Recently I have begun learning Sumerian using primarily Hayes' third edition manual from 2019. I also know some Latin and try to pronounce it correctly.

I wanted to do the same for Sumerian but a lot seems quite uncertain. I myself am mostly interested in the period of the third Ur dynasty, which does seem to be a period with less problems than e.g the earlier periods, as some sources seemed to suggest if /u/ and /o/ were seperate they would have merged by then.

So far I have taken a look at Jagersma's section on phonology, Hayes' section on phonology, and Edzard's section on phonology as well as a literal handful of papers in order to craft a picture of the pronunciation of Sumerian during this period. There does seem to be a lot of consensus on the consonants and the problematic ones seem to have vanished by then; It seems that stress rather than tone is now assumed, and vowel length seems to be quite accepted now.

The vowels seem to be the real problem. My question is if anyone has ever tried to reconstruct a Sumerian pronunciation scheme from this period by comparing the literature and if not, if you could give me some pointers for further research. I have seen some bleak statements like that our Sumerian would've been unintelligible to that of a native Sumerian speaker. I don't really care about infallibility since this doesn't seem possible but I'd like to explore it further both because I find it fascinating and would love to incorporate the latest research and not just wing it. Thanks in advance!

To give an example concerning the vowels, Hayes says that "dumu" most likely was pronounced as "domu", but doesn't really say why. Jagersma doesn't appear to accept an "o", and yet another source said that "by the Ur-III period, /u/ and /o/would already have merged.""

I'm looking for some work about the different names of the city of Babylon. I'm interested mainly in the form E.KI and would like to know its first attestation (and subsequent, if possible). Is there any article/book I could consult for this information?

𒊩𒆪 (MUNUS.KU, nin9), the term that is usually translated as 'sister' (incl. in translations of Inanna's Descent), seems to be the cuneiform female equivalent of gala 𒍑𒆪 (UŠ.KU), a term usually understood to mean 'lamenting priest' of Inanna, pertaining to figures which are likely to have transgressed modern cisgender and heterosexual norms. I was wondering why Assyriologists have chosen to translate this term (MUNUS.KU) as 'sister' instead?

If you include possible puns or alternative readings for the cuneiform 𒊩𒆪 (MUNUS.KU) - especially the 𒆪 sign - it even seems to imply a partner in a non-marital sexual relationship (that possibly doesn't transgress traditional ideas about chasity, i.e. withholding from piv intercourse). As such, it might be rendered as 'buttocks-woman' (𒆪 as dur2), 'laying woman' (𒆪 as ku), 'woman one lays with' (id.), all terms which seems to indicate 'bedpartner' or 'girlfriend', with definite non-traditional sexual overtones.

In Inanna's Descent to the Underworld, Inanna is called this term when Neti (the gatekeeper of the underworld) reports to Ereshkigal that 'thy 𒊩𒆪' wishes to enter the underworld. If what I said above is correct, wouldn't this imply that Inanna and Ereshkigal are (or were at one point) lovers rather than 'sisters'?

I'm Assyrian and speak Assyrian (i guess you guys would call it Neo-Assyrian but I still speak some aramaic not as fluent tho), how similar is Akkadian and Assyrian? I know some words transfer over or are very similar like Akkadian: nimru(m) being leopard and Neo-Assyrian: ܢܸܡܪܵܐ(' nim ra:) being only a slight change or like abu in Akkadian for father and aba or baba in Assyrian.

Hi all. Quite a few of you (and equally as many on Facebook) repeated what we already knew: There is a demand for learning how to speak Akkadian. Although many of you (especially the specialists) have also voiced doubts and given suggestions, I think there is enough interest that it is warranted to try nonehtheless.

I have created a Discord server, the reason being that Discord has a forum functionality, much more qucik messaging than Reddit, pre-existent ancient language communities like the Latin one, and it has voice chat functionalities as well. The link is https://discord.gg/5zQW9v4FyE and I suggest anyone who is even remoytely interested join.

When everyone has joined and the people from Facebook and those from Reddit can communicate, I suggest we first categorise who is who and what our backgrounds are, and then we can set up a plan. I think advance planning will be very important and we should set ambitious but realistic goals. We should also establish an agreed upon methodology right from the beginning, as I am sure we will run into many problems. Feel free to join the discord server now, even if you have no prior experience in Akkadian. Motivation is probably the most important for now.

Hey all,

Whilst doing my revision of Huehnarguard I once again got confronted with the presence of verbal aspect in Semitic. Although I am no stranger to aspect from my studies of Ancient Greek, I must say that I am quite confused by it in Akkadian.

Both Huehnergard and Soden mention that it is not a strictly temporal form, but rather mostly an aspectual form, and that e.g the preterite can denote a present or future action. Neither, however, seems to give an example of this usage. From what I can remember from my reading of original texts last time, translating e.g the preterite as a past time almost never gave issues.

I myself supposed that perhaps this could occur in temporal languages where in English we would e.g use the future tense or the pluperfect (the latter of which Huehnargerd does seem to cite), but am I right in thinking this, and would anyone be able to cite some actual examples from Old Babylonian texts? In addition, does anyone know where I might find a more detailed explanation on aspect in Akkadian, as well as perhaps the usages of the various "tenses" in general? Although I am sure the broad lines will be the same as in Ancient Greek, seeing that the languages are from a different family I cannot imagine everything will be identical by any means.

Hey guys!

I am a Classics student and outside of university am involved with the spoken Latin and Ancient Greek communities, which means I am taking classes in how to actively speak Latin and Ancient Greek as one would speak English, Dutch, or whatever your native language might be. In the past I have studied Old Babylonian (and a little Sargonic Akkadian) via Huehnergards grammar and then went on to read Old Babylonian letter collections and some stories. I sincie abandoned Akkadian after feeling like I had pretty much exhausted the corpus of interesting literature of that time period.

Now that I have gained more experience with seeing dead languages get revitalised/actually used beyond writing in them, I have gained the desire to restart learning Akkadian (as well as due to the fact it is required in order to take Sumerian classes at mu university). Seeing how much extra passion speaking in Latin and Ancient Greek gave me, I'd love to retry to do something similar for Akkadian (specifically the Old Babylonian phase, although I wouldn't mind drawing vocabulary and constructions from later periods if they aren't found in the older phases).

I browsed around this subreddit to see if anybody else has already gone through this process and now speaks Akkadian, but I didn't find anything except a group that had failed as well as the immersion channel that seems to have stopped producing content and whose sentences didn't get more complex than "I live in Babylon". As a result I wanted to ask: Are there any people that either already speak or interested in learning to speak Old Babylonian Akkadian? If so, perhaps we could give it a new shot. I have researched the phonology and have tried to create a pronunciation scheme based on what I personally found most convincing, but I am not a historical linguist and so don't know how accurate it is. Apart from that I have been revising my knowledge through Huehnergard's grammar and Soden's grammar, as well as just by reading.

Can anyone please help me understand the rules and how to phrase something?

I want to use a phrase kind of like a title like "Guardian of the King" or Guardian of the Home. I don't know if this is possible or makes sense but I want the emphasis on the Guardian. Like the difference between Guardian of the King, and King's Guardian, the first is more focused on the Guardian. They are the Guardian who guards the King, vs the King has a Guardian.

Regardless if that emphasis is possible what I actually want to say is Lamassu of Pazuzu. (It's for a story, cheesy I know) But how do I form that? Is it Lamassu Pazuzi? Does Pazuzu as a name change?

Does Lamassu stay the same? Or is Lamassu plural and it should be more like lamassum Pazuzi?

I've read a few pages and tried a few YouTube videos, but everytime I think I get it, they use an example which I can't make sense of.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

working on a project for college and i want to make a cuneiform tablet. problem is, i don't know cuneiform and alphabet charts can only get me so far. so far i've been phonetically spelling out akkadian words with a syllable chart, but it doesn't include a syllable that i need and i'm kind of at a loss. any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello everyone, I’m not a specialist, but I’d like to get your advice on a topic: the origins of the first chapters of the Bible and their potential roots in Sumerian traditions. Do you find this topic interesting, and would it be appropriate to discuss it in your group?

I’m intending to make a 40k space marine chapter that is order aligned and am curious as to the translation and the cuneiform sign.

In Law 128 of the Code of Hammurabi, I couldn't help but notice that the word contract is in its plural/oblique form here

So does this mean there used to multiple marriage contracts for one marriage?

What are they?

Or are they simply copies of the same marriage contract, to be kept by different parties to the marriage?

In this Law 200 of the Code of Hammurabi, I was wondering if the "rank" here refers to one of the three status for Hammurabi's subjects, namely awīlum, muškēnum and wardum?

In that case, as in the context it has expressly indicated that the case is between two awīlum, wouldn't that make "meḫrīšu" redundant?

Also in the next Law 201, the punishment for the same crime when the victim is a muškēnum is specified. But then there is no further specification for the crime when the victim is a wardum. Does it mean that such a crime against a wardum was not punishable?

Is it true that similar to rome it was fine as long as the bottom/submissive one was of lower class than his partner?

Hello. I'm trying to find out more about the etymology of the word "Jerwan" where the ancient aqueduct is located in Iraq. Can anyone help? Does anyone know what the original Assyrian name for the location is? Or whether Jerwan is an ancient Assyrian or Akkadian word. Thank you

Hello everyone, I have been looking for the second tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh(Specifically the last two rows of the inverse side) in untransliterated cuneiform, as I was planning to get them tattooed as a half-sleeve for myself. I am yet to find any place where the text is written out in cuneiform, and the tablet’s resolution in the photos leaves a lot to imagination. If anyone could help me out, would be really happy, thank you.

My retirement project is a software system for parsing and inflection of ancient Greek. I'm skeptical about the current crop of LLM/ML/generative AI systems, and also extremely skeptical about their application to ancient languages, which seems to be a lot of hype about systems that actually don't perform well. Does anyone have any impressions they could share about the system called Akkademia, which is described in this paper by Gutherz et al.?

Maybe it's apples-to-oranges when I apply my expectations about software for Greek to a system that deals with Akkadian. I guess there may be a lot of Akkadian texts out there that have never been looked at carefully, which is very different from the situation with classical Greek.