2 posts tagged “akkadian”

I've written about vocalised in Arabic and how this can almost impossible represent the stage of language as it is written. Especially the case endings seem to have not existed in Arabic when the orthography as we know it now was brought into use.

In fact, I believe that the noun cases and nunation are most likely a result of a highly ritualistic language a 'high' language so to speak that was much closer to proto-semitic than the actual Arabic language. I believe that at the time Hebrew and Arabic split, Arabic can't have had case forms in the way we see them today. That's quite a claim, but let me elaborate.

Arabic and Hebrew are close in some ways and very divergent in others. Arabic broken plurals have run rampant for example. Nevertheless the amount of similar shifts that they seem to have undergone after Arabic lost it's noun endings and nunation is so absurdly similar to Hebrew that it's almost as if history redid some shifts it had lying around for those funny Semitic languages anyway.

I don't believe that's the case, I believe endings and nunation must have disappeared and then Arabic and Hebrew (and probably aramaic and a bunch of other languages of which I have too little knowledge) underwent a bunch of common changes.

Let's give some examples. Hebrew masculine plural ending is  -īm Arabic masculine plural is nom. -ūna gen./acc. -īna. As we can see a shift of m to n occurred and word final -a was lost. in hebrew while it didn't in Arabic. This makes little sense to me. But now if we look at the 'pausal' and modern pronunciation of these two endings of Arabic we find it without an -a. -ūn/-īn The shift of word final m > n is much more natural than m > n between a long vowel and a.

This word final m > n shift is actually also found in the nunation, which in proto-semitic must have been mimation. I call ritualistic endings that were not part of the real language. But they must have been in use in some contexts. And if a language gets a constraint of final m turning to n it's quite likely that it will abide to this.

But that's just one of many more things I wanted to show. Another point is the loss of the final *t in feminines in both Arabic and Hebrew. These days Arabic has a etymological ة which is simply a h with the dots of a t over it. But dots are a more recent innovation thus only an h was used. The exact same spelling Hebrew uses to write feminines.

The situation is somewhat different though, hebrew always uses a he to write long final a's, while in arabic this orthography is quite restricted. Nevertheless it makes no sense for an Arab to writen a word with a final h if it was pronounced -atun or even -at. Why not write a t? I believe that Arabic and Hebrew both had final *-at that was then simplified to *-a which was later even lengthened in Hebrew to ā.

The accusative indefinite singular -an in Arabic can not be old, unless you feel like an alif is a perfectly logical letter to write -an instead of -ā you'll surely agree. This is not that controversial, it's generally accepted that in Old-Arabic the accusative indefinite singular was probably pronounced -ā and that the -an was reintroduced by analogy of the other cases. I've been told, and I hope someone will back this up, that in colloquial dialects -ā is still the normal pronunciation of the accusative. I personally am unsure whether for Proto-Semitic -an or -ā is reconstruced. But Akkadian has -am. So I guess the development of -ā is a later feature. A feature that Arabic shares with... You guess it, Hebrew!

Now I can hear you guys saying: aha! you made a mistake! And it's true there's no true accusative in Hebrew, but there are some petrified forms. For example BBLH or bāḇĕlā means  'towards Babylon'. Once again then a common feature of Hebrew and Arabic.

This leaves us with one major issue of course. HOW can Arabic have a ritualistic language so much more archaic than the spoken languages alive simultaneously. I'd suggest you go to Egypt, and watch al-jazira while listening to the people around you talking, and you'll find out that this is not all that bizarre as it sounds. It's essentially the same situation as all those years ago.

Luckily there's also some analogies to be made outside of Arabic. What to think of Vedic Sanskrit still existing as an oral tradition well after Classical Sanskrit died, and when the Prakrit languages were alive and kicking?

Or the (somewhat controversial) idea of Runic inscriptions that often look almost proto-germanic while languages must have differentiated into the different germanic languages at the time we find those inscriptions? It's pretty odd that in Old-Norse region not much before the first latin-written attestation we still find runic inscriptions that write the nom. sg. as -az rather than -r.

So this is the point where I ask you: Am I crazy? Am I seeing things? Surely these similarities can't just be coincidence can they? I'm open to all words of praise, critique and whatever else, as long as it doesn't change into a ridiculous mudfight. I want to be proven wrong, or someone to kindly point out that this interpretation has been the status-quo for centuries and has somehow gone past me.

[EDIT]

I should probably add that there's no direct reason to assume that there was no nominative -u and genitive -i or definite accusative -a. Since we also have to account for final vowels in the verbal system to explain certain vocalisms in Hebrew, this must have existed at some point. They may have been lost individually, or around the time that the two groups were starting to move away from each other.

First of all, sorry for the small delay, but I was on skiing holiday. Anyway, I'm back now, and I'll continue with my weekly updates.

Today I wanted to discuss the Hittite language, and in particular, it's rather odd script.

History
The first Hittite texts are attested around 1600 BC, making it the earliest attested Indo-European language. It was spoken in Anatolia, what we today would call Turkey. The capital of the Hittite state was Ḫattuša which is situated in the place today known as Boğazkale.

Script
Hittite was written in a cuneiform script similar to that the Akkadians used. This script is not exactly well suited for Hittite, since it write in syllables of the type CV, CVC (only a few) and VC. It is not uncommon for Hittite to have consonant clusters bigger than 3 consonants, since it's an Indo-European language. As one may have noticed, it is actually impossible to write a cluster of more than 2 consonants, And it's even impossible to make an initial cluster of more than one consonant. Besides that one could only write 4 vowels; a, e, i and u. While even some syllable signs did not distinguish between e and i. The vowel system of Hettite was much bigger than this.

Besides using their own script, the also used Akkadian and Sumerian words (called Akkadograms and Sumerograms respectively).
An Akkadogram that is commonly used is for example Ú-UL a word that means `not'. Although they'd write Ú-UL, it was meant to be read as the Hittite word 'natta'. The reason why they used the Akkadian word was probably because natta needs to be written with 3 cuneiform symbols (na-at-ta).
Akkadograms would also commonly be given the Akkadian markers of case and number, rather than the Hittite words.

Besides that they also use Sumerograms. Sumerian had a cuneiform script derived from a hieroglyphic script. Thus one symbol would mean one word. A commonly used word is LUGAL which is the Sumerian word for 'King'. This word is used more often than not as a replacement for the Hittite word for king; ḫaššuš. These Sumerograms would often be suffixed with the Hittite case endings rather than Sumerian.

Besides all this, they'd use Determinatives (which are usually Sumerograms). These were cuneiform symbols prefixed to a word. They were not meant to be read, but rather inform the reader what kind of word would follow. The Sumerogram for 'God' was put in front of the name of a god for example.

Translation

Hettblog