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Akkadian (lišānum akkadītum) was a Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly by the Assyrians and Babylonians. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated, language isolate. The name of the language is derived from the city of Akkad, a major center of Mesopotamian civilization.
Akkadian is divided into several varieties based on geography and historical period: [1]
Akkadian scribes wrote the language using cuneiform script, an earlier writing system devised by the Sumerians using wedge-shaped signs pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes the adapted cuneiform script could represent either (a) Sumerian logograms (i.e. picture-based characters representing entire words), (b) Sumerian syllables, (c) Akkadian syllables, or (d) phonetic complements. Cuneiform was in many ways unsuited to Akkadian: among its flaws was its inability to represent important phonemes in Semitic, including a glottal stop, pharyngeals, and emphatic consonants. In addition, cuneiform was a syllabary writing system — i.e. a consonant plus vowel comprised one writing unit — frequently inappropriate for a Semitic language made up of triconsonantal roots (i.e. three consonants minus any vowels).
As far as can be told from the cuneiform orthography of Akkadian, several Proto-Semitic phonemes are lost in Akkadian. Proto-Semitic glottal and pharyngeal stops and fricatives are lost as consonants, either by sound change or orthographically, but they gave rise to a vowel quality e not known in Proto-Semitic. The interdental and the voiceless lateral fricatives () merged with sibilants as in Canaanite, leaving 19 consonantal phonemes:
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There are four vowels, with distinctive vowel length:
Akkadian is an inflected language, and as a Semitic language its grammatical features are highly similar to those found in Classical Arabic. It possesses two genders (masculine and feminine), distinguished in second person pronouns (you-masc., you-fem.) and verb conjugations; three cases for nouns and adjectives (nominative, accusative, and genitive); three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); and unique verb conjugations for each first, second, and third person pronoun.
Akkadian nouns are declined according to gender, number and case. There are three genders; masculine, feminine and common. Only a very few nouns belong to the common gender. There are also three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Adjectives are declined exactly like nouns.
Akkadian verbs have thirteen separate root stems. The three basic modifications of the simple stem (numbered I, or called the Grundstamm, G-Stamm) are doubling of the second root-letter (II or Doppelungsstamm, D-Stamm), š-prefix (III or Š-Stamm) or n-prefix (IV or N-Stamm). A second series is created by infixing the syllable ta between the first two root letters, creating a generally reflexive set of stems. These two sets of four stems each are the most commonly used in Akkadian. A third set is created by the infixation of the syllable tan between the first two root letters. The final stem uses both the š-prefix and doubling of the second root letter. The stems, their nomenclature and examples of the third-person masculine singular permansive of the verb parāsum (root PRS: 'to decide, distinguish, separate') is shown below:
Akkadian verbs usually display the tri-consonantal root, though some roots with two- or four-consonant roots also exist. There are three tenses: present, preterite and permansive. Present tense indicates incomplete action and preterite tense indicates complete action, while permansive tense expresses a state or condition and usually takes a particle.
Akkadian, unlike Arabic, has mainly regular plurals (i.e. no broken plurals), although some masculine words take feminine plurals. In that respect, it is similar to Hebrew.
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 Verb-subject-object (VSO) word order. (Modern South Semitic languages in Ethiopia also have SOV order, but these developed within historical times from the classical SVO language Geez.) It has been hypothesized that this word order was a result of influence from the Sumerian language, which was also SOV. There is evidence that native speakers of both languages were in intimate language contact, forming a single society for at least 500 years, so it is entirely likely that a sprachbund could have formed. Further evidence of an original VSO or SVO ordering can be found in the fact that direct and indirect object pronouns are suffixed to the verb. 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.