Bēl Lišāni: Current Research in Akkadian Linguistics

Review of Biblical Literature, 2024

This revision of the Introduction to A Grammar of Akkadian features links to additional websites with resources for the study of Akkadian; an expanded bibliography, especially including recent studies of Akkadian dialects (now also referenced in the section on dialects); and an index to enable readers to locate the texts presented in the book’s exercises at the website of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative.

Bibliotheca Orientalis 2008/1-2: 149-54

This paper discusses various aspects of reciprocal constructions in Akkadian. Typological observations allow us first to recognize and then to better understand the various diachronic developments occurring in the history of Akkadian. Thus, starting with the main distinction between the verbal and the pronominal constructions, and considering the pronominal strategies found in the history of Akkadian, I examine the various syntactic distinctions between the one-unit and the two-unit pronominal constructions, and note that each belong to different periods. Considering the history of the pronominal expressions, proposals for the origins of each of the various constructions have been made. Similarly I examine the semantic differences between the verbal and the pronominal encodings, and use the conclusions of the these discussions to explain the fact that verbal construction seems to appear more frequently in the earlier periods and less later.

This study uses typological surveys of predicative possessive constructions across languages and illustrates how a typological study may contribute to a historical discussion. More pecifically it provides an account of such constructions in the history of Akkadian. The typological surveys reveal that various constructions in Akkadian not only connote possession accidently, but rather are tokens of predicative possessive constructions. Thus, this article provides a synchronic survey of different marginal predicative possessive constructions in Akkadian, of different dialects and from different periods, most of them unnoticed in the literature. Second, once these constructions are identified, assuming their existence in the history of a language may contribute to explaining other related phenomena, either as motivations for certain diachronic developments or as historical syntactic/semantic explanations for other phenomena. In the context of Akkadian, it will be first and foremost used to explain the origin of the Akkadian verb išûm, the equivalent of the English verb ‘to have’, as Akkadian is unique among the Semitic languages in having a finite verb for this function.

An International Handbook, 2011