User talk:Basumeh

Ugaritic
Ugaritic has separate letters for 27 of the 29 commonly-reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes, while Arabic has separate letters for 28 of the 29, but other than that, there's no real evidence that they were "almost exactly the same". Arabic has merged two proto-Semitic sounds in س which were kept distinct in Ugaritic. In the other direction, Ugaritic seems to have merged the sounds corresponding to Arabic ش and ض, and shows other partial or incipient mergers. There's also no evidence that "emphatics" (ط ظ ص ق) were pronounced with the back-of-the-throat pronunciations used in Arabic, and some reasons to suspect otherwise. I was the one who made the image File:Ugaritic-alphabet-chart-Arabic.svg, but the comparisons there only go so far... AnonMoos (talk) 19:36, 22 December 2012 (UTC)