17 Facts About Akkadian language

The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund.

Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to c 2500 BC.

Akkadian language is divided into several varieties based on geography and historical period:.

Old Akkadian language, which was used until the end of the 3rd millennium BC, differed from both Babylonian and Assyrian, and was displaced by these dialects.

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.

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Akkadian language began to be rediscovered when Carsten Niebuhr in 1767 was able to make extensive copies of cuneiform texts and published them in Denmark.

Some researchers 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.

Eblaite, formerly thought of as yet another Akkadian dialect, is generally considered a separate East Semitic language.

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.

Rule of Akkadian language phonology is that certain short vowels are dropped.

Formally, Akkadian language has three numbers and three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive).

Akkadian language verb has six finite verb aspects) and three infinite forms (infinitive, participle and verbal adjective).

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.

Akkadian language verbs have thirteen separate derived stems formed on each root.

Thus, the stative in Akkadian language is used to convert simple stems into effective sentences, so that the form sarr-ata is equivalent to: "you were king", "you are king" and "you will be king".

Beside the already explained possibility of derivation of different verb stems, Akkadian language has numerous nominal formations derived from verb roots.

Akkadian language has prepositions which consist mainly of only one word.