Akkadian

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/akkadian.htm

by brador • 10 years ago

67 34 10 years ago

How do linguists discover the phonetics of ancient symbols?

cal22• 10 years ago

Much of the decipherment of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics was due to the discovery and the analysis of the Rosetta Stone. An accurate translation was made by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Champollion

gkya3• 10 years ago

IANAL, but if the language family, period spoken and geography of a given ancient language is known, then there are many cues to suggest a pronunciation, if the language familys history is well documented. And sometimes you find documents that have cues about correct (and incorrect) pronunciation in the language itself (ancient greek has many such text, for example). One may also get cues from the pronunciation of the modern language in the ancient area of the language of which he is trying to discover phonetics.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

Akkadian specifically was pretty easy to handle because it is a Semitic language, like Arabic and Hebrew.

couchand• 10 years ago

"I am not a linguist"? Clever.

mmanfrin3• 10 years ago

Pictographs are difficult, and I'm not sure how pronunciation is sussed out since even modern, living languages have diverging pronunciations in pictographic written languages.

For morpheme based languages (i.e., where the letters make sounds, and then the collective sounds hold meaning), pronunciation can be backtrace by looking at the shifts of child languages. For instance, a lot of english T words had shifted from D words (e.g., 'dens' from french/latin for tooth, to english 'tooth'; many words experienced a d->t shift). When you compare this to other child languages who experienced other shifts, you can sort of triangulate back to the original pronunciation based on how the child languages ended up.

It's sort of like genetics, in a way: if you have two children, one with blonde hair and the other with brown hair, you can infer that one parent had to be blonde.

E: One more analogy since it came to me: Imagine you see a few people walking in different directions, and you want to know where they all started from. You can look at where they are, try to group them in to similar types ('cognates', which words do we think came from the same word), and then look at the path they seem to have been walking down. Then, you draw a line back from where they are, through the path they came from, and hope that the lines you draw for all of them intersect at some point, and that point is your source.

E2: Explaining pronunciation through text is hard.

danieltillett2• 10 years ago

Unfortunately the way genetics works with hair colour you can't infer from a child's hair colour the parent's hair colour, especially that of a blonde haired child.

gumby• 10 years ago

Sometimes you have clues from poetry (and discussions of poetry) or song.

In addition to other comments: sometimes you are lucky, as when someone figured out that Copts speak ancient Egyptian. It was also a semitic language like Arabic.

Of course none of this can be "authoritative" in a substantive sense: not only must Arabic pronunciation have influenced Copt, but you need only look at contemporary time to see how accents etc can vary widely in short geographical distances much less over time. These variations extend to contemporaneous usage of dead languages: I learnt Latin pronunciation in school which apparently is different from usage in the USA, so I can't even make Latin puns with certain people!

So in the end it's just a general idea and a consistent usage so scholars can communicate with each other.

jdmichal• 10 years ago

We still don't know what ancient Egyptian actually sounded like, because they didn't write vowels. Egyptologists basically invented a transliteration with rules for vowels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_language#Egyptologica...

nonbel• 10 years ago

I always wonder if this "no one wrote down vowels" thing was really because these languages were spoken without vowels. The insertion could just be projection of the current situation onto the past. I mean like a language consisting of words like this one:

xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...

cal22• 10 years ago

On a similar note, a full dictionary of the Assyrian language is available online through the University of Chicago.

[1] https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/publications/assyrian-dicti...

navls• 10 years ago

And for a steal at just over $2000!

superuser2• 10 years ago

The PDFs appear to be free, the price is if you want it in print.

gkya3• 10 years ago

PDFs free to download on that very page.

pavlov• 10 years ago

It's useful for a writing system to have a glyph for "zadmin" -- when you want to write about a zip-compressed administrator interface, it really saves time.

asciihacker• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the Scala web framework Akka. Perhaps that's where it got it's name?

tunesmith• 10 years ago

Swedish mountain.

http://doc.akka.io/docs/akka/2.4.4/additional/faq.html

hackaflocka• 10 years ago

Relevant: Behistun Inscription -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

If I ever write a novel, one of the characters is going to drive a Mazda Ahura.

unhammer• 10 years ago

There's a very readable and entertaining book (in Swedish at least, don't know if it's available in English) called "i döda språks sällskap" that talks about the history of accadian, sumerian, hettite etc; highly recommended if you can find+read it. The author used to blog in English at http://necrolinguist.blogspot.no/

mcguire• 10 years ago

Ola Wikander? Drought, Death, and the Sun in Ugarit and Ancient Israel: A Philological and Comparative Study seems to be his only work in English. Is that it?

Edit: I suspect not. Sigh.

thaumasiotes2• 10 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Babylon-Dominique-Cha... is in English. I wouldn't describe it as "readable and entertaining", though... it's dry, dry, dry, dry.

aab0• 10 years ago

The glyphs look amusingly like circuits.

brownbat• 10 years ago

You're brushing up against a big theme of "A Canticle for Leibowitz."

Recommended if you're interested in the preservation of forgotten lore. (It's both about that and becoming some.)

ajarmst• 10 years ago

I had to learn some Akkadian for a senior paper in Ancient Religions about 30 years ago. The topic was some discussion of grammatical similarities between the Hebrew text of Genesis and the Enuma Elish---one of the most important Akkadian texts, and an interesting source for studies of the early cultural origins of the monotheistic religions.

titanix2• 10 years ago

If you're able to use French, you can learn Akkadian, Sumerian and other ancient languages with a remote diploma from University of Strasbourg: http://theopro.unistra.fr/fileadmin/upload/DUN/theopro/Doc_A...

Akkadian

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