Ugaritic

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to Ugarit, the ancient Canaanite city on the Syrian coast, or to the extinct Semitic language written there in cuneiform
2. Describing the people, script, or language associated with the ancient city of Ugarit in northern Syria during the Late Bronze Age
3. Of or pertaining to the ancient northern Syrian city of Ugarit and the cuneiform alphabetic texts discovered at its archaeological site

Etymology: Ugarit was a Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast, and the name of the language was coined from the place name, not from the people who spoke it. Its texts were recovered in 1928, when a farmer ploughing a field near the modern town of Ras Shamra turned up clay tablets, and the script they were written in turned out to be an alphabet of about thirty cuneiform signs, a surprise to scholars who expected the language to be a dialect of something better known. The word is therefore simply the place name plus the adjectival suffix "-ic," the same pattern as "Mesopotamian" or "Akkadic." Behind the city's name lies a loanword that travelled a long way. The source for the Semitic form of the place name is the Sumerian "a-gar₃," meaning arable land, which passed into a Semitic language and came to name the city. The city, in other words, was named for its fields, and the word traces back to a Sumerian phrase for cultivated ground that was adopted by the Semitic speakers who lived there.