In agreement with Ignace Gelb's theories on the subject of all inhabited centers in Syria of the same era, it appeared that the Tell Mardikh civilization's cultural identity did not necessarily fall within the Semitic family.

[8] However, in 1968, the discovery at the same site of a statue bearing an ancient Akkadian inscription, mentioning the king Ibbit-Lim of Ebla, soon contradicted this hypothesis.

In his "Considerations on the Language of Ebla", he highlighted the artificial character of this opposition between morphology and lexicon and noted that "Akkadian differs from Western Semitic as we knew it hitherto because the latter was documented only on the phase following Amorite innovation.

If it is traced back to the time before these innovations, a northwestern pre-Amorite Semitic begins to emerge, which is concordant with Akkadian just because the latter preserved its earlier character after Amorite invasion".

Of the Eblaite corpus, whose publication began in 1974 as stated above, the majority of discovered documents are administrative or economic in nature, along with about a hundred historical tablets as well as some scholastic writings: lexicons, syllabaries, or bilingual texts.

Fortunately, some rare documents, bilingual letters or tablets, mostly written syllabically, enabled the breaking down of this graphical barrier and the clarification of our knowledge of this language.

Of course, even if we add to this collection the onomastic material, which in Semitic languages typically consists of short sentences, the portion of the Eblaite corpus that is usable from a linguistic perspective remains relatively narrow and limited from a morphological, syntactical, or lexical point of view.

On the other hand, the Eblaite syllabary, without being identical, bears significant similarities with that of the ancient Akkadian used in Kish during the Early Dynastic Period (DA II).

Fortunately, the restoration of phonetic values to these symbols has been made possible by the existence of bilingual lexical lists, where each Sumerian ideogram has its Eblaite form specified in a glossary using syllabic writing.

For example, when an Eblaite scribe uses the symbol LUGAL meaning "king" in Sumerian, he transcribes it with its Akkadian value šarrum but translates it as "dignitary."

Additionally, while Sumerian sometimes proceeds morphologically by reduplication of a word to make it plural, Eblaite reuses this practice with the same meaning, but transforming it into a simple graphical signified.

Furthermore it is not uncommon that the writing presents a defective character, where all the morphological markers are not indicated: ḫa-za-an šu-ba-ti = *ḫazānum yimḫur "the mayor takes it.

Additionally, as shown by the written forms la-ḫa for /laḫān/ or ba-da-a for /baytay/ for example, the phonemes /w/, /y/, /m/, and /n/ are not rendered graphically in the final or initial position.

The epigraphical material does not always allow a complete reconstruction of the paradigms, and the gaps must be filled on the basis of linguistic comparisons as well as internal reconstitutions that take the language's own structures into account.

[24] Special forms for the masculine second and third person accusative and dative: Eblaite presents a nominal system that is comparable to that of Akkadian and whose traces are found in certain Semitic languages.