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Ugaritic Language And Literature
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. Ugaritic has been called "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 (AKA 'Aqhat), 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ugarit
Ugarit (; , ''ủgrt'' /ʾUgarītu/) was an ancient port city in northern Syria about 10 kilometers north of modern Latakia. At its height it ruled an area roughly equivalent to the modern Latakia Governorate. It was discovered by accident in 1928 with the Ugaritic texts. Its ruins are often called Ras Shamra after the headland where they lie. History Ugarit saw its beginnings in the Neolithic period, the site was occupied from the end of the 8th millennium BC and continued as a settlement through the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages. It was during the late bronze age that Ugarit experienced significant growth, culminating in the establishment of the Kingdom of Ugarit. The city had close connections to the Hittite Empire, in later times as a vassal, sent tribute to Ancient Egypt, Egypt at times, and maintained trade and diplomatic connections with Cyprus (then called Alashiya), documented in the archives recovered from the site and corroborated by Mycenaean Greece, Mycenaean and Cyp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danel
Danel (, Ugaritic: 𐎄𐎐𐎛𐎍 DNỈL, " El is judge"), father of Aqhat, was a culture hero who appears in an incomplete Ugaritic text of the fourteenth century BCE at Ugarit (now Ras Shamra), Syria. Tale of Aqhat The text in ''Corpus Tablettes Alphabétiques'' '' TA' 17–19 is often referred to as the '' Tale of Aqhat''. Danel was depicted as "judging the cause of the widow, adjudicating the case of the fatherless" in the city gate. He passed through trials: his son Aqhat was destroyed but apparently in the missing conclusion was revived or replaced by Danel's patron god, Rpʼu, who sits and judges with Hadad and Astarte and was likely considered to be the equivalent of El. The text was published and translated in 1936 by Charles Virolleaud and has been extensively analysed since then. The Rephaim The text of ''The Rephaim'', a title given to the text by Mark S. Smith, also mentions Danel, who appears there and in the Tale of Aqhat as "a model figure in family matt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interdental Consonant
Interdental consonants are produced by placing the tip of the tongue between the upper and lower front teeth. That differs from typical dental consonants, which are articulated with the tongue against the ''back'' of the upper incisors. No language is known to contrast interdental and dental consonants. Interdental consonants may be transcribed with the extIPA subscript, plus superscript bridge, as in , if precision is required, but it is more common to transcribe them as advanced alveolars, as in . Interdental consonants are rare cross-linguistically. Interdental realisations of otherwise-dental or alveolar consonants may occur as idiosyncrasies or as coarticulatory effects of a neighbouring interdental sound. The most commonly-occurring interdental consonants are the non-sibilant fricatives (sibilants may be dental but do not appear as interdentals). Apparently, interdentals do not contrast with dental consonants in any language. Voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labial Consonant
Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. The two common labial articulations are bilabials, articulated using both lips, and labiodentals, articulated with the lower lip against the upper teeth, both of which are present in English. A third labial articulation is dentolabials, articulated with the upper lip against the lower teeth (the reverse of labiodental), normally only found in pathological speech. Generally precluded are linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue contacts the posterior side of the upper lip, making them coronals, though sometimes, they behave as labial consonants. The most common distribution between bilabials and labiodentals is the English one, in which the nasal and the stops, , , and , are bilabial and the fricatives, , and , are labiodental. The voiceless bilabial fricative, voiced bilabial fricative, and the bilabial approximant do not exist as the primary realizations of any sounds in E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diphthong
A diphthong ( ), also known as a gliding vowel or a vowel glide, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech apparatus) moves during the pronunciation of the vowel. In most varieties of English, the phrase "no highway cowboys" ( ) has five distinct diphthongs, one in every syllable. Diphthongs contrast with monophthongs, where the tongue or other speech organs do not move and the syllable contains only a single vowel sound. For instance, in English, the word ''ah'' is spoken as a monophthong (), while the word ''ow'' is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word ''re-elect'') the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong. Diphthongs often form when separate vowels are run together in rapid speech during a conversation. However, there ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monophthongization
Monophthongization is a sound change by which a diphthong becomes a monophthong, a type of vowel shift. It is also known as ungliding, as diphthongs are also known as gliding vowels. In languages that have undergone monophthongization, digraphs that formerly represented diphthongs now represent monophthongs. The opposite of monophthongization is vowel breaking. Arabic Classical Arabic had two diphthongs, and , which are realised as the long vowels and in numerous Arabic dialects. This monophthongization has further developed into and , respectively, in urban North African dialects. Some notable exceptions to this monophthongization are some rural Lebanese dialects, which preserve the original pronunciations of some of the diphthongs. Other urban Lebanese dialects, such as in Beirut, use the mid vowels and . Another exception is the Sfax dialect of Tunisian Arabic, which is known mostly for keeping the Classical Arabic diphthongs and . Some varieties might maintain th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in Vowel length, quantity (length). They are usually voice (phonetics), voiced and are closely involved in Prosody (linguistics), prosodic variation such as tone (linguistics), tone, intonation (linguistics), intonation and Stress (linguistics), stress. The word ''vowel'' comes from the Latin word , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word ''vowel'' is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (, , , , , and sometimes and ). Definition There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one Phonetics, phonetic and the other Phonology, phonological. *In the phonetic definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English language, English "ah" or "oh" , produ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are ''y'' and ''w'' in ''yes'' and ''west'', respectively. Written in IPA, ''y'' and ''w'' are near to the vowels ''ee'' and ''oo'' in ''seen'' and ''moon,'' written in IPA. The term ''glide'' may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel. Classification Semivowels form a subclass of approximants. Although "semivowel" and "approximant" are sometimes treated as synonymous, most authors use the term "semivowel" for a more restricted set; there is no universally agreed-upon definition, and the exact details may vary from author to author. For example, do not consider the labiodental approximant to be a semivowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic attached to non-syllabic vowel lett ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages contain phonemes (or the spatial-gestural equivalent in sign languages), and all spoken languages include both consonant and vowel phonemes; phonemes are primarily studied under the branch of linguistics known as phonology. Examples and notation The English words ''cell'' and ''set'' have the exact same sequence of sounds, except for being different in their final consonant sounds: thus, versus in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a writing system that can be used to represent phonemes. Since and alone distinguish certain words from others, they are each examples of phonemes of the English language. Specifically they are consonant phonemes, along with , while is a vowel phoneme. The spelling of Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tale Of Aqhat
The Tale of Aqhat or Epic of Aqhat is a Canaanite myth from Ugarit, an ancient city in what is now Syria. It is one of the three longest texts to have been found at Ugarit, the other two being the Legend of Keret and the Baal Cycle. It dates to approximately 1350 BCE. While the complete tale has not been preserved, there remain of it, according to David Wright, "approximately 650 poetic lines", with the bulk of its content concerning "ritual performances or their contexts". The remains of the story are found on three clay tablets, missing the beginning and end of the story. These tablets were discovered in 1930 and 1931. The Tale of Aqhat was recorded at Ugarit by the high priest Ilmilku, who was also the author of the Legend of Keret and the Baal Cycle. The three primary characters of the Tale are a man named Danel, his son Aqhat, and his daughter Pugat. The narrative First tablet Danel is described as a "righteous ruler" (Davies) or "probably a king" (Curtis), providing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel (biblical Figure)
Daniel (Biblical Aramaic, Aramaic and ; ; ) is the main character of the Book of Daniel. According to the Hebrew Bible, Daniel was a Nobility, noble Jews, Jewish youth of Jerusalem taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, serving the king and his successors with loyalty and ability until the time of the Persians, Persian conqueror Cyrus the Great, Cyrus, all the while remaining true to the God of Israel. While some conservative scholars hold that Daniel existed and his book was written in the 6th century BCE, most scholars agree that Daniel, as depicted in the Book of Daniel, was not a historical figure, wherein the character was probably based on a similar legendary Daniel from earlier traditions. It follows that much of the book is a Roman à clef, cryptic allusion to the reign of the 2nd century BCE Diadochi, Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Six cities claim the Tomb of Daniel, the most famous being that in Susa, in southern Iran, at a site known as Tomb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ezekiel
Ezekiel, also spelled Ezechiel (; ; ), was an Israelite priest. The Book of Ezekiel, relating his visions and acts, is named after him. The Abrahamic religions acknowledge Ezekiel as a prophet. According to the narrative, Ezekiel prophesied the destruction of Judah's capital city Jerusalem. In 587 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon's Temple, and sent the Judahite upper classes into the Babylonian captivity. However, Ezekiel also prophesied the eventual restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. It is believed he died around 570 BC; Ezekiel's Tomb is a Jewish religious site in Mesopotamia. Three decades later, in 539 BC, the Persian empire conquered Babylon and the Edict of Cyrus repatriated the exiles. The name "Ezekiel" means "God is strong" or "God strengthens" in Hebrew. Biblical account The author of the Book of Ezekiel presents himself as Ezekiel, the son of Buzi, born into a priestly ( kohen) lineage. The aut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
