stress on sumerian loanwords in akkadian

[zombiehjort]

I have been wondering, when a sumerian word i loaned into akkadian, what happens with the stress on such a word?

Does it retain the sumerian stress or is it modified to have the akkadian stress?

[us4-he2-gal2]

Zombie - insofar as I am aware, loanwords from Sumerian into Akkadian are re-analyzed according to the rulers of Akkadian grammar. So you would then apply the rules outlined in Huehnergard chapters 1-3. You are probably very conscious of stress because it is really emphasized in the first part of Huehnergard - I would point out that it becomes a fairly loose science when you take the entire field of Assyriology into account, different scholars observe the rules in slightly different ways and you get different results depending on which grammar book you use most. Not to say its unimportant, but expect variation within the field.

[zombiehjort]

Thank you a lot for telling me

can you elaborate further, by telling me how we know this?

[nemequm]

I don't know what Huehnergard says, but according to the book we used the stress of Akkadian is mostly studied by studying other Semitic languages. It's quite logical to think that using diacronic linguistic methods and relating to other Semitic languages we can make quite good guesses of the stress of Akkadian.

But do we know _anything_ about the stress of Sumerian?

(I have to say that to me - as a native speaker of language where stress is always on the first syllable - all the fuss about the right stress in the right place when studying foreign languages is really tiresome And especially when it comes to dead languages - I'm so happy I will never meet any natives who could laught at my pronounciation, so why to care...)

EDIT:
Actually, here you have a wild hypothesis (I guess it's the thing we Finns are famous in this area of study nowadays ;P). I still don't know about Huehnergard, but our book tells that Akkadian had almost as regular stress pattern as Finnish has. And in Finnish every loan word will get the Finnish stress pattern immediately & very naturally, so I have a strong intuition that the Akkadians would have done the same thing if Sumerian words they borrowed had different stress patterns.