The Sound of Akkadian -- Listen to Ancient Babylonian online

Heritage Key ^ | Thursday, September 30, 2010 | Ann Wuyts

[SunkenCiv]

Almost 2,000 years after its last native speakers disappeared... [t]he recordings include excerpts from some of the earliest known works of world literature, dating back to the first years of the second millennium BC... readings of Babylonian poems, myths and other texts in the original tongue... -- available online for free at www.speechisfire.com -- are given by Dr. Worthington's fellow Assyriologists. Babylonian is one of two variants (or dialects) of Akkadian, the other being Assyrian. Akkadian became the 'lingua franca' of the Near East around, until its use began to decline around the 8th century BC. The last Akkadian cuneiform document dates to the 1st century AD. Dr Worthington's hope is that having heard the sound of the extinct language -- the earliest attested Semitic language, some listeners will be sufficiently intrigued to investigate further, and perhaps end up studying the history, language or culture of the period... The existing collection focuses on poetry in particular. Most of this is known from cuneiform inscriptions found on clay tablets in the area that was once Mesopotamia... Beyond literature and poetry, the site has also contains other important documents from the period. Part of the Codex Hammurabi, for example, the ancient law code from 1790 BC, can be both read and heard -- although you are (not yet) treated to all 281 of the laws and parallel punishments Hammurabi had listed... Thirty recordings have been released so far and more are currently being prepared.

[ThanhPhero]

So where did they find ancient Babylonian CD? Or was it still on 8-Track?

[Renfield]

I listened to one of these recordings. Sounds a lot like Hebrew!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks! The code of Hammurabi didn’t much survive the king, and wound up lost for thousands of years, until the cuneiform writing system was cracked, using an archive of Akkadian texts. As Samuel Noah Cramer pointed out, it was found that cuneiform (though a very flexible system) had been “hacked” to work with Akkadian, and that they’d borrowed it from some unknown source. Other tablets which could be pronounced but not translated were in Sumerian, were older, and the cracking of Sumerian may have been the greatest translation achievement in history. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

Same family of languages, and non-IndoEuropean. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure. :O)

[SunkenCiv]

The cuneiform script is a phonetic writing system that records the syllable using very evolved and stylized pictures of common items (this is similar to the way hieroglyphic writing came about in Egypt).

Figuring it out involved a lucky find, obviously; Akkadian is an extinct language inside a living language family, and is extinct in the same way really old Old English is extinct; learning Old English wouldn’t be too difficult for modern native English speakers, and the translator of Akkadian made some guesses, tested them, found some sequences which looked like words which had been passed down, and laboriously reconstructed many of the sounds as well as the language itself.

IOW, it wasn’t easy.

As noted above, the non-Akkadian origin was clear from the sound assignments to many of the “pictures” — they didn’t correspond to the Akkadian language, but the writing system had been in use and was teachable, so the Akkadians were stuck with the Sumerian forms. Sumerian was used as a ceremonial language for centuries after the everyday spoken version (as well as the ethnic group) vanished from the Earth.

[SunkenCiv]

And pick up a quart of buttermilk. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

I highly recommend this one, which remains up-to-date, despite coming from the 1990s.

Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson

Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West

Decipherment of the Mayan glyphs proceeded from logical reconstruction. Recognition of the signs for numbers permitted equating them with dates of the Mayan calendar. A sign list compiled as a sort of "alphabet" in the 16th century by Fray Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who served as bishop of Yucatán, was incorrect in some of its interpretations but offered a number of useful clues. In 1952, Yuri Knorozov was the first to suggest that the glyphs were phonetic symbols. Later in the decade, Tatiana Proskouriakoff hypothesized that a set of sculpted inscriptions from Guatemala depicted rulers of Piedras Negras, along with the ruler's birth date and date of accession, and it became obvious that Mayan monuments recorded history. Eventually it was recognized that Maya scribes mixed phonetics with logograms (whole-word semantic symbols such as "+" or "&") in unpredictable ways... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.

[Defiant]

Thanks for the explanation. I was being facetious. Acadian is where we get the origin of the word "cajun", and so I was pretending to confuse "acadian" with "akkadian" and making a little joke.

I always enjoy the articles you find.

[muawiyah]

The Sumerians may or may not have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Their language is now understood to have many Dravidian elements, although it was advanced well beyond all such languages at the time writing was invented ~ probably driven by writing itself. At the same time the Sa'ami languages are also quite arguably Sumerian cognates ~ but the problem is that it's only been within the last few hundred years any of them were rendered into writing, while at the same time they've been heavily influenced by Indo-European and Fenno-Ughric languages.

Archaeologists in Iran are working on an ancient pre-Sumerian settlement/city/town/whatever that appears to connect ancient Mesopotamia with ancient South India.

Most of the above was predicted shortly after the first translations were made of early Sumerian texts ~ and simply on the basis that the Sumerians discussed Ice Flows, Glaciers and sunny beaches with palm trees (at least the way the early Hungarian translators understood the texts).

The Great Depression and WWII/Communist occupation/etc. left careful examination of Sumerian materials in the lurch for a very long time. Scholars are just now getting back into the wealth of untranslated materials.

[IYAS9YAS]

Thanks!

[SunkenCiv]

:’) That is amusing!

[SunkenCiv]

:’) my pleasure, and great tagline!

[IYAS9YAS]

great tagline!

Swiped it from another Freeper. I can't take credit for it.

[SunkenCiv]

Still counts. ;’)

[SunkenCiv]

Cuneiform decipherment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_script#Decipherment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language

[Yaelle]

HOW can experts in a written language know how it sounds?? I call BS. The first two recordings, the one guy sounds like he is trying to approximate (or has) a middle eastern accent. The second one, a woman, has an very obvious German accent. We don’t know how the original speakers sounded with their choices of vowels and any sound that we now use the letters “r” or “ch” for.

The reasearch is commendable. Learning what the writings tell us is important. Trying to “fake” an ancient accent is not.

[SunkenCiv]

The translation is the real thing because it results in coherent texts wherever it’s tried; multilingual texts are one of the reasons the pronounciations were figured out, since there were cuneiform texts containing already known languages (such as Greek). The archive of Hattusas in Anatolia was filled with tablets which could be pronounced but were not in any known language; Emil Forrer (Swiss, but the name looks French, and of course he spoke German) started to notice words that were German-like, which led him to crack one of the four or more languages found on the various tablets, and reconstruct an extinct IndoEuropean language.

[Zionist Conspirator]

Let me know when they have readings of Sumerian available to listen to.

[SunkenCiv]

Will do. Here’s something in the meanwhile:

http://www.sumerian.org/cmaacat.htm
http://www.ancientscripts.com/sumerian.html