A Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9783111356693, 9783111000282

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A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF A K K A D I A N

JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA MEMORIAE N I C O L A I VAN WIJK D E D I C A T A edenda curat

C O R N E L I S H. VAN S C H O O N E V E L D STANFORD UNIVERSITY

SERIES PRACTICA XXI

1966 M O U T O N & CO. LONDON

· THE H A G U E ·

PARIS

A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF AKKADIAN by

ERICA REINER UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

1966 M O U T O N & CO. LONDON

· T H E

H A G U E

· PARIS

© Copyright 1965 Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER :

65-24780

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This grammar, my first attempt toward a formulation of the structure of Akkadian which has intrigued me for many years, owes its existence to a set of fortunate circumstances. As to the subject matter, discussions with my colleagues at the Oriental Institute, as well as work with the vast range of material for the Assyrian Dictionary Project over the years, provided stimulation and challenge; as to the presentation as a linguistic study, it was the encouragement of my colleagues in linguistics that led me to attempt it. To all the friends, students, and colleagues who read various drafts or discussed sundry points with me go my sincere thanks. I am particularly indebted to my colleagues Eric P. Hamp, Professor of Linguistics, and A. Leo Oppenheim, Oriental Institute Professor of Assyriology, who so generously gave of their time to read the manuscript at various stages, and sustained me in my effort to bring this grammar to completion. I have been especially fortunate to profit from the constructive criticisms and suggestions of my colleague Bulcsú László (University of Zagreb and University of Chicago), whose help in the final redaction, in particular with the formalization of the phonological and transformational statements, has been invaluable. It is my pleasant duty to acknowledge the financial contribution of the Division of the Humanities of the University of Chicago toward secretarial expenses.

TABLE O F C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

0.1 Purpose and scope 0.2 Organization 1. T H E C O R P U S

1.1 The language 1.2 Dialects 2. THE WRITING SYSTEM

2.0 Preliminary statement 2.1 The script 2.1.1 Graph and referent 2.1.2 Graphotactics 2.2 Elements of the transliteration system 2.2.1. Determinatives 2.2.2 Word signs 2.2.3 Phonetic complements 2.2.4 Syllabic signs 2.2.4.1 Types of syllabic signs 2.2.4.2 V signs 2.2.4.3 CV signs 2.2.4.4 VC signs 2.2.4.5 CVC signs 2.2.4.6 Sequences of signs 2.3 Changes in writing habits 2.4 Problems caused by the writing system 3. PHONOLOGY

5

13

15

15 17 20

20 20 23

23 23 23 24 25 25 26 26 27 28 28 28 29 29 29 29 30 33

8

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3.0 Basic assumptions 3.1 Phonemes 3.1.1 Prosodies 3.1.2 Configurative feature 3.1.3 Phones without phonemic status 3.1.3.1 /s/ 3.1.3.2 [w] 3.1.3.3 [j] 3.1.3.4 Distribution of glides 3.2 Stress 3.3 Distinctive feature analysis 4 . PHONOTACTICS

4.0 Questions to be treated 4.1 Vocalic and consonantal length 4.1.1 Cluster of identical consonants 4.1.1.1 Evidence of the writing 4.1.1.2 Evidence of morphophonemic alternations 4.1.2 Clusters with length 4.1.2.1 Occurring clusters 4.1.2.2 Members of clusters 4.1.2.3 Inventory of clusters 4.1.2.4 Advantages of the notation/:/ 4.1.2.5 Free variation o f / : C/ and /C :/ 4.2 Sequence of two vowels 4.2.1 Boundary between two vowels 4.2.1.1 Indication of boundary by writing conventions 4.2.1.2 Indication of boundary by a syllabic sign 4.2.1.2.1 Between/u/and/a/ 4.2.1.2.2 Between /i/ and /a/ 4.2.1.2.3 Between/a/and/a/ 4.2.1.2.4 Between/a/and/i/(or/e/) 4.2.1.2.5 Between/a/and/u/ 4.2.1.2.6 Between /u/ and /i/ (or /e/) 4.2.1.2.7 Between /u/ and /u/ 4.2.1.2.8 Between /i/ and /i/ 4.2.1.2.9 Between/i/(or/e/) and/u/ 4.2.1.2.10 Between/e/and/i/ 4.2.1.2.11 Between /e/ and /a/ 4.2.1.2.12 Between /a/ and /e/ 4.2.1.2.13 Between /i/ and /e/ 4.2.1.3 Notation of syllable boundary

33 34 35 35 35 35 35 37 37 38 39 42

42 42 43 43 43 43 43 44 44 45 45 46 47 47 47 47 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48 49 49 49 49 49

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4.3 Consonant clusters 4.3.1 Non-occurring clusters 4.3.1.1 Notes on non-occurrence of certain clusters 4.3.1.2 Morphological significance 4.3.2 Distinctive feature analysis 4.4 Resolving of clusters 4.4.1 Two consonants 4.4.1.1 Consonant and length 4.4.2 Three consonants 4.4.2.1 Two consonants and length 4.4.2.2 Consonant and two lengths 4.4.2.3 Positions of the epenthetic vowel 5. MORPHOLOGY

5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3

Morphemes Morphophonemic alternations Inflectional classes The noun 5.3.1 Declensions 5.3.1.1 Inflectional and syntactic distribution of the declensions . 5.3.2 Nominal subclasses 5.3.3 Gender 5.3.4 Number 5.3.4.1 Endings of the singular 5.3.4.1.1 Historical note 5.3.4.2 Endings of the plural 5.3.4.2.1 {u: ~ i:/e:> 5.3.4.2.1.1 Writing of {:} 5.3.4.2.2 {a:nu ~ a:ni} 5.3.4.2.3 {a:ne:} 5.3.4.2.4 {a:n ~ e:n} 5.3.4.2.5 {u:tu ~ u:ti} 5.3.4.2.6 {a:tu ~ a:ti} 5.3.4.3 Distribution 5.3.4.3.1 {u: ~ i:/e:} and {a:nu ~ a:ni} 5.3.4.3.2 {a:nu ~ a:ni} and {a:tu ~ a:ti} 5.3.4.3.3 {u:tu ~ u:ti} 5.3.4.4 Infixed plural 5.3.4.5 Plural morphemes 5.3.4.6 Generative statement of the plural 5.3.5 Case inflection 5.3.5.1 Declension (1)

9

49 50 50 51 51 51 52 52 52 52 52 53 54

54 55 56 56 57 57 58 59 59 60 60 60 60 60 61 61 61 62 62 62 62 63 63 64 65 65 66 66

10

TABLE OF CONTENTS

5.3.5.2 Declension (2) 5.3.5.3 Declension (3) 5.3.5.4 "Adverbial" cases 5.4 The verb 5.4.1 Personals 5.4.1.1 Paradigmatic illustration of personal Set 2, with verb-stem /par:is/ 5.4.2 Mood 5.4.2.1 Ventive 5.4.2.2 Subjunctive 5.4.2.3 Sequence of suffixes 5.4.2.4 Optative and vetitive 5.4.3 Root and stem 5.4.3.1 The root 5.4.3.2 Derived stems 5.4.3.3 Stem determinant 5.4.4 Tenses 5.4.4.1 Stem allomorphs 5.4.4.1.1 A subclass of stem allomorphs 5.4.4.2 Infixed tense morphs 5.4.4.3 Vocalic replacement 5.4.4.3.1 "Irregular" verbs 5.4.4.4 Perfect 5.4.4.4.1 Perfect tense infix 5.4.4.4.2 Perfect tense infix: alternate segmentation . . 5.4.4.5 Recapitulation of tense morphs 5.4.4.6 Tense morphs of Stem IV (N) 5.4.4.7 Tense vowels of derived stems 5.4.5 Weak verbs 5.4.5.1 Roots which contain length 5.4.5.2 Stem determinant 5.4.5.3 Stems with length among their radicals 5.4.5.3.1 Behavior of the radical /:/ in clusters 5.4.5.4 Inflection of Class (1) 5.4.5.5 Class (2) 5.4.5.5.1 A suggested alternate analysis 5.4.5.5.2 "Strong conjugation" 5.4.5.6 Class (3) 5.4.5.6.1 Class (3) stems with stem vowel /a/ 5.4.5.6.2 "Strong conjugation" 5.4.5.7 Divergent verb stems 5.4.5.7.1 "Primae w"

67 67 68 69 69 70 71 71 71 71 71 72 72 73 74 74 76 77 77 78 79 79 79 79 80 80 81 82 83 83 85 86 86 87 89 89 90 91 92 92 93

TABLE OF CONTENTS

5.5

5.6

5.7 5.8 5.9

5.4.5.7.2 "Primae η" 5.4.5.7.3 "Mediae geminatae" 5.4.5.7.4 Recapitulation of the realizations o f / : / . . . . 5.4.5.7.5 Residue 5.4.6 Stative and imperative 5.4.6.1 Stative 5.4.6.2 Imperative Pronouns 5.5.1 Inflectional classes to which "pronouns" belong 5.5.1.1 Substantives 5.5.1.2 Adjectives 5.5.1.3 Indeclinables 5.5.2 Pronominal inflection 5.5.3 Personal pronouns 5.5.3.1 Paradigm of personal pronoun, free form, subject case. . 5.5.3.2 Paradigm of personal pronoun, free form, object case . . 5.5.3.3 Paradigm of personal suffixes 5.5.3.4 Personal pronoun, bound form 5.5.4 Determinative pronoun and relative pronoun Derivation 5.6.1 Prefixes 5.6.2 Infixes 5.6.3 Suffixes Indeclinables Clitics Concord

6. MORPHOPHONEMIC ALTERNATIONS

6.0 Isolating morphophonemic change 6.1 Consonants for which morphophonemic change may be documented . 6.1.1 /m/ 6.1.1.1 C+m 6.1.1.2 m+C 6.1.2 /n/ 6.1.2.1 m+n 6.1.2.2 ( + ) « + C 6.1.3 β / 6.1.4 /t/ 6.1.4.1 C+t 6.1.4.2 + / + C 6.1.4.3 (C)+Vf 6.1.5 /k/

11

93 95 96 96 97 97 97 98 98 98 99 99 99 100 101 101 101 101 102 102 102 103 103 103 104 104 105

105 106 106 106 107 107 107 108 109 110 110 Ill Ill 112

12

TABLE OF CONTENTS

6.2 Non-morphophonemic changes 6.2.1 Historical change 6.2.1.1 Changes from OB to MB 6.2.1.2 Changes from OA to MA 6.2.1.3 Changes from MA to NA 6.2.1.4 Other changes 6.2.2 Dialectal variation 6.2.2.1 Old Babylonian and Mari dialect 6.2.2.2 Assyrian and Babylonian 6.2.2.3 Babylonian (OB, MB, SB) and Neo-Babylonian . . . . 6.2.3 Free variation 6.2.3.1 Free variation of /a/ and /e/ 6.2.3.2 Free variation between voiced and voiceless consonant . 6.2.3.3 Free variation b e t w e e n / m / a n d / n / 6.2.3.4 Free variation between /a/ and /i/ in Assyrian 6.2.3.5 Free variation between is and us before consonant . . . 6.2.3.6 Consonantal metathesis 7. PHONOTACTIC ALTERNATIONS

7.0 Environments that determine alternants 7.1 Before the gender suffix {t} 7.1.1 Pattern 1 7.1.2 Pattern 2 7.1.3 Pattern 3 7.1.4 Pattern 4 7.1.5 Pattern 5 7.1.6 Pattern 6 7.1.7 Before feminine plural 7.1.7.1 Traditional explanation 7.2 Before terminal juncture 7.2.1 Other attestations of terminal forms 7.3 Bound form 7.3.1 An alternant of the bound form of adjectives APPENDIX

1. A generative statement of the case inflection 2. A generative statement of the inflected verb

112 113 113 113 114 114 114 114 114 115 115 115 115 116 116 116 116 117

117 117 117 117 118 119 120 120 121 122 123 124 125 125 128

128 135

GLOSSARY OF AKKADIAN FORMS

137

GLOSSARY OF SELECTED LINGUISTIC TERMS

153

BIBLIOGRAPHY

154

ABBREVIATIONS

ABL AfO AHw. Baghd. Mitt. BiOr Boyer, Contribution CAD CT GAG Idrimi JCS OIP OLZ Or. N.S. RA Syria Szlechter, Tablettes TCL Tukulti-Ninurta Epic VAB Wiseman, Treaties WZJ YOS

R. F. Harper, Assyrian and Babylonian Letters. Archiv für Orientforschung. W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Baghdader Mitteilungen. Bibliotheca Orientalis G. Boyer, Contribution à Γ histoire juridique de la Ire dynastie babylonienne. The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum. W. von Soden, Grundriß der akkadischen Grammatik. S. Smith, The Statue of Idri-mi. Journal of Cuneiform Studies. Oriental Institute Publications. Orientalistische Literaturzeitung. Orientalia, Nova Series. Revue d'assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale. Syria. E. Szlechter, Tablettes juridiques de la Ire Dynastie de Babylone. Textes cunéiformes du Louvre. E. Ebeling, Bruchstücke eines politischen Propagandagedichtes aus einer assyrischen Kanzlei (= Mitteilungen der Altorientalischen Gesellschaft, XII/2). Vorderasiatische Bibliothek. D. J. Wiseman, "The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon", Iraq, 20, Part 1. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Yale Oriental Series, Babylonian Texts.

INTRODUCTION

0.1. PURPOSE AND SCOPE

The purpose of this study is to present a substantial part of the corpus of the Akkadian language in the form of a grammar. This grammar has roughly the subdivisions customary in the field of Assyriology, but its organization has profited from the grammatical models and descriptions evolved in current linguistic research. I have attempted to give a description of the elements of the language - phonemes and morphemes - and the occurring combinations of these elements in terms of categories established from the analysis of Akkadian itself, and not in terms of some grammatical model - such as one or another language of the Semitic family - nor in terms of the grammatical categories of the Assyriologist's native tongue or of some second language acquired by him, such as Latin or Greek, in the humanistic gymnasium. However, I have not attempted to adhere to any particular linguistic theory, and this, in the eyes of many, may constitute a major shortcoming of this study. My reasons for this stem in part from the nature of the corpus of Akkadian texts and of the particular section that I have chosen for this grammar, and in part from the composition of the public to whom such a grammar should speak. By the nature of its content and purpose, this grammar addresses itself to a twofold audience. For the Assyriologist, it offers a series of restatements of language data. Most of the data are well known and, moreover, have been arranged and organized in patterns which are sufficiently contrastive and articulated, but they became overgrown with a tangle of exceptions, diachronic considerations, and descriptions of graphic or phonetic alternations unjustifiedly raised to a phonological level. Some of the data, I believe, are new both in their statement of occurrence and in their interpretation. For the linguist, it tries to present the language data, stated, sometimes alternatively in descriptive and generative terms, in such a way that material hitherto only available in an incomplete collection, or, on the contrary, in an over-atomized form becomes clearly articulated. The grammar does not address itself to the beginner, unless the student be linguistically trained, since it offers neither hard-and-fast rules, nor extensive paradigms, nor the customary handy categories to assimilate the new language to one already known

16

INTRODUCTION

to him, usually Hebrew. Nevertheless, while language teaching is not the primary purpose of this description, its aim is that distributional facts and correlations be stated in such a way that test sentences must be correctly generated; this serves, in the case of Akkadian, not only a pedagogical purpose aimed at the student, but also serves the scholar in need of providing a restoration for a fragmentary passage. Some basic principles, by now elementary in most fields of linguistic study, have been observed in this presentation, with the consequence that secondary or even irrelevant aspects of language description, to which the Assyriologist reader is accustomed, have been deliberately neglected. Thus, while the title specifies the language as "Akkadian" and not as one or another dialect or historical period that this term subsumes, the grammar is essentially synchronic. In that, it adheres to the principles enunciated by F. de Saussure, and followed in the various structural schools of Europe and America, according to which linguistic description should be synchronical and never mix the synchronic and diachronic levels. Indeed, the prerequisite for a diachronic study (historical grammar) is a set of studies on the linguistic systems of the various periods of time and/or the areas (geographical dialects) which are genetically related to the language. There is in fact a greater need for studies on individual dialects and periods of Akkadian than for a comprehensive grammar. 1 Such a grammar actually exists (W. von Soden, Grundriss der Akkadischen Grammatik, 1952, to be cited henceforth as GAG) ; based on a vast collection of material, it cites the regular and irregular forms of each dialect and period, for each grammatical category; it also takes cognizance of exceptions and deviating forms, often however through a set of rules devised to take care of precisely such forms. On the other hand, descriptive studies of dialects are nonexistent or inadequate by linguistic standards. The best dialect study, that of I. J. Gelb on Old Akkadian, is of necessity based on a very limited corpus and has to resort to etymological reconstructions to fill in missing paradigmatic material. All other studies duly note what is divergent from an ideal dialect - Old Babylonian is usually arbitrarily selected to serve - and fail to give a complete list of occurring forms. They illustrate the "Barmecide approach", the apt term of B. Bloch (Language, 21, 112f.) for describing a language by telling what it lacks. In keeping with the Saussurian principle, this study keeps apart the two levels of synchronic description and diachronic analysis, although a purely synchronic approach is made difficult by the nature of the corpus, about which more will be said presently. In the face of the difficulty involved in selecting a dialect that would offer adequate coverage, the corpus on which the study is based is the literary dialect of Akkadian, which will be further defined in Chapter 1. This has been selected as the one which provides the widest differentiation among the most material. Contrasting dialects - the most diverging, or the less well attested, or the less easily elicited ones - are 1

"Als erstes möchte ich da Einzeluntersuchungen nennen, die der Schreibweise, der Grammatik und dem Wortschatz innerhalb der einzelnen Sprachperioden und Dialekte gewidmet sind" (W. von Soden, 1961, p. 47, referring to the main tasks in the field of Akkadian).

INTRODUCTION

17

occasionally adduced; none of the peripheral dialects is included in the primary presentation, but will be used occasionally as illustration when helpful. To have selected a body of texts uniform enough to exclude dialect variation and historic change would have meant to restrict the data to the point that the grammar would have ceased to be useful to anyone but a specialist. My decision to include a large and varied corpus has extended the range of variations beyond that accountable for by distributional or similar criteria. Inevitably then, material which a finer segmentation of the corpus into dialects, genres, and even idiolects, would have sorted out further, appears here lumped together. In such cases, and further, in order to deal with features and contrasts that may be of interest to the reader and may also serve to delimit the dialect described against other dialects of Akkadian, I have added a number of "footnotes" and "asides" ; these are set off in the layout by reduced type. These asides take the place of perhaps desirable short sketches on the other dialects, which, however, it would at this stage be premature to try to present. Etymological considerations are naturally not taken into account, although sometimes they are referred to in comparing the traditional analysis of some forms with the analysis preferred here.

0.2. ORGANIZATION

By way of general introduction, the first two chapters deal with the corpus of Akkadian texts and with the system of writing. The main body of the grammatical treatment that follows is divided into Phonology, Phonotactics, and Morphology. Since these represent convenient chapter headings rather than a hierarchy in the Bloomfieldian sense, morphophonemic alternations are treated after the morphology. The contrast between morphophonemic alternation and other types of phonetic change is illustrated at the end of that chapter. An interesting prospect is to eventually follow up morphophonemics with a generative phonology. Higher units of syntax have not been treated in the framework of this study - apart from a tentative analysis of partial morpheme structure in the Appendix - because I considered the statement of the distribution of the lower rank units as the more urgent task. Eventually of course, and ideally after some agreement has been reached by Assyriologists on the distributional categories here defined, phrase structure should receive similar synchronic treatment, preferably according to a generative model, not because of any inherent virtue of the generative grammars, but mainly because such an approach, more in harmony with the viewpoints prevalent up to now in Assyriological circles, is more likely to enlist the cooperation of philologists in our field. For, as suggested by Chomsky, "It would not be inaccurate to regard the transformational model as a formalization of features implicit in traditional grammars, and to regard these grammars as inexplicit transformational generative grammars" (Chomsky, 1964, p. 918).

18

INTRODUCTION

The chapter headed Phonology is my attempt to classify the information that is available on the basis of the written texts and comparative Semitics, the two factors which permitted the decipherment of Akkadian. Hence, rather than phonemics, it contains the minimum morphophonemics and phonetics gained by combined consideration of the graphic system and Semitic etymology. The chapter headed Morphemics treats more extensively some morpheme classes (nouns, verbs), and rather cursorily only, or not at all, some others which belong rather to the lexicon or to syntax, such as prepositions, adverbs and adverbials, and numerals. In this sense, this study is not really a grammar, but rather a set of statements and restatements. I believe that making these restatements is a necessary first step before a grammar of any dialect can be attempted. Every Assyriologist will be able to quote references to constructions that have not been treated in this grammar. I myself have a collection of such examples, both of morphological and of syntactical oddities, which I have not included because a grammar should not be a collection of oddities. Once a satisfactory distribution of these seeming oddities is found, they have to find their place in the grammar. For the time being, it has seemed to me more important to give a basic framework for the operation of the Akkadian language. The above mentioned comprehensive grammar of Akkadian (GAG), with the many dialect grammars it comprises, and the recent dictionaries (AHw. and CAD) have been extensively consulted as an insurance against significant omissions of both "normal" and "irregular" forms. Hence much of the study takes the shape of restatements of the distributional categories apparent in the GAG and in the dictionaries. New terminology has been avoided in order to permit the use of this book by any Assyriologist who may be inclined to consult it. The current and accepted terms are, however, in many cases more strictly defined. When it was found necessary to introduce new terminology, the current term is cited in parentheses after the new one. Akkadian words - cited in their transcription forms as they appear in the dictionaries, or in transliteration - are normally not accompanied by references when these can be found in the published volumes of the AHw. and the CAD. These two dictionaries now cover the letters A, B, D, E, G, {J, I, J, Κ (partly), Ç, and Z. References are given only for words beginning with letters that have not yet appeared in these two dictionaries, as well as for forms or spellings not cited in the dictionaries. Words not glossed in the text are found in the Glossary on p. 137ff. The categories, lists, and paradigms here given do not claim to be the only possible categories, lists, paradigms, or other divisions applicable to Akkadian ; the solutions, as I have often tried to indicate explicitly, have no claim to uniqueness ; in short, I do not claim to know the truth. I have presented the linguistic facts, trying to take care of all the facts and to show what is significant about them. There might be more economical and more elegant ways of presenting them, and certainly alternate ones that would also do justice to the facts; in fact, I have indicated some of the alternate possibilities in the relevant paragraphs.

INTRODUCTION

19

The structural linguist is asked to bear with polemical or narrative sections intended to rectify or refute views held by a great majority of philologists in the field, even if such polemics seem to him pounding at open doors. Such doors may indeed be still closed to the philologist, not entirely without the fault of the linguist. The aim of this study will be reached if it helps to exorcise some ghosts and, at the same time, serves as usable material to the general linguist who, no doubt, will find many opportunities to refine and further restate the restatements of the present work. Symbols and notations: capital letters are used for conventional, or conventionally identified, signs of the cuneiform syllabary; / / enclose phonemic transcriptions; [ ] enclose phonetic transcriptions, or rather, phonetic approximations; { } enclose morphs or morphemes. Akkadian words or segments not enclosed in one of these pairs normally represent the citation forms currently used by Assyriologists, or a preliminary transcription, and are mostly in italics. Whenever special attention is drawn to the written image of a cited form, the latter is enclosed in < > ; for the same reason values of cuneiform signs are also sometimes enclosed in < ).

1. THE CORPUS

1.1. THE LANGUAGE

Akkadian belongs to the Semitic family of languages and was written in Mesopotamia and the literate countries of the ancient Near East from roughly 2400 B.C. to 100 A.D. It was spoken in Mesopotamia for a considerably shorter period of history, since languages belonging to the same Semitic family were concurrent or competing with it, to an extent that cannot be determined, for precisely the reason that the extant written records are in Akkadian. For this reason, I prefer the term "written language" to that of "dead language" when referring to Akkadian; the former term is not only historically more correct but also indicates the nature of the difficulties that face the linguist, since problems arise not so much from the fact that the language is dead, i.e., has no more living speakers, and hence no more new material can be elicited nor the analyzed material submitted to checks by such speakers, but from the fact that it is known to us only through written records. While a "dead" language may be known, e.g., from tape recordings, and thus subject to phonetic analysis, but have a finite corpus, a written language cannot be subjected to phonetic analysis but its corpus may be expanded by the discovery of more - even if usually of the same kind of - written records. For the peculiar problems confronting the linguist dealing with a written language see, e.g., Mcintosh, 1956, and Chao, 1961.

1.2. DIALECTS

The written records of Akkadian form no continuous stream but fall into isolated groups of texts from areas geographically distant from each other through a period of, as has been mentioned above, over 2,000 years. The compulsion of tripartite division has quite naturally led Assyriologists to divide such groups of texts according to the postulated two main dialects of Akkadian, into Babylonian and Assyrian, Old, Middle, and Neo. Since these divisions soon proved insufficient, while conserving the terms of Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian (OA, MA, NA), and Old, Middle and NeoBabylonian (OB, MB, NB), in recent years the dialects Old Akkadian (OAkk.) - for the oldest periods - and Late Babylonian (LB) - for the Persian and Seleucid periods have been added to the dialect classification, and research has started on the dialect areas of Old Babylonian.

THE CORPUS

21

Obviously, these dialect groups need to be further refined; ideally, material from one or more neighboring sites should be described each in its own right, and when limiting such a dialect in time, one must not leap over gaps of a hundred years or more. Peripheral dialects, and documents written outside the Akkadian language area, must be investigated separately; in fact, the only pertinent linguistic analyses up to the present have been performed on such documents only. The dialect texts include letters, legal and administrative texts, about 30-40 thousand in number, of which, however, no more than 4-5,000 are letters, while the rest contain, apart from recurrent formulas, very little language material. The definition of dialects and their relation to each other present difficulties which should at least be pointed out here. The first question is whether our subdivisions as mentioned above delimit dialects or rather separate languages. I have here included under the name "dialect" not only geographically different forms of speech but also the historical stages of the language or languages considered. Taking the terms dialect and language in their rough definition,11 would be inclined to consider Old Akkadian and Neo-Babylonian as distinct languages. For the chronologically intermediate periods (i.e., roughly 2000 - 600 B.C.), I assume the existence of two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian. This assumption may be considered the statement of negative evidence, i.e., of the fact that there seems to be no convincing way of deriving the earliest attested Assyrian or Babylonian texts from Old Akkadian, nor deriving Neo-Babylonian from the preceding stages of Babylonian without admitting at least considerable interference from other Semitic languages. Outside the requirements for a definition of a geographical dialect area fall those texts that are customarily called "literary" which originated at an earlier, the Old Babylonian and post-Old Babylonian, period, and have survived either in both Old Babylonian and late copies, or, for the great majority, in late copies only. While the writing habits changed greatly in the interval (see 2.3), the late copies usually preserve rather exactly the tenor of the original text; the slight differences must reflect phonetic, perhaps even phonemic change, and some change in morphology which, of course, may conceal much more far-reaching historical change. Since, however, the wording of such texts is changed in very rare and exceptional cases only, we have no answer to the question whether such "literary" texts still represent a language intelligible to persons other than the ancient scholars who copied them, nor a clue to the relation they may have had to the language spoken. The dialect of these "literary" texts has been, and will here be termed, Standard Babylonian (SB); whatever the relation of such texts may have been to the spoken language at any given period, they represent a legitimate corpus for linguistic analysis. The number of lines of SB texts may be estimated at about 1

"The most spectacular and best known (linguistic variation) is that between geographical forms of speech. When the differences are small, these are known as dialects. When larger, they are known as languages. However, no exact definition of these two terms is feasible" (Gleason, 1961, 398).

22

THE CORPUS

40 thousand, or twice that of the Iliad and the Odyssey. A great many of these exist in several duplicates. This corpus should be kept separate from other dialects that can be circumscribed in time and geographically, which reflect the language of a scribal center and which themselves may or may not be integrated into another kind of rigid transmission, such as legal, economic, and administrative texts. It is only in private letters - predominantly from the OA, OB, NB, and NA periods - that some evidence can be found for the spoken language of an area at a given time. Another group of texts, customarily included in "Standard Babylonian", have again to be analyzed in a different way : these are the reports of named and known Assyrian and Babylonian kings that can thus easily be dated but that use the literary dialect and are clearly modeled after those of their predecessors in style, without being just slavish copies of them. Reports on the military achievements and building activities of the Assyrian and Babylonian kings written at their courts have to be grouped according to their literary models - sometimes a Sumerian one - with due consideration given to the efforts of the sometimes very ingenious authors to introduce novelty and variety in this "court-style" by a new use or combination of an old phrase. Whether such creativity of individual scribes at royal courts should be taken as antiquarian interest, literary flair, or conscious language reform has to await further investigation based on the above-sketched lines. Again, as any of the distinct parts of the corpus enumerated above, these written records can likewise be adduced for language description if their specific character is constantly borne in mind.

2. THE WRITING SYSTEM

2.0. PRELIMINARY STATEMENT

The following aperçu deals with the elements of the writing system, their preferred combinations and limitations. It is intended partly as preliminaries to some statements made in the section on phonology, and partly as a general statement of the principles which I follow in my linguistic interpretation of the texts. It does not constitute a "graphology" or "graphemics", the theoretical foundations of which are very scant yet and have not been applied to the writing of Akkadian. At this stage it is, however, important to stress the difference between graphs, the elements of the writing system, and their referents; the two are often loosely used one for the other. Ideally, we should be speaking only in terms of allographs, morphographs, etc. ; if we wish to avoid the tedious encumbrance of such a terminology and use the terms customary in grammatical analysis, we must at least be aware that we are using a shortcut.

2.1. THE SCRIPT

The written records of Akkadian make use of the cuneiform writing system, the graphs of which, when Akkadian texts begin to be written in it, are arranged in horizontal lines progressing from left to right (with the notable exception of the stela with the Code of Hammurapi).

2.1.1. Graph and referent A graph in the cuneiform writing system is a cluster of wedges imprinted in clay, or imitations of such imprints in other materials, which are usually set off by a space at the left and the right. Such a graph is called, in Assyriological parlance, a "sign" (as graphs in the Chinese system are called "characters"). The referent of the sign in the language for the writing of which it is used is called its "value". (Thus there are "Sumerian values", "Akkadian values", etc.) The referent or "value" of a graph is a text segment statable as a sequence of one or more phones. A text stated as a sequence of values is called "transliteration". This definition - which is not necessarily cotermin-

24

THE WRITING SYSTEM

ous with other definitions of transliteration used by Assyriologists1 - is of importance for the following, wherein we shall speak of the elements of the system called transliteration and not of the system of writing proper. A configuration of wedges which is the graph is not normally a compound of constituent configurations. E.g., the graph PA plus the graph IB do not equal a graph PA + IB but the graph SAB. This statement is necessary because some graphs (those corresponding to some of our numerals) are indeed compounds of their constituents, and also because some graphs have been considered by the ancient scribes as compounds of some other graphs; this is evidenced partly by the scribes' analysis of such graphs into two or more components in the sign lists, and partly by the names there given to such graphs (see Christian, 1913). Since a graph is not normally a compound of constituents, obviously the constituents of a graph have no relation to the constituents of the referent ("value") ; this may be proven by the fact that allographs - or historical diagraphs - of the same graph are not necessarily decomposed into similar constituents. Such ancient learned constituent analysis is different from the case of the so-called ligatures, which are rare instances of graphs whose constituents have a relation to the constituents of the value; this relation is sometimes indicated in the transliteration practiced by a +-sign instead of a hyphen in connecting the constituents of the value. Such ligatures are the sign IA (ligature of I + A with non-syllabic i, i.e., a monosyllabic value), and such ligatures as i+na, as+sum, as+sur, as well as ligatures with the numeral 1: 1 +en, and 1+ei, and with determinatives (see 2.2.1), such as the Sumerogram DINGIR+EN.

2.1.2. Graphotactics The arrangement and the distribution of the graphs (graphotactics) express linguistic information. The distribution of the graphs segments the written utterance into smaller units, in a way somewhat comparable to punctuation marks. The units thus gained we identify with linguistic units, with the word as the lowest level; what is important here is the fact that units below the rank of word are not segmentable from the writing system as it has been analyzed so far. The largest unit is the line which is normally coextensive with a clause or a group of clauses ; a line may or may not be coextensive with a sentence. Specifically, a line in a literary text does not contain a group less than a clause; if there is no room on the line for the whole clause, the next line is indented. This holds for the literary dialect ; there are exceptions, even in SB royal inscriptions, but mostly in letters, and in texts written in peripheral areas. A line on a tablet inscribed with a letter often contains 1

For instance: "Transliteration is a form of graphic transfer wherein one sign (or a combination of alphabetic signs and artificial symbols) stands for each character of the writing we are recording" (Gelb, 1948, 2).

THE WRITING SYSTEM

25

less than a clause, and a line on a peripheral tablet inscribed with a literary text may contain part of one clause and part of the next clause ("enjambement"). The smallest unit is the word. A graphemic word is one or more graphs the first and last of which at times co-occur with the beginning and the end of a line respectively. In other words, a word as defined by graph-arrangement is not divided between two lines, and in this definition stands for the grammatical unit: base plus affixes or compound. Again, exceptions occur, mostly in letters, when the suffix morph or morphs consisting of several graphs may run on into the next line ("rejet"). Selection in the occurrence of graphs also determines words. Thus, word final is often marked by occurrence of a graph which normally occurs in word final only, e.g., su, and some others which rarely occur in other than word final, e.g., turn, kám, and conversely, word initial is marked by the absence of such graphs or of other graphs that do not occur in word initial, i.e., u. A word consisting of one graph is sometimes so identified by the occurrence of a special graph, or graph sequence, e.g., ù {u}, or lu-u {lu} (however, the graph la which corresponds to the word {la} is identified in some dialects only by the sequence la-a). Additional information is sometimes provided by the properties of a written document (writing material, size and shape) ; these normally provide a rough indication of the type of its content (letter, royal annals, literary text, and so forth), of its geographical situation, and of the time when it was written. In marginal cases, the configuration of a given graph may carry a direct semantic reference. Thus, numerals written with horizontal wedges refer to particular units of volume, and numerals written with vertical wedges refer either to other units of volume or to things counted. These considerations however shall not concern us here. 2.2. ELEMENTS OF THE TRANSLITERATION SYSTEM

The system of transliteration as defined above is a composite system in two respects: through the elements' two-fold relation to the written utterance, and through the diversity of the elements themselves.

2.2.1. Determinatives First, some elements correspond to text segments which have a reference in the phonological system, i.e., we assume that they formed part of the utterance, were pronounced, while other elements correspond to text segments which have no reference in the phonological system, i.e., were not pronounced. The referential status of the latter is that of an "ideogram", inasmuch as they directly represent meaning. Their property is that of a graphic affix - pre- or suffix - which marks form-classes. Hence, the usual names "determinative", which more properly refers to their graphic affix property, and "se-

26

THE WRITING SYSTEM

mantic indicator", which more properly refers to their ideogram status, each describe one of their aspects. I would also suggest the term "class indicator" as describing their property of marking form-classes, in the manner of a "written inflection". It has not yet been determined what kind of inflection is manifested by this "written inflection", but such an investigation should form the basis of a segmentation of the corpus in the analysis of the writing system itself. Secondly, we may divide the elements of the system by the ways in which they match text segments. Their usual division is into syllabic signs (syllabograms) and word signs (logograms). These may be considered two sub-systems.

2.2.2. Word signs The word signs (logograms) occurring in Akkadian texts are mono- or polysyllabic words or phrases borrowed from texts written in Sumerian, the language for which this writing system is first attested. Logograms are signs which have Sumerian graphic etymologies and also represent text segments, but they represent Akkadian phonic material only insofar as such is substituted for them, and in consequence have to be excluded from the phonological and morphophonemic analysis. Note that the class indicators are also word signs which have Sumerian graphic etymologies, but, although they may be homographous with logograms, they do not have the further morphemic references of logograms.

2.2.3. Phonetic complements The phonetic complements or phonetic indicators are a type of graphic affixes whose reference may be identified as morphophonemic. They occur with logograms in the following way: When a word sign (logogram), i.e., a Sumerian word, occurs in an Akkadian context, it is often followed by a sign whose value usually consists of the last consonant of the corresponding Akkadian word (i.e., the translation word) and of a vowel, sometimes of yet another consonant, i.e., by a CV or CVC sign; this sign normally represents the paradigmatic ending of the word required by the Akkadian construction. This syllabic sign, in contrast to the preceding logogram which is customarily romanized in Roman capitals, is customarily romanized in italics just as other Akkadian text-segments, and connected to the preceding word sign by a hyphen, or, if according to another custom of transliteration the logogram is transcribed in Akkadian and thus romanized in lower case italics, the "phonetic complement" is set after it raised one half line: e.g., KI-tim or er?etirntim, 'earth'; some transliterate even erpeti" by giving the sign TIM the syllabic value "ti". However, two diachronic stages have to be distinguished : In the earlier periods, including OB, the sign groups A.SÀlum, A.SÀ-Zaw and A.ÈÀ-lim for instance are to be read respectively eqlum, eqlam and

THE WRITING SYSTEM

27

eqlim, and the syllabic sign after A.SÀ indicates the grammatical ending of the word, as well as the fact that the preceding sign or sign complex is to be read in Akkadian, not in Sumerian. In later periods, the syllabic sign appears in a form - usually in one or two only - that does not correspond morphophonemically to the grammatical function of the word. Thus, the signs KI-tim (more rarely Kl-tum) stand for any of the following forms of the word {ersetu} : ersetu, er$eta, erseti·, the signs ΑΝ-ιί or AN-e stand for the forms Samû or samé, interchangeably; here the phonetic complement indicates that the graph adjacent to the left is to be read in Akkadian, but no longer indicates the grammatical ending of the word. However, it still indicates which lexeme is to be selected from among the several Akkadian correspondences (translations) of the Sumerian word, and thus such writings as KI-tim, AN-« indicate that {ersetu} is to be selected rather than {itti} or {asar} for KI, {samû} rather than {ilu} for AN. Thus, the phonetic complement or phonetic indicator (Gelb, 1948, 104f.) gives in all periods (1) morph information, namely directions (a) to select an Akkadian morph and (b) which morph to select, i.e., the morphophonemics of the adjacent graph, and (2) suffix information, namely (a) it fixes a suffix position, i.e., the occurrence of a suffix, (b) it indicates the suffix set, and (c) in the earlier periods, it specifies the morphophonemics of the suffix. Hence it is a graphic affix with morphophonemic reference. This clarification is necessary in order to avoid drawing phonological or morphological conclusions from a feature that is peculiar to the writing system. For example, one is not permitted to say that the sign TIM has the reading -ti because it is appended to the word to be read erpeti at a period when the final /m/ of the nominal case-inflection had disappeared (see 6.2.1.1); nor is one permitted to say, on this basis alone, that, because the sign complex KI-//m also stands for ersetu, after a certain date the case endings all coalesced in a "schwa" (which for the Orientalist often is a synonym of "indistinct vowel"), or that final vowels were "dropped". For a discussion of this problem see below 5.3.5.1.

2.2.4. Syllabic signs Syllabic sign here, as in comparable writing systems, is used in a special technical sense (see Gleason, 1961 p. 414); syllabic signs match, that is, their values are expressed in terms of, syllables or syllable segments. A border case is that when a syllable consists of a single vowel, and in this case only is the sign "alphabetic". There is no sign whose referent is less than a phoneme, although some graphs represent the configurative mark "syllable boundary" (see 3.1.2). The values of syllabic signs, i.e., statements of text segments in terms of phones, have been established, in the process of the decipherment of the cuneiform writing, by combined consideration of the graphic system - the first values of which were given with the help of bilingual texts (including proper names found both in cuneiform writing and other known writing systems, e.g., Old Persian, Greek, Hebrew) - and Semitic

28

THE W R I T I N G SYSTEM

etymology. Since Akkadian was recognized to be a Semitic language, phonemes known in other Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, etc., were expected to be found in Akkadian too. For the implications of this assumption, see below, 3.0. The retracing of the procedure which led to the assignment of values to signs over more than a hundred years of decipherment cannot be attempted here; what seems to have been a trial-and-error method continues to be applied as various refinements are brought into the transliteration system. 2.2.4.1. Types of syllabic signs. The elements of the syllabic sub-system are signs representing vowel (V) alone, or vowel and consonant (VC, CV, and CVC). (VCV and CVCV values given to some signs are precisely the result of applying morphological - or morphophonemic - rules to the writing system.2) 2.2.4.2. V signs. Of V signs, there is one each for a, e, and i, but three for u. The homophonous usigns have been taken over from Sumerian, and apart from the OAkk. period when one of these may have represented the syllable /ju/ in word-initial, these are in fact homophonous though not always interchangeably used, as they became stabilized in certain writing habits. 2.2.4.3. CV signs. The distribution of CV signs is uneven. For some consonants (t, s), there is a sign each for the syllables Ca, Ce, Ci and Cu ; for others (ρ, d, t, k, g, q, s, z, s, h, 1, r) there is only one sign for the syllables Ce/i (e.g., left, re/i, ge/i, etc.); in still other cases, although there exist two different signs for Ce and Ci syllables, only one of them is used in one dialect, or the use of one is restricted (ne/ni, me¡mi, be/bi). There is only one sign for any of the vowels that may occur with the two "semi-vowels" [w, j] and the glottal stop [?], (i.e., wV may be theoretically read [wa, we, wi, wu], etc.); for these see below, 3.1.3. Conversely, as to CV signs in which the vowel is the same, there are sometimes less, sometimes more signs than correspond to the phoneme inventory. In the case of homophonous signs - differentiated in the transliteration by diacritics - such as su and sú, the distribution is conditioned by scribal habits, such as, in the mentioned case, the second is normally used in word final, and not (although exceptions occur) in word initial. On the other hand, while some signs can be grouped into pairs which differ in one phonological feature only, such as voice, other CV signs are polyvalent in this respect: For example, there is a different sign for each of the syllables /ba/ and /pa/, /bi/ and /pi/, but one sign only for both /bu/ and /pu/. Another asymmetry resulted in the dental and velar row: In Old Babylonian there were two signs, ka and ga, for « Such values have been suggested for the NA dialect by Deller, Or., N.S., 31 (1962), 7-26 and 186196.

THE WRITING SYSTEM

29

writing the three k-row consonants followed by the vowel a, i.e., the syllables /ka/, /ga/, and /qa/; similarly, there were two signs, ta and da, for writing the three /-row consonants followed by the vowel a, i.e., the syllables /ta/, /da/, and /ta/. To the first pair a third sign, qa, was added in the course of the centuries, thus providing one sign each for the syllables /ka/, /ga/, and /qa/, but no third sign was added to the pair ta and da ; nevertheless we continue to interpret the sign ta as representing the phonemic sequence /ta/, or /ta/, transliterated as ta or tá respectively, and the sign da as representing the phonemic sequence /da/ or /ta/, transliterated as da or ta respectively, depending on etymological or morphophonemic considerations. 2.2.4.4. VC signs. Among the VC signs, most iC signs can also be read eC, with the exception of is, il and in, since there exist the signs es, el, en. Moreover, there is only one VC sign - including homophones having a traditionally restricted distribution, such as as and ás, ar and ár, at and at - for any syllable whether the final consonant is voiced, voiceless, or "emphatic". In other words, the oppositions voiced vs. voiceless vs. emphatic are neutralized in VC signs, e.g., in the signs ad/t/t (also ádltjt), ab/p, ig¡k¡q, iz/s/s, uz/s/?, etc. 2.2.4.5. C VC signs. CVC signs are less evenly distributed; the oppositions voiced/voiceless or voiced/ emphatic, or all three, are again neutralized for the final C, and in some signs also for the initial C, as in d/tan, d/t/tal, b/pan, d/t/tim, b/pal, djtir, z/sum, g/k/qir, etc. 2.2.4.6. Sequences of signs. A sign sequence CV^VjC may be equivalent to a sign CVXC when such a sign is available in the graphic system, and the sign sequences CV 1 -V 1 and Vj-VjC may be equivalent to one sign CVX and VjC. No other sign sequence (e.g., VC-CV(C), CVCV(C), CVi-VüQ is equivalent to a sign CVC, i.e., represents less than two syllables, and the sequences first mentioned may also represent two syllables, see below 4.2ff. The writing habits are such that within one word, sequences of (C)V-CV-CV signs or of (C)V-VC-CV-VC signs occur, but not normally sequences of (C)VC-VC-VC signs. The latter restriction is of importance for phonology and morphology, see below, 3.1.2 and 4.2.1.1. 2.3. CHANGES IN WRITING HABITS

The changes in the writing system between early texts (partly including OB) and later texts (OB and later) mentioned in 1.2 manifest themselves not only in such material features as the sign forms, or the introduction of new signs in the form of ligatures or by differentiation by means of diacritics (V? and V£f), or of new values - such as addition to or restriction of the polysemy of a particular sign - or the increasing use of

30

THE WRITING SYSTEM

CVC signs as well as a more frequent use of word signs, but also in important innovations in writing habits which affect the "fit" of the system. Innovations that can be dated to the post-Old Babylonian period, or that became current then, are : (a) Long consonants are indicated by (C)VC 1 -C 1 V graphs (and not as before by (C)V-CjV graphs) ; it is to be remembered that the doubling of the consonant element is not visual, as the above symbolization might suggest; (b) A tendency of treating components of groups - compounds or other stressunits - as free forms (i.e., decrease of sandhi-writings) ; (c) Lack of indication of the morphophonemic alternant of the "head" or free lexical item element of a paradigmatic form, more observable in nouns than in verbs; (d) Technical texts (medical, pharmaceutical, divination texts) often use a group of graphs that represent either the free form or an invariable bound form of a word, most likely for quick visual identification, with presumably only secondary reference to the paradigmatic form; e.g., they write mar-ha?, tak-fir, tar-kas, tal-pap, etc., for items whose full phonological form is /marhasV/ i.e., marhafu, marhasa, marhaçi, /takçitrV/, /tarak:as/, /talap:ap/, etc.

2.4. PROBLEMS CAUSED BY THE WRITING SYSTEM

The asymmetry of the writing system is of course the legacy of the Sumerian, or presumably even of the Pre-Sumerian language which was first reduced to writing in cuneiform. Signs homophonous in Akkadian may have been distinctive in Sumerian; polyvalence often resulted from the adoption for the same sign of both its Sumerian word-value and its Akkadian translation value. Since the writing system used by the Sumerians was not adequate to express distinctions significant in their own language - which makes one suspect that this system was not originally invented to write Sumerian, see e.g., Dávid, 1945, 13ff. - the inadequacy, or lack of "fit", remained and increased when it was borrowed by the Akkadians, both in the direction of overdifferentiation and of underdifferentiation. Palliatives such as scribal conventions and later secondary differentiations of signs to introduce into the writing differences pertinent in the language never reached a point where it could be said that every combination of phonemes found expression in the writing. While it is well known that the writing system was not designed for Akkadian, it is not generally accepted that it was not designed for Sumerian either. Statements found in several articles on the subject which, after reconstructing the Sumerian phonology from the writing system, and the Akkadian phonology from the same writing system, find that the two phonological systems are indeed very close, only point up the inadequacy of the writing system for either language. It seems to me that the more one is able to match the phonemes - and a fortiori, the phones - of the two languages on the basis of the common writing system, the less likely it becomes that there was an original fit between Sumerian writing and Sumerian language. Hence the assumption

THE WRITING SYSTEM

31

- in my mind unwarranted - of a quasi-perfect fit involving two languages as different as Sumerian and Akkadian can only indicate that there is a fit with neither. When, at the time of the decipherment, many values assigned to the syllabic signs were based on the Semitic etymology of the words, a certain arbitrariness was introduced into the system of transcription from which Assyriology, in spite of many efforts to remedy this, cannot be completely freed. The so often alleged polyphony and homophony of the syllabary is to a large extent due to lack of rigor in the system of transliteration. In recent years it has been recognized and advocated - especially by I. J. Gelb, see e.g., Gelb, 1952,108f. - that there is little, if any, polyphony in the syllabary of any given period. The syllabary of W. von Soden (von Soden, 1948) is the first systematic attempt to limit certain syllabic values to a given dialect. However, the inherent falsification that results from applying etymological correspondences and a priori established, normative grammatical rules, i.e., interpretation before the facts have been collected, in assigning syllabic - and hence phonemic - values to the signs of the syllabary has not only not been corrected, but has not even been admitted. In truth, the restrictions and refinements introduced by the above-mentioned scholars and others are only palliative in effect, and Assyriologists still seem to move in a vicious circle from grammar to transcription to grammar and so forth. The origin of all this confusion seems to be the historical accident that the first transliterated - or deciphered - texts were Assyrian royal inscriptions written around 1000 B.C. and later; the values ascertained from these texts were then transferred to texts written about 1000 years earlier, in a less differentiated system of writing. Since these earlier, Old Babylonian, texts soon were taken to represent an "unspoiled" - often called "classical" - period of the language, syllabic values for which no special sign existed in the OB system of writing were assigned to some Old Babylonian signs, and these secondarily posited values could in turn conveniently be substituted in the later texts whenever etymology necessitated the positing of a consonant or vowel which had not been included in the reading of the particular sign when originally assigned its syllabic value. As peripheral texts - written by Hittites, Hurrians, or other non-Akkadian speakers - were discovered, further new values came to be assigned to the signs, when the use of diverging sets of signs only indicated the inability of the foreign speakers to differentiate Akkadian phonemes, or their adherence to a scribal tradition transmitted through foreign channels. Such are the reasons for which a great number of homophones have been introduced into the syllabary by the decipherers, and for which the unaware observer thinks that the Assyrian texts give a more exact transcription of the language than the Old Babylonian ones. No systematic attempt has as yet been made to revise the entire system of transcription; the efforts of some scholars to adhere rather to the principles of the writing system than to a normative grammar have been greeted with derision and often construed as a lack of knowledge of the grammar. Two roads are open to the Assyriologist: to observe in his transliteration only the differences overtly expressed by the writing system, or to expand the values of signs by

32

THE WRITING SYSTEM

introducing the maximum number of differentiations for one sign within the limits set by the system. As an example : he may choose to transliterate the sign BU always bu, whether the etymology requires bu or pu. On the other hand, he may give any of the following values to the sign DI (with the exception of OA texts) : di, de, ti, (e; or to the sign IB the values ib, ip, eb, ep ; even to the sign GI the values gi, ge, and (the less frequent values) qì, qè. All these remain within the possibilities of the system (see above, 2.4.2 and 2.4.3). However, violence is done to the system itself if the syllabic value se20 is assigned to the sign Si when there is, and the texts in fact use, the available sign SE to write this syllable. To a ridiculous extreme go those who go ad absurdum in assigning "phonetically required" values to signs used in a peripheral, non-Akkadian scribal center, in order to change this particular, peripheral, system, conditioned by the language of the area, into a system consistent with Akkadian phonology. The system of transliteration presently current seems rather adequate to its users, but is harmful in obscuring some points of phonology and morphology. These points are : distinction between the phonemes3 /e/ and /i/ and in consequence the morphemes into which one or the other enters; the distribution of voiced, voiceless, and emphatic sibilants and of the palatal groove fricative /§/; the distribution of vocalic and consonantal length; the morphemic shape of endings (verbal or nominal suffixes). This rather short list does not look unduly dangerous to affect the description of the language; it will look different, however, if we state the positive versus the negative: not affected by our present system of transliteration are: the vowels /a/ and /u/; the consonants /m, n, 1, r, ? and h/; consonantal prefixes; most, but not all, /s/ and sibilants in syllable initial (sa, si/e, su; zi, zu; ?u; but ambiguous za — ça, zum = sum, zìi = sar = sar, sib = sib, etc.) ; some stops in syllable initial. There are thus grave uncertainties, or rather a large scope for subjective interpretation of ambiguities ; not to mention in this connection the fact that it is customary to blame the ancient scribe for any dissonant form that shocks the sense of symmetry of the grammarian and contradicts the norms he has established. Therefore, every new look at the structure of Akkadian ought to start with a reconsideration of the accepted system of transliteration. Nevertheless, this study must forego a re-investigation of the writing system, in spite of the fact that when the foregoing has been said, such an investigation must seem as necessary for a grammatical study as phonetics before establishing the phonemic system of a language. Work with the material has shown that the errors resulting from the arbitrariness of the system of transcription correct themselves; in case of doubt, a minimal range of distinctiveness has been preferred over the maximal distinctiveness current in the field.

For the phonemes here cited in phonemic notation, see 3.1.

3. PHONOLOGY

3.0. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

As mentioned in 2.2.4, the syllabic values by which Akkadian text segments are represented in the transliteration are composed of phonemes whose general classification was established by Semitic etymology, although, of course, their phonetic identities cannot be recaptured. Further refinements among members of a class with a similar component, as, e.g., dentals, sibilants, high vowels, depend on the considerations applied in eliciting them from the contrasts supplied by the writing system. As stated in 2.4, I follow the principle of preferring a minimal range of distinctiveness. This principle contrasts with current practice in Akkadian phonology, which often moves on the allophonic level. This is evidenced not by the absence of the term "phoneme", because the terms used ("sounds", "Laute", "Sprachlaute"), following the accepted usage of the neogrammarians, are to be understood as standing approximately for "phoneme" ; rather, the allophonic level of work on Akkadian is apparent from the increasing number of studies in recent years which "discover" another and yet another "sound" in Akkadian. These may be "intermediate" vowels such as ö, ü, o, ä (i.e., ae) or consonants such as ?, g (the voiced counterparts of the voiceless emphatics ç, q), interdental spirants, laryngeals, and other consonants usually regarded as part of the Proto-Semitic consonantal stock. The reasons for this practice lie in two tacit assumptions. One regards the writing system, the other general Semitics. With regard to Semitics, it is assumed that since Akkadian is the oldest recorded Semitic language, it must contain, or have once contained, all sounds that comparative linguistics has posited for Proto-Semitic. An exception is made for the common Semitic laryngeals, it being accepted that the number of these has been reduced due to the influence of the substratum language, in this case, Sumerian.1 The hitherto accepted theory that Proto-Semitic interdentals were equally 1

" . . . im Akkadischen [sind] infolge der Substratwirkung des Sumerischen die allgemeinsemitischen Laryngallaute [h], ßi], ['] und [g] geschwunden, einer Substratwirkung, der auch noch das Aramäische auf babylonischem Boden unterlegen ist, der sich erst das Arabische, das als die Sprache einer Herrenschicht nach Babylonien gekommen ist, hat entziehen können" (Falkenstein, Genova, N.S., VIII, 303f.).—"Das Akkadische macht abgesehen von dem schon erwähnten Laryngalschwund und der Verschiebung der dentalen Spiranten zu Zischlauten den Eindruck einer verhältnismässig 'konservativen' semitischen Sprache" (ibid., p. 305).

34

PHONOLOGY

"lost" in Akkadian is nowadays being modified by the positing of these sounds for at least some dialects of Akkadian.2 The other assumption, with regard to the writing system, is, paradoxically, that, while the system of writing is permitted to operate with homophonous signs, the grammarians seem to exclude the possibility of homophonous morphemes. Where such seemed to emerge through the customary system of transliteration, it was found expedient to substitute for one of the values a value which differs only in one phonetically similar consonant. This phonetically similar consonant, which is then usually considered a different phoneme, serves then as the minimal difference between the two homophonous - or "phonetically similar" - morphs, and the road is open to prove the existence of the particular phoneme by the "minimal pair" thus generated. Another device substitutes /e/ for /i/ in the polyvalent Ce/i syllable to arrive at two morphs. On the other hand, wherever there appears a spelling that would seem to indicate a phonetic difference (b for p, e.g.) the transcription of the morpheme is not changed, but instead the unusual sign, e.g., BA is assigned a value homophonous with that of the usual one, PA (i.e., ρά for ba), so that the number of homophonous signs keeps increasing as new texts from yet little known regions and dialects are being published. In extreme cases, where the phonetic similarity seems to be insufficient, the spelling is attributed to an error of the scribe. Instead of citing examples, I can simply refer to the sign lists (the standard, and comparatively sober, sign list is von Soden, 1948), to illustrate this overgrowth of homophonous signs. The above sketched circular methods are also used either to describe, or to obscure, phonetic change, as the case may be. This question will be further dealt with in the section of morphophonemic alternations (Chapter 6). 3.1. P H O N E M E S

The literary (also the OB) dialect of Akkadian has the following phonemes: the stops /b, p, d, t, t, g, k, q/, the spirants /z, s, s, S, 1)/, the sonants /m, n, r, 1/, the vowels /a, e, u, i/. labial dental groove-alveolar velar palatal tongue-base voiceless voiced pharyngealized* nasal

2

Ρ b

m

t d

s ζ

k g

t

s

q

s

h

η

Cf., e.g.: "Die neuen Beispiele lassen sich ohne die Annahme eines gesprochenen / in bestimmten Fällen im späten Sumerischen wie im Akkadischen schwer erklären" (W. von Soden, AfO, 18, 120; cf. id. BiOr, 19, 150f.).

PHONOLOGY

35

Vowels :

i u e a For a distinctive feature analysis see 3.3.

* The phonemes transcribed t, q, and s are the so-called "emphatics", phonetically either velarized or pharyngealized stops and spirants.

3.1.1. Prosodies The prosodies include length, which is distinctive (phonemic), hereafter noted /:/ after V(owel) or C(onsonant), i.e., /V:/ and /C:/, see 4.1.1, and stress, which is non-distinctive, see 3.2. 3.1.2. Configurative feature On the basis of writing habits, a configurative feature similar to plus juncture e.g., in English an aim vs. a name can be established. This feature is expressed in the writing either by a sequence of syllabic signs VC VC (see 2.2.4.6), or by the so-called aleph-sign ?V (glottal stop). The plus juncture, similarly as in English, demarcates the word boundary but sometimes, very rarely, is incorporated in some lexical items as an internal juncture, cf., e.g., English /pléy+tòw/ for written . The difference in comparison to English is that internally juncture occurs only before a vowel not preceded by another one, e.g. /sum+ud/, /is+al/, etc., see Reiner, 1964, 169.

3.1.3. Phones without phonemic status At the OB period the language had already lost two phonemes that are to be assumed for previous periods : /s/ and /w/. The glottal stop [?], formerly possibly also a phoneme, has merged in SB with juncture in such forms as /§um+ud/, i.e., , /i§+al/, i.e., ; in other positions, the same way as the glides [w] and [j], it is an allophone of the zero phoneme. That [w, j, ?] are non-phonemic and omissible is also apparent from the fact that the signs used for their writing , ,