Re: Ugaritic Affiliations

On Sep 9, 9:03 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Sep 9, 3:06 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Unicode is very much a case of GIGO.

Hurling abuse from outside the computing industry does not help. Timely,
reasoned arguments are needed.

It should have been done at least 15 years ago. Instead, untrained
computer engineers bulled ahead with what they thought might be useful
approaches.

Why should I need a licence? Ideally one should have similar tables for
Hittite and Neo-Babylonian, and probably other stages.
Right, those are the only three "stages" you've ever heard of?

The Mesopotamian cuneiform repertoire in Unicode 5.0 is known to have
significant coverage gaps for stages before Ur III, so I didn't think it was
worth mentioning earlier stages. The Unicode charts represent the Ur III
stage, with the ticklish problem that anything later should be projected
back to an Ur III form.

It doesn't come in "stages." There were no analysts sitting down and
deciding every 500 years or so what the inventory of cuneiform signs
should look like.

2) It
is possible to make an alphabetic order using sign shapes.

I don't know what you mean. I've never discovered who first arranged a
signlist according to the arrangement that's standard today (followed
by von Soden, Labat, Borger, ..., with horizontals before angles
before verticals), but it is neither the ancient order (which you'll
find in the transcript of Syllabary A in WWS) nor the order used the
first time someone assembled a cuneiform signlist (1807).

You've just demonstrated that you understood what I meant!

No. Any ordering by shape is completely arbitrary with no reason to
favor it over any other. (The order of Chinese characters certainly
seems completely arbitrary and isn't by shape, sound, meaning, or
anything else.)

3) I know where
to find a list of signs, moreover, one in alphabetic order of sign
shapes.

Regardless of whether it reflects any sort of epigraphic,
philological, or linguistic reality!

So what convention are they working to then?

Who?

For Ur III forms one might hope to use the Unicode charts, though I don't
doubt that the shapes of some of the signs, signs that are not attested
(and
don't exist) for Ur III, are Michael Everson's invention.
Oh, no, he's started meddling in cuneiform now, too???

He seems to steer clear of CJKV stuff.

Thank heaven for small favors? Does that mean he won't go near things
that millions of people know about, but things that 50 people know
about are fair game?

Why can't you use Nissen and Green's signlist, with the corrections
from Steinkeller's review?

URL, please.

It is a BOOK. In a library. I'm sure Heimpel and Englund can set you
straight. (If you don't know who they are, you have no business at all
discussing the computerization of cuneiform.)

The 31st letter is clearly Colless's added 'sh'. I suspect the image in
the
Wiki page is derived by taking Colless's list, the 31 characters in the
Ugaritic block of Unicode, putting 2 and 2 together, and making 5.

As opposed to going to ANY reliable source, such as a Ugaritic
grammar.

What use is a grammar that predates 'Colless's discovery'? I'm not even
sure that he actually claims any such discovery.

There IS NO discovery. There is NO reason to consider it for even a
moment.

Everything I've seen, apart from the image on the wiki page, tells me
that
it is a variant of SHIN. I would not expect to see the two 'sh' letters
in
the same abecedary.
Since when are "variants" included in the list of letters in an alphabet?

When it is not clear that the variation is free when it is not conditioned.

Eh? What other alternatives are there?

Practical systems may be even more forced to include variants, as with the
'long s' in the Roman alphabet or the special final letters in the Hebrew
and Greek writing systems.

Those are clearly rule-governed conditioned variants (allographs).
This Ugaritic invention is not.

I'm not sure how to quote an additional post, but the following post has
been accessed using
URLhttp://groups.google.com/group/sci.lang/msg/8910eba34d128d67:

A: On Sep 4, 11:30 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A> On Sep 4, 3:47 pm, Yusuf B Gursey <y...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
A> > On Sep 4, 7:53 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A> > > If you don't know how similar Ugaritic and Arabic are (their
consonant
A> > > inventories are in fact identical), then you have no business
making
A> > > any comments whatsoever touching on Semitic linguistics.

A> > according to my sources ugaritic has 3 non-emphatic sibilants but no
A> > Dad.

A> You haven't consulted a Ugaritic grammar. Dad was marginal but had a
A> letter.

[Richard again]

Classical Arabic has 28 consonants. The Ugaritic script has 28
characters.

Correction: The Ugaritic distinguishes 28 consonants.

Just how little is known about what SSU represents.
IT DOES NOT REPRESENT ANYTHING IN THE UGARITIC LANGUAGE.

So do you withdraw your claim that Ugaritic and Arabic have the same
consonant inventory? Do you still claim that Ugaritic had a 'dad'? If so,
what letter was it written with? (My understanding is that Ugaritic SADE
corresponds to both Arabic sad and dad etymologically.)

Look it up in a grammar of Proto-Semitic.

.