Re: Proto-Romance

From:    Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> 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?
Well, if so, those would be the forms without mimation or nunation.
(-am- being the marker for the acc. sg. case in Old Babylonian, and
long -uu being the nominal marker for the nom. pl.).  The form _Kalah_
might be the construct state form.  But it seems unlikely to me that a
Akkadologist would not normalize place names to their common English
forms.  I'll have to ask my friends over at the Oriental Institute to
be sure.   (I looked through my modest Akkadian lexica myself and found
no entry for Nimrud like that.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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