The Ugaritic Alphabet, Za to the Final Sign

Za is the eighteenth sign and one of the consonants Ugaritic kept distinct when Hebrew merged it into Sade, so it has no Hebrew cognate; this atlas records Arabic Za as the closer match.

Samekh, the nineteenth sign, writes the plain s sound and continues the same consonant as Hebrew Samekh, with the name carried over from the Hebrew and Phoenician tradition.

Ayin, the twentieth sign, writes a voiced pharyngeal fricative made by constricting the throat, and continues the same consonant as Hebrew Ayin.

Qoph is the twenty-third sign and writes a voiceless uvular stop made further back in the throat than English k, continuing Hebrew Qoph.

Resh is the twenty-fourth sign. Its r sound is conventionally reconstructed as a trill or tap on the model of its Semitic cognates, not from direct Ugaritic evidence of how it was articulated.

Tha, the twenty-fifth sign, writes the th of English think. Ugaritic kept it as its own sign while Hebrew merged it into Shin, so Arabic Tha is the closer correspondence.

Ghayn is the twenty-sixth sign, a voiced fricative made at the uvula. Hebrew merged this consonant into Ayin, while Arabic kept it as its own letter Ghayn.

Taw, the twenty-seventh sign, writes the sound of English t and is the last sign Ugaritic shares with the standard twenty-two letter Northwest Semitic sequence.

Aleph (I) is the twenty-eighth sign, a variant of Aleph marking the glottal stop with the vowel i, a distinction Ugaritic is unusual among Semitic scripts in writing on the letter itself.

Aleph (U) is the twenty-ninth sign and sits beside Aleph (I), marking the same glottal stop with the vowel u and inheriting the identity of Aleph rather than carrying a name of its own.

S2 is the thirtieth and last sign, written on some longer school tablets. It resembles Samekh in form, but its function is unsettled: some specialists read it as an extra sibilant, others as a device for foreign words.