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Considering:
Semitic Languages
in John Huehnergard, CANE III
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Recently, numerous of you have probably heard my complaining about R. Caplice's "Introduction to Akkadian" . As someone who is currently studying just one modern language I am hardly in a position to critique a book meant to introduce the reader to the study of an ancient language - yet having briefly engaged myself with this book as a learner, I can feel what is going to work well and what is going to be a haphazard and treacherous path to language acquisition. This book seemed just obnoxious and my biggest complaint has been that what little practice and exercise the book offers, is also unaccompanied by the necessary solutions and answers - so the independent learner is left with no clue as to whether they have understood a grammatical principal correctly or not. Of course, I realize now that the issue here is that the key to the exercises is sold separately, and I simply don't own a copy.
Still, I am on the lookout for better more developed introduction to Old Babylonian dialect, and Rookillus today pointed me toward John Huehnergard's
A Grammar of Akkadian, which certainly looks like a strong alternative. It also comes with a separate key to the grammar which contains all the solutions to the problems, but which again, must be purchased separately (unfortunately.) See:
and
At the moment, I am considering not the book itself but an article Huehnergard wrote on Semitic Languages for the third volumes of the CANE serious. This is an attempt to survey the subject as a whole, however I will note below only selected points about Semitic language and focus mainly on the information relating to the Old Babylonian dialect (the object of this thread.)
First, I find his opening statement to be very ably put:
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The Semitic Languages are humanity's longest attested language family and constitute the dominant linguistic group in much of the Near East throughout history, from the mid third millennium BCE, when and Akkadian and Eblaite documents appear, down to the present. In most periods, moreover, one or another Semitic language has served as a lingua franca for the entire region: Akkadian during the second millennium BCE, Aramaic from the mid first millennium BCE to the mid first millennium CE, and Arabic since then. Besides Akkadian and Aramaic, other Semitic languages of antiquity are Hebrew and Phoenician. Modern Semitic languages are Arabic, one of the world's most widely spoken tongues; Amharic, Tigrinya, and many other languages of Ethiopia; Israeli Hebrew; scattered dialects of Aramaic; and remnants of South Arabian languages in Yemen and Oman. The Semitic family is the easternmost member of the Afroasiatic language phylum.
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Branches/
Scholars dealing with Semitic languages, on grammatical grounds and otherwise, have come to assign these languages different branches - East Semitic languages, West Semitic, Central Semitic and so on. Basically, from some archaic source of "common" Semitic language, two main branches emerged:
East Semitic, and
West Semitic. The west branch became much more prolific and it would branch again into Central Semitic and South Semitic, and from these, languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic arouse.
East Semitic/
My interest lies with the East Branch, which though it did not proliferate or persist in the way some of the West Semitic languages have, did exist for thousands of years in the following forms (as presented by Huehnergard):
The East Semitc Branch
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- Akkadian
- Old Akkadian dialects 26th-20th c. BCE
- Assyrian
- Old Assyrian: 20th - 18th c. BCE
- Middle Assyrian: 15th - 11th c. BCE
- Neo-Assyrian: 10th - 7th c. BCE
- Babylonian
- Old Babylonian: 20th - 16th c. BCE
- Middle Babylonian: 16th - 11th c. BCE (literary Standard Babylonian from the 12th c. BCE)
- Neo-Babylonian: 10th - 7th c. BCE
- Late Babylonian: 6th c. BCE - 1st. c. CE
- Eblaite: 24th - 23rd c. BCE
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[/color][/li][/ul]
Old Babylonian/
Huehnergard: "Old Babylonian is the term used for several closely related dialects from the twentieth to the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon (1595), the best known of which is that of Hammurabi's chancery; there are vast numbers of Old Babylonian texts in the form of letters, laws (such as the C
ode of Hammurabi), legal contracts, economic dockets, omens, royal inscriptions, lexical lists, and literary works such as the
Epic of Gilgamesh, the flood story of
Atrakhasis, and the myth of Anzu. Much less common are the texts in the Middle Babylonian (sixteenth-eleventh centuries), which is known from letters, dockets, and a few Royal Inscriptions. Throughout much of the second millennium, Akkadian, especially Old and Middle Babylonian, was used as a lingua franca in much of the Near East; for example, many Akkadian texts of the Late Bronze Ages have been found at sites in Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt."
Note on Standard Babylonian/
It seems worth noting and remembering that, despite its name, this was not a spoken dialect per se: "During the half of the first millennium BCE, and probably beginning earlier, both Babylonian and Assyrian scribes wrote literary works (such as
Enuma Elish) and other learned texts (such as royal inscriptions) in an archaizing, non-spoken dialect called Standard Babylonian."
Note on Eblaite/
The first digs at Ebla, in the 1970s, produced many tablets according to Huehnergard, some of which we have considered already at enenuru - a majority of the Early Dynastic incantations text in fact come from here, and have parallels in tablets from Fara and Abu Salabikh. The Ebla tablets are written either in Sumerian, or in what was to scholars a new dialect of Semitic - Eblaite. At first they thought they had found the root of the West Semitic branch of languages, however as the author notes, more recent assessments have it that this "is a form of East Semitic, either a separate subbranch closely related to Akkadian or even a dialect of Akkadian."
Personal Pronouns in Semitic Languages/
These languages, in both the East and West Branches, have demonstrable similarities and points of contact. While a close look at Grammar is beyond my means at the moment, I find Huehnergard's table containing a spread of Personal Pronouns from different dialects to show forms that are remarkably similar and evocative of each other even in a comparison of Akkadian to Hebrew. So here are some of those Personal Pronouns (in English we have 1st. person I, 2nd person you 3rd person He or She etc.).
Please note, I do not at the moment possess all the specialty accent marks required, and so the below is intended as an accurate approximation:
................Akkadian ......................Arabic (Classical).................Hebrew
1. per: ..anāku................................'anta.......................................'ânī, 'ānokī
2nd masc...atta.....................................'anta.......................................'attā
2nd fem......atti.......................................'anti........................................'att
3rd masc....šū........................................huwu.......................................hû'
3rd fem.......šī.........................................sē.............................................hī'
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Still to come.... inroads into the problem of Common Semitic Phonology?
