/

#AncientSouthArabian #Bible #Cushitic #Deuteronomy #Gurage #Hebrew #ProtoSemitic #religion

Earlier this year, I had two fun conversations with the team of the then newly-founded Kedem YouTube channel, which popularizes scholarship on the Ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. The first video was published yesterday. We talk about the concept of a language family, what languages constitute the Semitic language family, where Semitic comes from geographically and linguistically, how we can reconstruct earlier ancestors of the attested languages, and a few things this kind of reconstruction tells us about Proto-Semitic.

Stay posted for my second video with this channel, to be released sometime next year, on the different modern and—especially—ancient pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew.

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/12/30/video-intro-to-the-semitic-language-family/

#Afroasiatic #Akkadian #Amharic #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #Beja #Berber #Chadic #Cushitic #Egyptian #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #Moabite #ModernSouthArabian #news #Omotic #Phoenician #ProtoSemitic #Tigrinya #Ugaritic

While reviewing proofs for an article that should appear soon, it struck me that the shape ordinal numerals like ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’ take in Semitic provides some evidence for subgrouping that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Quick recap: most scholars today accept something like the following family tree for Semitic, as compellingly presented by Huehnergard & Rubin (2011).

I’m generally skeptical about West Semitic as a group because I think everyone’s favourite West Semitic innovation, the *qatala perfect, may be a retention from Proto-Semitic. But among some other innovations (I particularly like relative/demonstrative *θū > *ðū), this subgroup is supported by the shape of the ordinals. Akkadian has a *CaCuC– pattern, as in:

• Old Babylonian šaluš– ‘third’, rebu– < *rabuʕ– ‘fourth’, ḫamuš– ‘fifth’
• Old Assyrian rabū-t-um ‘the fourth (f.)’, rabū-ni ‘our fourth witness’, ḫamuš-ni ‘our fifth witness’

In West Semitic, the normal ordinal has a different, *CāCiC- pattern, as in:

• Classical Arabic θāliθ-, rābiʕ-, ḫāmis-
• Ge’ez śaləs, rabəʕ, ḫaməs
• Mehri (Modern South Arabian) śōləθ, rōbaʕ, ḫōməs
• probably also Sabaic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫms; Ugaritic θlθ, rbʕ, ḫmš…

In the rest of Northwest Semitic, one trace of this pattern might be found if the consonantal spelling tltʔ in Daniel 5:16 (Biblical Aramaic) stands for *tālítā ‘as the third one’ (Suchard 2022: 224). Otherwise, Aramaic and Canaanite have a different pattern: *CaCīC– followed by the nisbe suffix, which has a special shape in Aramaic. Examples:

• Biblical Hebrew šlīšī, rḇīʕī, ḥămiššī (probably influenced by šiššī ‘sixth’, itself a new formation for expected **šḏīšī)
• Syriac tliṯoy, rbiʕoy, ḥmišoy

So, we have three patterns: *CaCuC-, *CāCiC-, and *CaCīC–īy/āy-. Which one is oldest and which ones are innovative?

Interestingly, Ge’ez and Modern South Arabian both have a special set of numerals that specifically refer to periods of time like days:

• Ge’ez śälus, räbuʕ, ḫämus
• Mehri śīləθ, rība, ḫayməh

In the article I’m proofreading, I argue these can all be reconstructed as *CaCuC-. This also matches Biblical Hebrew ʕāśōr ‘tenth (day)’ and may be related to dialectal Arabic names for the days of a the week like ʔaθ-θalūθ and ʔar-rabūʕ (borrowed from Sabaic???). This matches the Akkadian pattern for the normal numerals, which also happens to be attested with reference to a period of time in Old Assyrian ḫamuš-t-um. It’s more likely for an old formation to be preserved in a specialized use like referring to numbers of days than for something specific like that to be generalized for ordinals in all contexts. *CāCiC– also has an obvious origin, as this is the productive pattern for active participles and we can imagine a kind of shift from ‘being third’ as a participle to ‘third’ as an ordinal. So in terms of innovations, this looks like:

1. Proto-Semitic: *CaCuC- (preserved in East Semitic/Akkadian)
2. Proto-West-Semitic: innovates *CāCiC-, preserves *CaCuC- for counting days etc.

*CaCīC–īy/āy– is so restricted that it is most attractive to see this as a late innovation shared by Canaanite and Aramaic. If so, that would support Pat-El & Wilson-Wright’s (2018; paywalled?) argument on other grounds that these two families form a subgroup within Northwest Semitic.

1. Proto-Aramaeo-Canaanite or Aramaic and Canaanite as an areal grouping: innovate(s) *CaCīC–īy/āy-, cleans up *CāCiC– with remarkable efficiency

An intermediate *CaCīC– pattern without the nisbe suffix added might be attested in Biblical Hebrew šālīš, which not only means ‘one-third (of some unknown measure)’ but is also a military rank that has traditionally been explained as the ‘third man’ on a chariot besides the primary warrior and the driver.

This pattern also forms fractions in Aramaic, as in Imperial Aramaic rbyʕ and Syriac rbiʕ-t-o ‘quarter’. So maybe we should see the pre-Aramaeo-Canaanite development as a shift from still very active-participle-y *CāCiC– to more productively adjectival *CaCīC-, with the extra adjectival nisbe suffix being added later for good measure. Maybe that last step took place after the ordinals had started to shift in meaning to fractions (which are nouns, not adjectives), giving something like *rabīʕ–īy– an original literal meaning like ‘quarter-y’.

In conclusion, an ordinals-based family tree ends up looking like this:

https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2023/11/03/ordinal-numerals-as-shared-innovations-in-semitic/

#Akkadian #AncientSouthArabian #Arabic #Aramaic #GeEz #Hebrew #linguistics #ModernSouthArabian #ProtoSemitic #Ugaritic