Eblaite corpus that is usable from a linguistic perspective remains relatively narrow and limited from a morphological, syntactical, or lexical point of view. The graphical barrier and writing practices The main difficulty faced by those studying the language of Ebla arose largely from issues in the writing system. Indeed, Eblaite shares its cuneiform writing system with the Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Elamite languages, a graphical system where each symbol may have collectively or separately an ideogrammatic and/or phonetic value. In the first case, the symbol or chain of symbols simply signifies an idea that is understandable by way of its Sumerian meaning; in the second case, the symbol indicates, with a more-or-less large approximation based on writing practices, the form of an Eblaite term following a principle of syllabic decomposition. The comparative study of Eblaite symbols reveals some differences with the systems used by other schools of scribes. 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). In fact, three transcription practices appear in the Ebla texts: one exclusively syllabic, another using both syllabism and ideography, and the last largely employing the ideographic principle. Included in the first category is mostly the incantatory texts and the writing of anthroponyms; in the second, the epistolary, historical, and literary documents, not to mention some diplomatic texts; and in the third, economic and administrative texts, relating to the management and stewardship of the palace where ideography is a sufficient system for the writing of realia. Qualitatively and quantitatively, this situation entirely resembles that of the Mesopotamian corpus. Only a small portion of documents found are syllabic, compared to the large quantity of texts written using Sumerian logograms. This led G. Pettinato to consider, at first, that these documents were written in Sumerian. Such a hypothesis obviously no longer holds today with regard to our understanding of the writing and formulation practices particular to Sumerian and Eblaite scribes. These graphical conventions are so specific that they are very often sufficient to identify the language underlying the ideograms. Thus, for example, the Sumerian practice of writing filiation following the formula X DUMU Y ("X son of Y") stands out from the Akkadian and Eblaite practice which prefers the phrasing X DUMU.NITA Y. However, if, as we just saw, we can identify a signified of