Correspondence between Ugaritic and Hebrew

Language issues

Ugaritic & Hebrew: verbs

Correspondence between Ugaritic and Hebrew - verb forms

The following table shows how the various verb tenses are constructed in essentially the same way in both Hebrew and Ugaritic. There are two main verb tenses, with the Perfect (completed action, usually the past tense in narrative) adding post-fix sections to the verb root, and the Imperfect (incomplete action, usually the present or future tense in narrative) adding mostly prefix sections. In the full Hebrew vowel-pointed text, other changes to the interior may be seen, but the table below shows only the consonantal text to highlight the underlying similarity. The lower variation (in brackets) for the Hebrew shows the text with vowel-holding consonants included, where it differs. In the table XXX represents the verb root.

Perfect (postfix)			Imperfect (prefix)
Ugaritic	Hebrew	Part	Hebrew	Ugaritic
XXX	XXX	3rd person masculine singular	y-XXX	y-XXX
XXX-t	XXX (XXX-h)	3rd person feminine singular	t-XXX	t-XXX
XXX-t	XXX-t	2nd person masculine singular	t-XXX	t-XXX
XXX-t	XXX-t	2nd person feminine singular	t-XXX (t-XXX-y)	t-XXX-n
XXX-t	XXX-t (XXX-ty)	1st person singular	’-XXX	’-XXX
XXX	XXX (XXX-w)	3rd person masculine plural	y-XXX (y-XXX-w)	y-XXX or t-XXX
XXX	XXX (XXX-w)	3rd person feminine plural	t-XXX-n (t-XXX-nh)	t-XXX or t-XXX-n
XXX-tm	XXX-tm	2nd person masculine plural	t-XXX (t-XXX-w)	t-XXX-n
XXX-tn	XXX-tn	2nd person feminine plural	t-XXX-n (t-XXX-nh)	t-XXX-n
XXX-n	XXX-n (XXX-nw)	1st person plural	n-XXX	n-XXX

Language issues