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Akkadian
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Akkadian
is a language that was widely spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq),
and was written in the cuneiform script from about 2400 BC to the early
centuries AD. It had two principal dialects, ancient Assyrian in the
north, and Babylonian in the south. These in turn exhibit differences in
different periods, for example Old Assyrian, Middle Assyrian and
Neo-Assyrian; the oldest Akkadian texts are written in what is known as Old
Akkadian. As well as being the standard language of Mesopotamia, Akkadian was
also used for written communication between peoples speaking quite different
languages, Hittite and Egyptian for instance. The
Akkadian language is in the Semitic family, which includes other ancient
languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic, the latter being the lingua franca in much of the Middle East 2000 years ago. Modern
languages in this family include Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic (Ethiopia), and
others. Akkadian and its dialects Assyrian and Babylonian are in the
north-east Semitic group, but this group of languages died out when
Babylonian was no longer used in speech or writing. Note that modern Assyrian
is not in the same group — it is a dialect of Aramaic and belongs to
the north-west branch of Semitic. There are no modern north-east Semitic
languages; Babylonian and Assyrian left no direct descendants. Like
other Semitic languages, Akkadian is of the inflectional type, meaning that
grammatical relationships are expressed by changing (or inflecting) the internal structure of words. The modern
method of learning this ancient language is to first learn the grammar, which
is well-understood, and then to read the Hammurabi law code,
written under the auspices of King Hammurabi of Babylon in about 1750 BC. All
texts in Akkadian are written in cuneiform, and the writing system can be somewhat complex. For more
information on the language, see the Wikipedia page. |
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