Status Updates From A Primer on Ugaritic: Langu...

three kinds of people were considered “Ugaritians”: “a son of Ugarit” was a citizen who received a salary, “a slave of the king of Ugarit” was not a citizen but had land granted by the king, and “a slave of the slave of the king of Ugarit”

For a stark example of the importance of remembering the distinctive elements of a word, including vowel length, note that in Akkadian mūtu is “death” and mutu is “husband.” Confusion here would certainly alter communication!

Ugaritic is largely a written, scribal language. It probably was not developed merely to encode the colloquial dialect of Ugarit, but also to serve as a regional diplomatic language in the Levant. […] Ugarit probably served as a regional center for training scribes; therefore, we might expect that scribal standards were developed at Ugarit.