Arabic and Ugaritic lexicography

Given the limited size of the Ugaritic corpus, it is often impossible to establish the meanings of words on the basis of attested usage. Consequently, scholars must resort to the witness of the cognate Semitic languages to help them understand Ugaritic. Arabic has been employed extensively in this enterprise. Being the most richly attested of the Semitic languages, it offers the scholar of Ugaritic the largest number of potential cognates. Our attestations of Arabic are separated from those of Ugaritic by almost two millennia. Consequently Arabic has had a longer time to develop semantically. This factor is often not adequately considered by scholars attempting to interpret Ugaritic with the aid of the Arabic lexicon. The present study details a method for assessing Arabic data to determine their suitability for application to Ugaritic. The entire Ugaritic corpus was read in order to isolate Arabic-Ugaritic isoglosses. The salient secondary literature was canvassed--words responsibly proposed or widely held to be Arabic-Ugaritic isoglosses were catalogued. An inventory of 265 words was compiled, 47 of which were submitted to the method here detailed. Of the proposed Arabic-Ugaritic isoglosses considered in detail, over half proved to be spurious; some 36% were shown to be possible isoglosses, and only 12% probable isoglosses. Among the results of this study are the following: (1) the determination that the lexical affinities of Arabic and Ugaritic are less pronounced than is sometimes reckoned; (2) the elimination of many inappropriate Arabic lexical data from scholarly debate; (3) the establishment of a method for determining the suitability of cognate Semitic vocabulary (particularly less ancient vocabulary) for clarification of Ugaritic, which, if followed, will minimize the incorporation of spurious data into scholarly efforts to understand this difficult literature.