a comparison with Akkadian that is too narrow, pointing out that there is no other contemporary model with which to draw comparisons. In his "Considerations on the Language of Ebla," he highlighted the artificial character of this opposition between morphology and lexicon, considering 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 characters after Amorite invasion". Essentially basing his study on the lexicon, G. Pettinato was nevertheless the first to announce in 1975 the discovery of a new Semitic language, to which he gave the name "Paleo-Canaanite." Though the scientific community was in favor of accepting this idea, they were not unanimous regarding Pettinato's proposed name. In fact, while indicating advantageously its similarity to Hebrew, Ugaritic, or Phoenician, the name proved nevertheless incapable of indicating its morphological roots in East Semitic languages. G. Garbini then proposed the term "Paleo-Syrian," but again, this proved just as inadequate to convey the Mesopotamian particularities and was not accepted. Therefore, without a name to fit this new language's different linguistic characteristics, "Eblaite" was finally chosen. Nature of the documents 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. To this list, we must also add a few rare literary texts: fragments of myths, epics, hymns, proverbs, as well as some documents for conjuration. From a linguistic perspective, although a great number of these documents were effectively written in Sumerian, a rather large portion of these only used the language ideogrammatically, as confirmed by certain Semitic elements added to the Sumerograms – such as morphological markers, suffix pronouns, or certain prepositions – which reveal an underlying language distinct from Sumerian.Such writing practices obviously made approaching Eblaite difficult. 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 if we add to this collection the onomastic material, which in Semitic languages typically consists of short sentences, the portion of the