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August 28, 2008
A Few Strange Letters
N. T. Wrong is back and telling us of The Lost Treasure of Ugarit, the first film of the Jack Hunter series. Run over to the Wrong site and learn more about the movie. He points out the rather strange string of letters seen near the end of the trailer. The "Ugaritic" morphs into "Jack Hunter." And I'm okay with the "Hunter" part. But I'm more than a little confused by the "Jack."
[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]
Bishop Wrong originally read it ʿgṯ?ḫ? hʾunṭʾir and worried that two of the letters are "new to the Ugaritic alphabet after 3200 years." But now he reads it as I do, ʿgṯśġ hunṭʾir. Since the good Bishop adopted my suggest, made in a comment to his post, this post is quite irrelevant. But, I'll post it anyway, because I don't have anything else for today and I put a lot of work into it. It did give me an occasion to look at a rather strange and largely incompetent rendering of the Ugaritic alphabet.
I still don't know jack about "Jack." The bottom edge of KTU 5.4 has a sign like 
. KTU 5.4 is an abecedary and the last letter is in the canonical Ugarit alphabet is ś. Here is Virolleaud's, 199, drawing of the tablet.
I couldn't find a picture that was much help. The sign in question is on the bottom edge and is seen below the surface of the tablet in the drawing. I suppose they thought that no one but someone with truly abnormal interests would be interested. Like the sign in the trailer, our student scribe wrote the sign with four vertical wedges one on top of the other. But this is likely some kind of error. He or she made four wedges where we would normally expect three several other times on this tablet. Despite the fact that the student scribe wrote this letter on the bottom edge of the tablet, there can be little doubt that he intended a ś. For the record, the ś is normally written 
and one can see the general family resemblance. In some ways, our scribe made the letter look somewhat more like the Akkadian ZU sign than the normal ś. But then, the alphabetic letter may not have come from the Akkadian ZU sign at all.
As to the letter than I read ġ, this seems to be a slight variant on a more common variant of the Ugaritic ġ sign. I'll leave this as an exercise to the truly abnormal reader. Hint: take a look at the ġs in KTU1.24.
Now why would the producers of The Lost Treasure of Ugarit use such strange variant forms and from differing tablets at that? I have no idea. Perhaps they choose ascetically appealing forms from a font list with variants like those provided by Logos.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at August 28, 2008 4:13 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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Comments
I've been thinking of it, in the back of my mind, and I detect the heavy hand of an aesthetic redactor.
The original author, 'U', came up with 'Jack Hunter' in Ugaritic letters. But then the aesthetic redactor ('H[ollywood]') decided that there were more interesting letters out there, and stuck them in over the original 'Jack'.
Posted by: N T Wrong at August 28, 2008 7:48 PM
N. T.
Yeah, I'm sure you are correct. Something like that no doubt happened.
Posted by: Duane at August 28, 2008 9:22 PM
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