Alphabet Letters
S2
Ugaritic Letters
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Origin Attested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean.
S2 is the thirtieth and last sign of the extended Ugaritic abecedary, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign on some of the longer school tablets from Ras Shamra so that the sequence ends where an earlier stage of it began. Its form resembles Samekh closely enough that it is conventionally described as samekh-like, but its function is genuinely unsettled: some specialists read it as an additional sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin rather than a native Ugaritic sound. No source gives it a name, and unlike most of the other signs unique to Ugaritic, no other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAttested in cuneiform tablets from Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit) from roughly the fourteenth century BCE until the city's destruction early in the twelfth century BCE, in the collapse that ended the Bronze Age across the eastern Mediterranean. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Place of OriginUgarit, modern Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Origin of the NameUgaritic's own abecedary tablets, found at Ras Shamra, fix the order of the thirty signs and, on the school copies among them, their arrangement into a teachable sequence, but no Ugaritic source assigns the signs names. Where a sign continues a Northwest Semitic consonant also written in Hebrew, this atlas carries the traditional name and pictographic sense those later alphabets preserve, understood as a scholarly projection rather than an attestation for Ugaritic itself. Signs unique to Ugaritic, and the sign added at the tail of the longer abecedaries, carry no traditional name at all. 1Tradition: The Ugaritic script Disputed
Associated SoundDebated. Most likely an additional sibilant close to samekh in shape and function, but its precise phonetic value is not settled; some specialists treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin rather than a distinct native sound. 1 Ugaritic epigraphers remain divided on the thirtieth sign of the abjad, conventionally labelled s2, known only from the alphabetic cuneiform tablets excavated at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, and dated to the Late Bronze Age. Daniels and Bright's The World's Writing Systems (Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the dispute: the sign closely resembles samekh in shape and sits near it functionally, but it occurs too rarely, and too often in words of apparent foreign origin, for specialists to agree whether it records a genuine extra native sibilant or served instead as a scribal device for spelling loanwords. Comparing its distribution across the tablet corpus against samekh's own has not settled the question, which is why it remains open rather than resolved. Identity
Script TypeAn abjad: thirty wedge-shaped cuneiform signs record consonants, impressed in clay in the order later shared by the Hebrew and Phoenician abjads, with three of the signs dedicated to the glottal stop aleph before the vowels a, i and u. 1 PositionThirtieth of thirty in the Ugaritic alphabet, in the order recorded by the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra, the earliest attested alphabetic order known. 1 Open Questions
Sense of the NameNot established for this sign.
No source gives this sign a name. Its function is itself debated (an extra native sibilant against a device for spelling foreign words), and no name has been proposed under either reading. See the linked open question. Cross-Tradition Connections
Related To
Why this is disputed. Conventionally described as samekh-like in form; whether it marks a genuinely distinct sibilant sound or is chiefly a device for spelling foreign words is unsettled, so the connection to samekh is a resemblance scholars note rather than an identity.
Sources
Open Questions (1 open question)
What is the thirtieth Ugaritic sign, S2, actually for?
The sign appears at the tail of the longer Ugaritic school abecedaries, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign, and its shape is conventionally described as samekh-like. No Ugaritic source names it, and specialists disagree on its basic function: some read it as an additional native sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin. No other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against, unlike Ugaritic's other five signs unique among its Northwest Semitic peers, all five of which correspond cleanly to a preserved Arabic letter.
What would resolve this A systematic survey of every attested occurrence of the sign in the Ugaritic textual corpus, not only the abecedaries, checked for whether it clusters in loanwords or foreign personal and place names, which would support the spelling-device reading, against whether it appears in ordinary native vocabulary in a way the standard twenty-nine signs could not otherwise write, which would support a distinct native phoneme.
Ugaritology; Northwest Semitic historical phonologyPeter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems
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