Re: Proto-Romance

Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> It did, in fact, and the documentation is relatively plentiful.
> When you read Hammurabi's Code, you see only a handful of Sumerograms,
> mostly representing gentilics and professions, and the rest of the cuneiform
> signs are syllabics. By the time you reach documents from the period of the
> Assyrian Empire, the documents virtually ooze with Sumerograms.  When in
> class I had wondered if this was merely a reflection of the different
> genres (one a law code intended actually to be used by barely literate
> administrators of the Empire, the other a historical proclamation of
> Sargon II boasting how violent he had been to rebels and Lesser Peoples),
> it was explained that in fact Akkadian by Sargon II's time had become
> diglossic, the common speech having lost all case distinctions, the
> present subjunctive singular -u, etc.  These were retained in the
> writing to a large extent, in addition to the acrolect being loaded
> with Sumerian lexemes.
Would the fact I've seen the Akkadian name of Nimrud given variously
as 'Kalah', 'Kalha' and 'Kalhu' (that's ignoring 'k'~'c' and 'h'~'kh'~'ch'
variation) be related to that loss of case suffixes?

                                           Andreas