Ugaritic grammar

It possesses two genders (masculine and feminine), three cases for nouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, and genitive [also, note the possibility of a locative case]); three numbers: (singular, dual, and plural); and verb aspects similar to those found in other Northwest Semitic languages.

Ugaritic, like all Semitic languages, exhibits a unique pattern of stems consisting typically of "triliteral", or 3-consonant consonantal roots (2- and 4-consonant roots also exist), from which nouns, adjectives, and verbs are formed in various ways: e.g. by inserting vowels, doubling consonants, and/or adding prefixes, suffixes, or infixes.

These verbs exhibit irregular patterns in their conjugation due to the inherent instability of the weak consonants, often leading to phonetic variations.

Due to its weak consonants, this verb can undergo phonetic changes, such as the assimilation of waw (w) to yod (y), especially in the absence of an intervening vowel, leading to forms like ḥyy.

[1] Ugaritic verbs occur in 10 reconstructed patterns or binyanim: Nouns in Ugaritic can be categorized according to their inflection into: cases (nominative, genitive, and accusative), state (absolute and construct), gender (masculine and feminine), and number (singular, dual, and plural).

Using the word malk- (king) and malkat- (queen) for example: As in Arabic, some exceptional nouns (known as diptotes) have the suffix -a in the genitive.

However, the vocalization may be reconstructed as /-āmi/ in the nominative (such as malkāmi "two kings") and /-ēmi/ for the genitive and accusative (e.g. malkēmi).

The female afformative plural is /-āt/ with a case marker probably following the /-t/, giving /-ātu/ for the nominative and /-āti/ for the genitive and accusative in both absolute and construct state.