Akkadian alphabet. Akkadian and Aramaic among the Assyrians. History of Assyrian-Georgian relations

6.2. Conversational sign language of the deaf as an example of a sign system that replaces natural language There is no doubt that not all of our thinking is verbal. However, the following is undeniable. In order for the child's intellect to develop normally, the child must

§ 20. Sumero-Akkadian synthesis

§ 20. Sumerian-Akkadian synthesis Most of the Sumerian temple cities were united by Lugalzagesi, ruler of Umma, around 2375 BC. e. This was the first manifestation of the imperial idea known to us. A generation later, this enterprise was repeated, with great success,

AKkadianlanguage.

For written fixation of the Akkadian language, verbal-syllabic cuneiform was used, borrowed from the Sumerians and representing groups of wedge-shaped characters, squeezed out onto clay tablets, which were then fired.

The cuneiform system consists of:

simple and complex ideograms;

signs with phonetic reading denoting syllables.

The same group of signs often has several ideographic and - at the same time - phonetic meanings. The transmission of syllables is ambiguous: different signs can be used for the same thing. There are no separating marks or spaces between words, as was customary in all ancient writing systems. Reading facilitates the presence of determinatives - signs indicating that a word belongs to a certain class by meaning (for example, "mātu" - country - before the names of countries, "ilu" (god) - before the names of gods).

Sumerianwriting.

Sumerian writing has a verbal-syllabic character. It is based on pictorial signs (pictograms), which are ideograms that convey not a word, but a concept (concept), and most often not one, but a number of associative concepts. Initially, the number of characters in the Sumerian language reached a thousand. Gradually, their number was reduced to 600. Almost half of them were used as logograms and at the same time as syllabograms, which was facilitated by the monosyllabic nature of most Sumerian words, the rest were only logograms. When reading in each individual context, the ideogram sign reproduced one specific word, and the ideogram became a logogram, that is, a sign for a word with its specific sound. A pictorial sign most often expressed not one concept, but several conceptually related verbal meanings. The presence of signs expressing more than one word created polyphony. On the other hand, Sumerian had a large number of homonymous words - homophones, apparently differing only in musical tones that were not specifically reflected in the graphics. As a result, it turns out that to convey the same sequence of consonants and vowels, there can be up to a dozen different signs that differ not depending on the sound of the word, but on its semantics. In Sumerology (here the most convenient Daimel system is used), when transliterating such ‘homophones’, the following designations are accepted: du, du2, du3, du4, du5, du6, etc., in order of approximate frequency.

There were many monosyllabic words in the Sumerian language, so it was possible to use logograms that convey similar words to purely phonetically convey words or grammatical indicators that could not be reproduced directly in the form of a picture sign-ideogram. Thus, logograms are beginning to be used as syllabograms. At the end of the first half of the III millennium BC. e. determinatives appeared denoting the category of a concept, for example, determinatives of wooden, reed, stone objects, animals, birds, fish, etc.

It should be noted the rules of transliteration of Sumerian texts. Each character is transliterated in lowercase direct Latin letters, separated from the transliteration of another character within the same word by a hyphen. Determinatives are written above the line. If the correct choice of one or another reading of the sign in a given context cannot be made, then the sign is transliterated in capital Latin letters in its most common reading. There are no doubled consonants in Sumerian, so spellings like gub-ba are purely orthographic and should be read /guba/.

Chineseletteŕ

Chinese writing has been the only accepted way of writing Chinese for thousands of years. Chinese characters are also widely used in Japanese and Korean writing (they are called kanji and hanja). Until 1945, the Chinese script was also used to write the Vietnamese language (Khan Tu).

The age of Chinese writing is constantly updated. Recently discovered inscriptions on tortoise shells, reminiscent of ancient Chinese characters, date back to the 6th millennium BC. e., which is even older than Sumerian writing.

Chinese writing is usually called hieroglyphic or ideographic. It differs radically from the alphabetic one in that each character is assigned some meaning (not only phonetic), and the number of characters is very large (tens of thousands).

According to legend, the hieroglyphs were invented by Cang Jie, the court historiographer of the mythical Emperor Huang Di. Prior to this, the Chinese used knot writing. The oldest Chinese records were made on tortoise shells and bull bones, and recorded the results of divination. Such texts are called jiaguwen. The first samples of Chinese writing date back to the last period of the Shang Dynasty (the most ancient ones date back to the 17th century BC).

Later, the technology of bronze casting emerged, and inscriptions appear on bronze vessels. These texts are called jinwen. The inscriptions on the bronze vessels were preliminarily squeezed out on a clay mold, the hieroglyphs were standardized, they began to fit into a square.

Etruscanalphabet- a set of characters characteristic of the written Etruscan language. Related to the Greek and early Latin alphabets.

The most famous monuments of Etruscan writing are tombstones and ceramics. At the moment, about nine thousand inscriptions are known, made using the Etruscan alphabet - found on tombstones, vases, statues, mirrors and jewelry. Fragments of the Etruscan linen book Liber Linteus were also found.

The problem with deciphering is that the Etruscans did not have a writing system, that is, they wrote both from left to right and from right to left. In addition, boustrophedon is also found: one line is written from left to right, the second line is written from right to left, the third is from left to right, etc. The second difficulty is that the words were not always separated from each other.

The Etruscan inscriptions were already incomprehensible to the Romans, who had a proverb “hetruscum non ligatur” (“Etruscan is not readable”). All later attempts to read Etruscan inscriptions on the basis of any of the known languages ​​\u200b\u200bwere not successful; the point of view prevails, according to which the Etruscan language is not related to known European languages ​​and is isolated.

Since the Etruscan language has not been deciphered, and the ordered set of characters used by the Etruscans themselves (the alphabet in the proper sense of the word) is unknown, the Etruscan alphabet is a reconstruction. This applies both to the number of letters and their shape, and the sound of the corresponding sounds. The basis for reading are a few Latin-Etruscan bilinguals and Etruscan records of proper names.

There are about 90 known Etruscan characters found in the Etruscan script. They are reduced to 27 basic characters, the rest are considered graphic variations.

Dateś thpí shift- one of the first systems of phonetic writing recorded in the history of mankind. Appeared around the 13th century BC. e. and became the ancestor of most modern writing systems.

The Phoenician script is one of the first alphabetic scripts in the world, however, it was the Phoenician script that gave rise to several branches of alphabetic scripts, and, today, almost all alphabetic scripts of the world (with the exception of Japanese Kana and Korean script) have roots in the Phoenician script. Other scripts that have an alphabetical structure - Old Persian cuneiform and Meroitic writing, did not take root.

alphabeticalwriting- this is writing, where one sign conveys one sound, in contrast to logographic and ideographic writing, where each sign corresponds to a specific concept or morpheme. Syllabic writing also cannot be considered alphabetic writing, since each sign corresponds to a separate syllable, but not to a sound.

1. language, literature worthy of the very ... used not only cuneiform, but also Akkadian language and the administrative system adopted in ... and historical texts on Akkadian language, which were reproduced in Amorit...

2. History of the states of Mesopotamia

   Abstract >> Culture and art

   And the Euphrates, were talking on Akkadian language. In southern Mesopotamia, the Semites ... occupied almost all of Mesopotamia. Gradually Akkadian language supplanted Sumerian, and by the beginning ... 6th century BC. Aramaic language became official language, A Akkadian language ousted. By the 1st century BC...

3. Sumero Akkadian civilization

   Report >> Culture and art

   Popular hero of the Sumerian and Akkadian literature. One for works... and Akkadian peoples occurred gradually, the displacement of the Sumerian language Akkadian(Babylonian... Sumerian in origin. Akkadian mythological texts of the Old Babylonian...

A multi-volume dictionary of the Akkadian language, prepared by several generations of experts, is now available online on the website of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Polit.ru reports. Akkadian, formerly known as Assyro-Babylonian, is a Semitic language. It is known to us from numerous cuneiform monuments. Thanks to the conquests of the Assyrian kings, it spread widely in the Middle East. Also from the middle of the II millennium BC. e. Akkadian was used in diplomatic correspondence between the ancient Eastern rulers, it was used by both the Hittite kings and the pharaohs of Egypt. From the IV century BC. e. it began to be supplanted by Aramaic as the main language of communication in the region, but it remained in written form for a long time.

The Chicago Akkadian Dictionary was founded in 1921 by the famous American archaeologist and historian Henry Breasted. It was originally planned that the dictionary would be ten volumes, but in the end their number grew to twenty-one. The first volume was published in 1956 and the last in 2011. The dictionary contains the most complete collection of Akkadian vocabulary, extracted from texts dating from 2500 B.C. e. before 100 AD e. In total, it has about 28 thousand words. A print edition of all volumes of the dictionary costs more than a thousand dollars, but all volumes are available on the project website in PDF format.

Plan:

Introduction

• 1. History
• 2 Dialects
• 3 Writing
• 4 Phonetics
• 5 Vocabulary
• 6 Morphology
• 7 Syntax
• 8 Bibliography
  • 8.1 General work
  • 8.2 Basic grammars
  • 8.3 Dictionaries
  • 8.4 Readers

Introduction

Akkadian language (translit. acc. lišānum akkadītum, after the name of the city of Akkad), or Assyro-Babylonian, - one of the oldest Semitic languages, forming their northern or northeastern group (possibly together with Eblaite); the spoken language of the three peoples who inhabited the territory in the ancient Mesopotamia - Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. For written fixation of the Akkadian language, verbal-syllabic cuneiform, borrowed from the Sumerians, was used. The oldest Akkadian monument dates back to the 25th century BC. e., later - I century; in the last centuries of its existence, the Akkadian language, supplanted by Aramaic, was used only in a few cities of Babylonia.

1. History

The first traces of the Akkadian language are found in cuneiform inscriptions in Sumerian (the ancient non-Semitic language of Mesopotamia, extinct by the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC; cuneiform was invented by the Sumerians), dating from about 3000 BC. e. These are personal names and words borrowed by the Sumerians from the Akkadian language. With the emergence of the first Akkadian state and its subsequent expansion under King Sargon and his successors (c. 2341-2160 BC), the Old Akkadian language (this term is applied to the Akkadian language of the 3rd millennium BC) began to speak and write over a vast area from Akkad (modern Baghdad) in the south to Assyria (modern Mosul) in the north. In addition, at the same time, the Old Akkadian language began to gradually spread through the territory of Sumer in the south of Mesopotamia and through the territory of Elam, the eastern neighbor of the Akkadians. The ensuing revival of Sumerian domination, which lasted about two centuries, threatened for some time to put an end to the Akkadian expansion, but new invasions of the Semitic peoples c. 2000 BC e. led to the complete displacement of the Sumerian language by Akkadian, which became official throughout Mesopotamia.

The most extensive conquests, which led to the formation of a vast state at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, and the subsequent revival of trade relations, spread throughout Asia Minor the influence of Babylonian culture and the Babylonian-Assyrian language, which is becoming official language international relations; in the 15th century BC e. on it even the Egyptian pharaoh corresponds with his closest neighbors, petty Palestinian vassals. Together with Babylonian cultural concepts, legislation, mythology, etc., the peoples of the Middle East borrow a number of words from the Babylonian-Assyrian language.

From the 14th century B.C. e., the Aramaic language penetrates into Mesopotamia), brought by a new wave of nomadic Semites. Gradually, this language becomes the spoken language of the entire population, so that in the 9th century BC. e. the Babylonian-Assyrian language is already spoken almost exclusively by the ruling class, and since the 6th century BC. e., that is, with the founding of the Neo-Babylonian state with the Chaldean dynasty, the Babylonian-Assyrian language remains only as a written language. Under the Persians, it was the official language of the eastern half of the state, and individual monuments in the Babylonian-Assyrian language are found until the middle of the 3rd century BC. e.

2. Dialects

After 2000 BC e. Akkadian has two distinct dialects: "Babylonian", which was spoken in the south - in Babylonia, and "Assyrian" (not to be confused with modern Assyrian, which belongs to another group of Semitic languages), which was spoken in the north - in Assyria; for each of these dialects there are several historical stages development. Because of this division, Akkadian is often referred to as "Assyro-Babylonian" or "Babylonian-Assyrian". The Assyrian dialect of Akkadian is possibly a direct descendant of the Old Akkadian language (in any case, it is closer to Old Akkadian than Babylonian), while Babylonian has a number of features that cannot be traced back to Old Akkadian and which go back to others, more ancient and still poorly recognizable dialects.

The Babylonian dialect was of much greater cultural significance than the Assyrian dialect. Since the middle of the II millennium BC. e. Babylonian was widely used as a kind of lingua franca throughout the Middle East and became the language of correspondence between the royal courts of the Hittites, Hurrians, Arameans, Canaanites and Egyptians. The vast archives of Boghazkoy (Asia Minor) and Tell el-Amarna (Egypt) provide the best evidence of the widespread Babylonian dialect of the Akkadian language. Even the inhabitants of Assyria, who had previously used exclusively their own dialect, from the middle of the 2nd millennium began to use the Babylonian dialect - first in their historical inscriptions, and later in written texts of a general state character. As a result, by the end of the Assyrian period, all Assyrian texts were written in the Babylonian dialect, with the exception of numerous personal letters and economic documentation, where the local Assyrian dialect continued to be used. The more archaic character of the Assyrian dialect is evident when compared with Babylonian; in particular, the so-called weak consonants remain uncontracted even in late Assyrian, while in the most ancient Babylonian texts they appear already in a contracted form.

There are the following dialects of the Akkadian language:

• Old Akkadian dialect (XXIV-XX centuries BC)
  • Babylonian dialect
    • Old Babylonian dialect (XX-XVI centuries BC)
    • Middle Babylonian dialect (XVI-XII centuries BC)
    • Young Babylonian dialect (XII-X centuries BC)
    • Neo-Babylonian dialect (X-VII centuries BC)
    • Late Babylonian dialect (7th century - early AD)
  • Assyrian dialect
    • Old Assyrian dialect (XX-XVI centuries BC)
    • Middle Assyrian dialect (XVI-XII centuries BC)
    • Neo-Assyrian dialect (X-VII centuries BC)

As can be seen, only the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian has a continuous written history spanning over two millennia. Around the end of the Old Babylonian period and the beginning of the Middle Babylonian, a special literary language, the so-called standard Babylonian, was formed. It is in the standard Babylonian that the vast majority of poems, epics, historical documents are written, it was used in diplomatic correspondence from Egypt to the modern territories of Turkey and India.

3. Writing

For written fixation of the Akkadian language, verbal-syllabic cuneiform was used, borrowed from the Sumerians and representing groups of wedge-shaped characters, squeezed out onto clay tablets, which were then fired.

The cuneiform system consists of:

1. simple and complex ideograms;
2. signs with phonetic reading denoting syllables.

The same group of signs often has several ideographic and - at the same time - phonetic meanings. The transmission of syllables is ambiguous: different signs can be used for the same thing. There are no separators or spaces between words, as was common in all ancient writing systems. Reading facilitates the presence of determinatives - signs indicating that a word belongs to a certain class by meaning (for example, "mātu" - country - before the names of countries, "ilu" (god) - before the names of gods).

4. Phonetics

In Akkadian, there are 4 vowels distinguished by longitude-shortness, and 20 consonants, including 2 weak consonants (semi-vowels). All consonants according to the method of articulation can be divided into 8 groups. On early stage the development of the language of consonants was more, but in the XIX-XVI centuries. BC e. some of them have been lost. To convey Akkadian sounds, a special Latin-based transliteration font is used (font ttf: Akkad Sans Regular).

5. Vocabulary

Most Akkadian words have a three-consonant root, but there are also words with two- and four-consonant roots. Word formation occurs by prefixation, suffixation, reduplication and vowel changes, while word formation is quite rare. Akkadian vocabulary is characterized by a large number of synonyms and polysemantic words. The oldest and most numerous loanwords in Akkadian are from Sumerian. In peripheral dialects there are words of Hurrian and Elamite origin. From the 7th century BC e. borrowings from Aramaic appear, and from the end of the 6th century. BC e. - from Persian. Borrowings from Akkadian occur in many Semitic languages, through which they entered Greek, Latin, and modern European languages.

6. Morphology

Akkadian has the following parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, particles, and conjunctions. The names were masculine and feminine, singular, dual (only for nouns) and plural. Nouns could stand in 3 cases (nominative, genitive, accusative) and 3 main states (inflected, conjugate and absolute). Adjectives could stand in 2 cases (nominative and indirect). Personal pronouns, depending on the use, are represented by three categories (independent, suffixal and possessive). Verb stems differ in the type of root consonants. Verbal stems change their primary meaning according to the system of breeds. There are 4 main rock systems in Akkadian: G (main), D (with doubling of the 2nd accord. - the meaning of the intensive), Š (with the prefix š- - the meaning of the causative), N (with the prefix n- - the meaning of the passive), in each of which forms derivative rocks: Gt, Gtn, Dt, Dtn, etc. Conjugated forms of the verb: present, preterite, perfect, stative. Non-conjugated: infinitive, participle. Moods: imperative, subjunctive, ventive, precative, prohibitive.

7. Syntax

Depending on the expression of the predicate in the Akkadian language, there could be two types of sentences: verbal and nominal. The word order of a verb sentence is: subject - direct object - indirect object - predicate. With a predicate expressed by the causative form of the verb, there can be two direct objects. Word order of a nominal sentence: predicate - subject, both of them are in nominative case, there is no need for a connection between them. Complex sentences with different types adnexal.

8. Bibliography

8.1. General works

• Lipin L. A. Akkadian language. M., 1964.
• Dyakonov I. M. Languages ​​of ancient Western Asia. M., 1967. S. 263-338.
• Dyakonov I. M. Akkadian language // in the book. Afroasian languages. Book. I. Semitic languages. M., 1991. S. 70-109.
• Reiner E. Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian. The Hague, 1996.
• Kaplan G. H. Essay on the grammar of the Akkadian language. St. Petersburg, 2006.

8.2. Basic grammars

• Ungnad A. Grammatik des Akkadischen. Neubearbeitung durch Matous 5. Aufl. Munich, 1979.
• von Soden W. Grundries der Akkadischen Grammatik. 3. Aufl. Rom, 1995. (GAG)
• Buccellati G. Structural Grammar of Babylonian. Wiesbaden, 1996.
• Huehnergard J. A Grammar of Akkadian. Atlanta, 1997.
• Caplice R. Introduction to Akkadian. 4th ed. Rome, 2002.

8.3. Dictionaries

• The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago. Chicago, 1956. (CAD)
• Lipin L. A. Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) language. Issue. II. Dictionary. L., 1957.
• von Soden W. Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. bd. I-III. Wiesbaden, 1958-1981. (AHw)
• Black J.G., George A., Postgate N. A Concise Dictionary of Accadian. Wiesbaden, 2000.

8.4. Readers

• Lipin L. A. Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian) language. Issue. I. Reader with tables of signs. L., 1957.
• Borger R. Babylonisch-assyrische Lesestucke. Teil I-III. Rome, 1963.