[13] The Akkadian Empire, established by Sargon of Akkad, introduced the Akkadian language (the "language of Akkad") as a written language, adapting Sumerian cuneiform orthography for the purpose. John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite". Both of these are often used for the same syllable in the same text. The most important user of this system is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Another peculiarity of Akkadian cuneiform is that many signs do not have a well-defined phonetic value. ina maar (forwards), ina balu (without), ana r (up to), ana maar (forwards). 
During this period, a large number of loan words were included in the language from Northwest Semitic languages and Hurrian; however, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory. Independent personal pronouns in Akkadian are as follows: Suffixed (or enclitic) pronouns (mainly denoting the genitive, accusative and dative) are as follows: Demonstrative pronouns in Akkadian differ from the Western Semitic variety. While generally more archaic, Assyrian developed certain innovations as well, such as the "Assyrian vowel harmony". As in all Semitic languages, some masculine nouns take the prototypically feminine plural ending (-t). The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The following table contains an example of using the noun arrum (king), the adjective rapum (wide) and the verbal adjective parsum (decided). As is also the case in other Semitic languages, Akkadian nouns may appear in a variety of "states" depending on their grammatical function in a sentence. Causative or intensive forms are formed with the doubled D-stem, and it gets its name from the doubled-middle radical that is characteristic of this form. Several Proto-Semitic phonemes are lost in Akkadian.
(see Code of Ur-Nammu.) It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. This rule, however, does not always hold true, especially in nouns where a short vowel has historically been elided (e.g. [15] However, the latest cuneiform texts are almost entirely written in Sumerian logograms.[16]. [2][23] The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Akkadian, Modern Standard Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew: The existence of a back mid-vowel /o/ has been proposed, but the cuneiform writing gives no good proof for this. These forms are generally not productive, but in the Neo-Babylonian the um-locative replaces several constructions with the preposition ina. The ordinals are formed (with a few exceptions) by adding a case ending to the nominal form PaRuS (the P, R and S. must be substituted with the suitable consonants of the numeral). The voiceless lateral fricatives (*, *) merged with the sibilants as in Canaanite, leaving 19 consonantal phonemes. The following table summarises the dialects of Akkadian identified with certainty so far. In these cases, the lost vowel is restored in the construct state (so aknum yields akin). The completion of this work was hailed as a significant milestone for the study of the language by prominent academic Irving Finkel of the British Museum.[34][35]. After the end of the Mesopotamian kingdoms, which were conquered by the Persians, Akkadian (which existed solely in the form of Late Babylonian) disappeared as a popular language. Word order seems to have shifted to SVO/VSO late in the 1st millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD, possibly under the influence of Aramaic. The last known Akkadian cuneiform document dates from the 1st century AD. Akkadian lost both the glottal and pharyngeal fricatives, which are characteristic of the other Semitic languages. e.g. The phoneme /r/ has traditionally been interpreted as a trill but its pattern of alternation with // suggests it was a velar (or uvular) fricative. In the dual and plural, the accusative and genitive are merged into a single oblique case. In the following table the nominal phrase erbt arr danntum a lam pu abya 'the four strong kings who built the city are my fathers' is analyzed: Akkadian sentence order was Subject+Object+Verb (SOV), which sets it apart from most other ancient Semitic languages such as Arabic and Biblical Hebrew, which typically have a verbsubjectobject (VSO) word order. Examples: ina btim (in the house, from the house), ana dummuqim (to do good), itti arrim (with the king), ana r mru (up to his son). Because Akkadian as a spoken language is extinct and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known, little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and phonology of Akkadian. It is noted, however, that in the case of the numeral "one", the ordinal (masculine) and the cardinal number are the same. [2][22] For example, when the possessive suffix -u is added to the root awat ('word'), it is written awassu ('his word') even though would be expected. Regardless of the complexity of the preposition, the following noun is always in the genitive case. or if he accepted something for safekeeping without same, man-NOM he-3.M.SG stealer-ABS is_killed-3.SG.PASS-PRS. This group distinguishes itself from the Northwest and South Semitic languages by its subjectobjectverb word order, while the other Semitic languages usually have either a verbsubjectobject or subjectverbobject order. Akkadian (/kedin/, Akkadian: akkad)[1][2] is an East Semitic language, now extinct, that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (Akkad, Assyria, Isin, Larsa and Babylonia) from the third millennium BC until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BC. Some researchers (such as W. Sommerfeld 2003) believe that the Old Akkadian variant used in the older texts is not an ancestor of the later Assyrian and Babylonian dialects, but rather a separate dialect that was replaced by these two dialects and which died out early. Additionally there is a general tendency of syncope of short vowels in the later stages of Akkadian. By the 10th century BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. As the most important contact language throughout this period was Aramaic, which itself lacks case distinctions, it is possible that Akkadian's loss of cases was an areal as well as phonological phenomenon. Because of the assimilation of n, the /n/ is only seen in the present forms, and the Xtn preterite is identical to the Xt durative. In this vein, an alternative transcription of * is *s, with the macron below indicating a soft (lenis) articulation in Semitic transcription. if the counted noun is masculine, the numeral would be feminine and vice versa. It has been hypothesized that this word order was a result of influence from the Sumerian language, which was also SOV. The participle, which can be active or passive, is another verbal adjective and its meaning is similar to the English gerund.[specify]. Centuries after the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Akkadian (in its Assyrian and Babylonian varieties) was the native language of the Mesopotamian empires (Old Assyrian Empire, Babylonia, Middle Assyrian Empire) throughout the later Bronze Age, and became the lingua franca of much of the Ancient Near East by the time of the Bronze Age collapse c. 1150 BC. As an example, the tn-stem is called III/3. Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BC. [3] It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian (which is a language isolate). However, the language was still used in its written form; and even after the Greek invasion under Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Akkadian was still a contender as a written language, but spoken Akkadian was likely extinct by this time, or at least rarely used. All consonants and vowels appear in long and short forms. The radicals are occasionally represented in transcription in upper-case letters, for example PRS (to decide).
While numerals precede the counted noun. Akkadian, unlike Arabic, has only "sound" plurals formed by means of a plural ending; broken plurals are not formed by changing the word stem. Old Babylonian, along with the closely related dialect Mariotic, is clearly more innovative than the Old Assyrian dialect and the more distantly related Eblaite language. -ni is used for the nominative, i.e. The stress patterns of Akkadian are disputed, with some authors claiming that nothing is known of the topic. The latter is found in all other Semitic languages, while the former appears only in Akkadian and some dialects of Aramaic. Some examples are: Sumerian da-ri ('lastingly', from Akkadian dru), Sumerian ra gaba ('riders, messenger', from Akkadian rkibu). A rule of Akkadian phonology is that certain short (and probably unstressed) vowels are dropped. (Modern South Semitic languages in Ethiopia also have SOV order, but these developed within historical times from the classical verbsubjectobject (VSO) language Ge'ez.) Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire (c. 23342154 BC). Its decline began in the Iron Age, during the Neo-Assyrian Empire, by about the 8th century BC (Tiglath-Pileser III), in favour of Old Aramaic. epum (foot) becomes epn (two feet). Nor is there any coordination in the other direction; the syllable -a-, for example, is rendered by the sign A, but also by the sign N. Akkadian belongs with the other Semitic languages in the Near Eastern branch of the Afroasiatic languages, a family native to the Middle East, Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, parts of Anatolia, North Africa, Malta, Canary Islands and parts of West Africa (Hausa). There are, however, some compound prepositions which are combined with ina and ana (e.g. The stems, their nomenclature and examples of the third-person masculine singular stative of the verb parsum (root PRS: 'to decide, distinguish, separate') is shown below: A very often appearing form which can be formed by nouns, adjectives as well as by verbal adjectives is the stative. "Alliances which man of Enunna (has)"). The resulting consonant-vowel pattern differentiates the original meaning of the root. Under the Achaemenids, Aramaic continued to prosper, but Assyrian continued its decline. [5] From about the 25th or 24th century BC, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. In the beginning, from around 1000 BC, Akkadian and Aramaic were of equal status, as can be seen in the number of copied texts: clay tablets were written in Akkadian, while scribes writing on papyrus and leather used Aramaic. This polarity is typical of the Semitic languages and appears also in classical Arabic for example. Beside the previous languages, some nouns were borrowed from Hurrian, Kassite, Ugaritic and other ancient languages. For this reason, forms like lu-prus ('I will decide') were first encountered in Old Babylonian instead of the older la-prus. Thus, the stative in Akkadian is used to convert simple stems into effective sentences, so that the form arr-ta is equivalent to: "you were king", "you are king" and "you will be king". Most obviously, Akkadian does not tolerate word final consonant clusters, so nouns like kalbum (dog) and marum (front) would have illegal construct state forms *kalb and *mar unless modified. As is clear from the above table, the adjective and noun endings differ only in the masculine plural. awl < awlum, ar < arrum). The infinitive of the Akkadian verb is a verbal noun, and in contrast to some other languages the Akkadian infinitive can be declined in case. [] could have been assimilated to the preceding [t], yielding [ts], which would later have been simplified to [ss]. For the sibilants, traditionally // has been held to be postalveolar [], and /s/, /z/, // analyzed as fricatives; but attested assimilations in Akkadian suggest otherwise.