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The Sound of Akkadian -- Listen to Ancient Babylonian online
Heritage Key ^ | Thursday, September 30, 2010 | Ann Wuyts

Posted on 10/01/2010 7:06:36 PM PDT by 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at heritage-key.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Travel
KEYWORDS: akkadian; assyrian; babylonian; epigraphyandlanguage; godsgravesglyphs
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To: Candor7

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


21 posted on 10/02/2010 5:29:31 AM PDT by ThanhPhero (di tray hoi den La Vang)
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To: SunkenCiv

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


22 posted on 10/02/2010 6:10:23 AM PDT by Renfield (Turning apples into venison since 1999!)
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To: UCANSEE2; Publius6961; ModelBreaker; muawiyah; Fred Nerks

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. :’)


23 posted on 10/02/2010 7:07:58 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: Renfield

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


24 posted on 10/02/2010 7:09:05 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: Moonmad27; Mr. Silverback; ElayneJ; tanuki; Steve Van Doorn; silverleaf

My pleasure. :O)


25 posted on 10/02/2010 7:11:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: IYAS9YAS; Defiant; ThanhPhero

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.


26 posted on 10/02/2010 7:19:35 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: wildbill

And pick up a quart of buttermilk. ;’)


27 posted on 10/02/2010 7:19:51 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: Captain Beyond
I highly recommend this one, which remains up-to-date, despite coming from the 1990s.
Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The Worlds Undeciphered Scripts 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.

28 posted on 10/02/2010 7:23:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: SunkenCiv
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.

29 posted on 10/02/2010 8:33:17 AM PDT by Defiant (Liberals care more about the Koran than they did about Terri Schiavo.)
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To: SunkenCiv
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.

30 posted on 10/02/2010 9:53:41 AM PDT by muawiyah ("GIT OUT THE WAY" The Republicans are coming)
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To: SunkenCiv

Thanks!


31 posted on 10/02/2010 10:08:31 AM PDT by IYAS9YAS (Liberalism can be summed up thusly: someone craps their pants and we all have to wear diapers)
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To: Defiant

:’) That is amusing!


32 posted on 10/02/2010 12:51:11 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: IYAS9YAS

:’) my pleasure, and great tagline!


33 posted on 10/02/2010 12:54:21 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: SunkenCiv
great tagline!

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

34 posted on 10/02/2010 1:52:19 PM PDT by IYAS9YAS (Liberalism can be summed up thusly: someone craps their pants and we all have to wear diapers)
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To: IYAS9YAS

Still counts. ;’)


35 posted on 10/02/2010 2:39:38 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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Cuneiform decipherment:

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

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


36 posted on 10/02/2010 2:49:25 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: SunkenCiv

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.


37 posted on 10/02/2010 2:55:52 PM PDT by Yaelle
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To: Yaelle

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.


38 posted on 10/03/2010 7:17:03 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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To: SunkenCiv

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


39 posted on 10/03/2010 7:21:57 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator (Shofekh dam ha'adam, ba'adam damo yishshafekh; ki betzelem 'Eloqim `asah 'et-ha'adam.)
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To: Zionist Conspirator

Will do. Here’s something in the meanwhile:

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


40 posted on 10/03/2010 7:35:26 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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