No, it really is coincidence that this and the last-bar one post here are both about cuneiform!

[lethargic_man]

A year ago, I was in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, about which I wrote:

[There was] a surprisingly small number of explanatory labels. Actually, that's not entirely true: There was a lot of explanatory text on the artefacts; unfortunately it was all in Akkadian. I'm beginning to think I ought to teach myself cuneiform in the same way as I taught myself the Arabian alphabet, to look for Hebrew cognates (quite a few of which I was able to spot in transliterated names).

aviva_m then delighted me by getting me a copy of Assyrian Primer, an Inductive Method of Learning the Cuneiform Characters, by John Dyneley Prince, for my birthday. I duly set out to learn cuneiform, but didn't get very far, as it's very complicated. Rather than being an alphabet (something which hadn't been invented yet when cuneiform was devised), cuneiform is a syllabary (and also has ideograms). Thus, there are an awful lot of signs to to learn: even just Part I of the book, which covered the simple signs (representing sounds with only one consonant in them) required memorising ninety-eight different signs.

In the end, I didn't get very far before I gave up altogether. It really made me appreciate how difficult reading and writing would have been then, and why its practice would have been restricted to professional scribes. (Though it also raised the question of why on earth cuneiform hung on so long after the invention of the vastly easier to master alphabetic writing).

Anyhow, months later, I picked the book up again, and determined to read it through without trying to learn the signs. This did result in my gaining insights into the relationship of Assyrian with Hebrew as a result—which was the whole point in the first place.

For a start, I'm ploughing my way slowly through ewtikins's A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew atm, in which Weingreen states that the feminine ending ־ָה was originally ־ָת. I can't see any evidence for this in Hebrew, but it was the case in Assyrian, so when Weingreen says "originally", what he means is during the evolution of Proto-Semitic into Hebrew.

I was amused the way the text gave the words for "man" meaning "human" as opposed to "man" meaning "male person" as "man (homo)" and "man (vir)". I have thought in such terms myself in the past, but you'd have thought אָדָם and אִישׁ would have been more appropriate here... though the actual words in Assyrian were completely different: amelu and zikaru. The latter is cognate to the Hebrew for "male"; the former turns up in the Biblical name Evil-merodach, which is a mangling into Hebrew of Babylonian Amel-Marduk, "Man of [the god] Marduk".

It also turns up in the sentence in the Amarna Letters which The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives as an example of pre-Biblical Hebrew:^* "kī nāmlu tumḫaṣu lā taqabilu u tansiki qati amelim ša yimaḫaṣṣi" (If ants are smitten, they do not accept [it] but bite the hand of the man who smites them). Though I don't understand why if this is Hebrew (and I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what makes this (otherwise) pre-Biblical Hebrew rather than Akkadian), it uses the Akkadian words amelu and qatu. (The rest is clearly Hebrew; in Biblical Hebrew it would be: כִּי נְמָלִים תִּמְחוֹץ לֹא תְקַבְּלוּ וְתִּנְשְׁכוּ יַד אִישׁ שְׁיִמְחְצֵם .)

* The context is that the Canaanite governors of the then Egyptian provinces in the Levant in the second millennium BCE wrote reports back to Egypt in Akkadian, which was the lingua franca, but when they didn't know the Akkadian word, they would leave a blank, write the Canaanite (i.e. Hebrew) word in the margin, and come back and fill in the correct word once they had found it out; the Judaica gives this as the one example of a complete sentence in pre-Biblical Hebrew.

I'm amused to see the Assyrian for "king" is šarru and "prince" māliku: in Hebrew, the roles are the other way around, where the cognate words (שַׂר and מֶלֶךְ) mean "commander" and "king".

Like in Hebrew, abstracts can be signified by adding -utu (־וּת); however, Assyrian takes this further than the Hebrew, by expressing in one word (paṭrutu) so complicated a concept as "the right to bear a dagger" (from paṭru, dagger).

Having thus got through Part I of the book, I then turned to Part II, where there were a further 138 compound signs to learn. Not only that, but many of the signs had multiple values, which was rare in Part I. Not only that, but some of the signs were the same as signs in Part I, but with different values. For example, had the value aš or rú in Part I, but run, dil or ṭil in Part II. It really makes you wonder how modern scholars were ever able to crack the writing system!

It was at this point that I threw my hands up in despair... though I was tempted to continue because, whilst in Part I, the exercises typically involved translating simple sentences using the vocabularly already mastered, such as "Mud is in the marsh of the city. The city of the shining kingdom is great and strong," etc; the first exercise in Part II was entitled "Hymn to the Fire-god Bal-gi" and the second "Prism of Sennacherib"—i.e. real texts from the ancient world.

A few things I should add in the unlikely eventuality anyone else is tempted to read this book. Firstly, the entire thing is handwritten (it was originally published in 1909, and the publishers must have stormed out of the building at the thought of setting a combination of English and cuneiform in hot lead). Secondly, the edition I have (a modern reprint, but, sadly, accurately reflecting one of the asdasd original editions in this regard) is missing pp.33–50, being the exercises for Part II. Fortunately, as this book is out of copyright, you can find a scanned copy of the original printing at archive.org, from where you can print out the missing pages.

Lastly, and indeed leastly, I was amused to encounter the following passage in this post on lughat

Tuareg has kept a distinction between two short vowels, ǎ and ə; but most varieties have just merged the two, so there is no difference in three-consonant roots between the aorist and preterite. So in Siwi, for example, you get:

• Aorist: əlməd “learn!”
• Preterite: (y)-əlməd “(he) learned”
• Intensive: (i)-ləmməd “he is learning”
(Students of Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian will be getting a sense of déjà vu now...)

(And, if anyone gets excited at recognising the root למד, apparently it does not go all the way back to proto-Hamito-Semitic (the common ancestor of Hebrew and Berber), but was apparently a Phoenician loanword.)

Actually, did anyone out there find this interesting apart from me?

Comments

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

You used latin letters here. What letter did the Akkadian use? Is it similar to Assyrian? It looks definitely similar to Hebrew. If yes, they might use Assyrian letters, too, as we Jews use for Hebrew. What is cuneiform? I have never heard of it. You can show me when I visit you.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

They used cuneiform (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform), which looks like this:

It was devised for writing Sumerian, and then adapted for writing Semitic languages, for which it is actually rather poorly suited; for example, māliku "prince" is actually written ma-al-ku; the -a-a- means the a is a long vowel.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly find it interesting. Don't expect any intelligent comments from me though.