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Sumerian and Akkadian and Cuneiform | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6508 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 41 of 49 08 May 2012 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So, long time nothing written and to little studied. Three weeks form now is the exam, and I will have to be able to
read and translate the annals of Sennacherib, a pretty gruesome king of the Neo-Assyrian empire! Goal for this week: memorize all simple cuneiform signs (thus, the cv and vc signs). Learn the rules for how weak verbs mutate by heart. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6508 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 42 of 49 10 May 2012 at 2:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Semitic languages makes word from du, tri and quadraconsonantal roots. More often than not they are
triconsonantal, the consonants are called radicals. Some consonants are weak, and thus instead of showing up, disappear and leave weird traces behind them. Those are ', w, y, and sometimes n. *prs in the infinitive is parāsum, *bn' in the infinitive is banûm from >*banā'um where the ' disappeared and the vowels elided. 3person preterite iprus and ibnū (I think). To kill *d'k infinitive dâkum from > *da'ākum and 3ms preterite idāk from id'ak. *wšr becomes... ašarum and in 3pms preterite ušur! from iwšur. *lw' becomes... lamûm later on, because w>m. thus 1ps should follow the pattern (form pars̄um) aprus and therefore becomes... almē from alw?'.. to be honest that e.. I dunno why it pops up there. It's probably from ā'i, but then where's the i from. In other words: Akkadian verbs seem to be very regular, but, you have to keep 3000 years of phonological change in your head to understand how they work at all, because lawûm becomes almê! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5091 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 43 of 49 10 May 2012 at 9:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The purpose of the transliteration is not to show what the text probably sounded like when read aloud (though it gives an approximation of that). It's so the reader can know exactly which cuneiform signs were used in the original text. For that reason it's very important to reproduce the Sumerian readings, and to indicate them in capital letters so they look different from the Akkadian readings. If you want to know what the text might have sounded like when written, you have to "translate" the transliteration into another text. This is called normalizing. You have to do that even if there are no Sumerian logograms, because the character-for-character transliteration of even just phonetic signs doesn't exactly represent how it sounded. Let me show you what I mean with an example taken from Marcus's Akkadian textbook: Transliteration: šum-ma a-na ši-bu-ut ŠE ù KÙ.BABBAR ú-ṣí-a-am a-ra-an di-nim šu-a-ti it-ta-na-aš-ši Normalization: šumma ana šībūt še'im u kaspim ūṣi'am aran dīnim šu'āti ittanašši Translation: If he has come forward for the purpose of (false) testimony concering grain or money, he shall bear the penalty of that case. Their phonetic signs were a syllabary with mosty CV and VC pronunciations. To represent a CVC syllable, they strung two signs together to represent that. Also, they had no way of representing long vowels, so the modern reader has to reconstruct that. In short, the transliteration is not a text to read aloud from, unless you know the language so well that you can normalize it on the fly. Incidentally, you may have noticed the signs ù and ú. The accent marks have no pronunciation value. There are several signs that are pronounced identically, so they use accent marks to distinguish them in transliteration.
No, they didn't speak Sumerian. Sumerian was a dead language by then. They did have manuals that gave the Sumerian and Akkadian readings for the various signs, so they knew what the Sumerian pronunciation had been (or, at least, the pronunciation that they had preserved). You're jumping the gun by assuming they must have pronounced the signs according to whatever the corresponding Akkadian word was. I don't know what scholars in the field think about this, but it's certainly conceivable they spoke the Sumerian word when reading aloud. Akkadian's writing system is sort of like that of Japanese. The Akkadian phonetic signs are like kana, and the Sumerian logograms are like kanji. That being the case, there's no reason to assume necessarily that they must have always given the signs native readings, since we have a living example of a literary culture (Japan) that does something much more complex than that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6552 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 44 of 49 10 May 2012 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks - your answer has cleared up the enormous difference between transliterated and normalized Akkadian texts for me. When I read old stuff in for instance Old Nordic or Latin the texts are only presented in their normalized form.
However I still doubt that the Akkadian scribes would mix old Sumerian words into the text when they read something aloud - not at least because their listeners might have problems understanding those Sumerian words. After all we all say the equivalent of 'and' in our respective languages when we see the ampersand sign & - we don't say "ampersand". The only common exception from this rule is the practice of saying "dot" in English in site addresses - but it took a 'dot com crisis' to establish that habit. Edited by Iversen on 10 May 2012 at 10:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6508 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 45 of 49 10 May 2012 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, there are many CVC-signs, so you do not have to use CV-VC all the time. As for representing long vowels: they did that alot. They could! It's called plene writing and it was used to reduce ambiguity and sometimes when the scribe was not lazy. As for the readings: we know them because we have lists from old scribes. KUR ma-tum, KUR ka-ša-du-um, etc. since Akkadian is inflecting and Sumerian is not, you would not really be able to just say kur. Besides, Akkadian do have many Sumerian loanwords :P 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6508 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 46 of 49 12 May 2012 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The similar look of cuneiform signs are beginning to get on my nerves. To add to this, there's also polyvalence:
thus the same sign can have multiple phonetic as well as logographic readings. *deep breath* I shall overcome this... Wish me luck. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| aldous Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5091 days ago 73 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 47 of 49 16 May 2012 at 3:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
You make an interesting point. I think the difference is that when you study Latin, you learn the language first, and then if you're interested, you can move on to the palaeography. You don't have to. You can enjoy the language without it. But with the cuneiform languages (correct me if I'm wrong), it seems you're expected to learn at least some palaeography at the same time you study the language. It's like making a beginning Latin student learn to read uncials and memorize medieval abbreviations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ebadlun Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4421 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes | Message 48 of 49 19 May 2012 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hello, I am a random passing stranger - I found your log whilst looking for Akkadian-related things generally.
I've been teaching myself Akkadian on-and-off for a year or so, inspired by a visit to the British Museum, so I was very interested to read your experiences. I've been using Huehnegaard's book - I find it extremely concise, clear and thorough in terms of the grammar. I find it less useful when it comes to learning Cuneiform - there are far too few reading exercises, especially in the early stages. Lesson 9 introduces 10 characters in OB, cursive and NA forms, including complex symbols like mah and la - and then gives you just two (2) lines of text to practise on! Lesson 16 introduces the first real Babylonian text - a difficult contract with many unintroduced characters, entirely inappropriate for the level the learner has reached, and a real morale-killer. Compound characters are introduced without any mention of what their compounded from - eg LUGAL is a lot easier to learn if you already know it's made up of LU + GAL - but Huehnegaard doesn't mention that. But all-in-all a difficult language, as are all Semitic languages. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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