Fun with Akkadian

UPDATE: After this was posted on March 20th, a long-time reader argued that my final result is in fact incorrect. Scroll to bottom to see the debate and the new translation.

Recently a reader asked me how to translate "heart of lion" into Akkadian. More often than not I have to refuse requests to translate something into an ancient script because frankly (a) I can't possibly know every ancient language, and (b) I don't have the time to look it up and translate as a I learn. In this case I really knew little-to-nothing of Akkadian but since the phrase was fairly simple I took it on as a way to learn a bit more about Akkadian.

First, I looked up the words in the expression, namely "heart" and "lion". I also know that Akkadian was an inflectional language which means that the words change form depending on their function in a sentence. In particular, "of lion" is what is called the genitive case, and unlike English where this concept is expressed as a phrase, Akkadian would have it as a derivation of the root of "lion". In other words, I need to find the word for "lion" in Akkadian and then figure out how to modify it into the equivalent of "of lion".

I found this online dictionary which seems to be pretty good.

http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/cuneiform.languages/dictionary/index_en.php

From this, I found libbu to be "heart; belly, tummy; wish, mind; center, inside". Since the first definition is "heart", my guess is that the rest are metaphoric extensions of the original meaning. Next I found lābu to be "lion". This seems to be pretty straightforward.

Now there is an extra wrinkle in that the Akkadian dictionary states that "mimmation is omitted". This reflects a historical change in the Akkadian language itself that during the Old Babylonian period (20th to 16th century BCE) many words ended in -m, so "heart" would've been libbum. However, the last -m is lost after that time, and the word would be libbu in later dialects like Assyrian. You can see http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/words.html#mimmation for more information. I personally prefer to use mimmation form.

Next we want to create the construction "heart of a lion". Naively, we can see that "heart" is the main subject of the phase, the so called nominative case, which would be libbum in Old Babylonian. The expression "of a lion" is the genitive case that we discussed earlier, which would be lābim in Akkadian. So the entire translation should be libbum lābim, right? Wrong!

Turns out that when putting two nouns together in Akkadian there's a special case called the construct state in which the nominative case is shortened down to the bone. The entire nominative ending of -um is omitted, and in this case the double consonant -bb- is reduced to a single consonant, so the final form becomes lib lābim.

See http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/noun.html#declension for more details.

Next we move onto how to write the translated expression in Akkadian cuneiform. To write lib, we use the signs li-ib, so that we can indicate the final -b consonant. . Next up is lābim, where ā is a long vowel, and so we double the vowel [a] like so la-a-bi-im.

And here it is:



And yes, in a geeky way, it was fun.

I highly recommend the Akkadian Language site (http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/) which touches on Mesopotamian history, cuneiform script, Akkadian grammar, and sample texts. Sometimes I've gotten lost in it for hours!

UPDATE: A friend Twitter disagreed with this conclusion of mine. This was followed by much tweeting back and forth and some more research on my part.



Specifically I found "A structural grammar of Babylonian" by Giorgio Buccellati on Google Books and it provided example of what I am looking for. Particularly I found the phrase libbi ālim which means "heart of the city" which is similarly enough to what I'm looking for, although lib ālim might still be correct in a more obscure way.

Here is the new translation in cuneiform:



Don't you just love this new social network thingy?

Reference:

• Akkadian Language, John Heise, http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/
• Akkadian Dictionary, Association Assyrophile de France, http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/cuneiform.languages/dictionary/index_en.php
  
• A structural grammar of Babylonian, Giorgio Buccellati, http://books.google.com/books?id=_Of_CeS5JRUC&pg=PA159&lpg=PA159&dq=libbum+construct+state&source=bl&ots=ccO6FdKi-2&sig=3whMSTkMWAd8nJMl5IpOWnlSSro&hl=en&ei=zveHTejRI4bmsQO-hMmODA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=heart&f=false

A grab bag of wiggling thoughts

It's March 2011 already? My last post was in November 2010 and to be honest I haven't had any ideas on what to talk about. There are, however, updates over at the very Web 1.0 Ancient Scripts website, including new page on Cretan Hieroglyphs and an update on Linear A.

For the next writing system I am going to jump across the globe and work on Rongo Rongo, the mysterious scripts of Easter Island. It's going to be fun to read about all the looney crackpot theories about this script. However, aside from dubious claims with the aliens, supernatural beings, and even wandering Greeks/Egyptians/Phoenicians, there are actually solid research but with various degrees of convincibility. I've done a bit of reading already and it's quite fascinating!

Another subproject that I really want to get started is bibliography on each page. Right now all my sources are available on the Reference page (http://www.ancientscripts.com/reference.html), and I meticulously keep that updated. However, what would be really nice is to have each page lists its own source materials. It would be a bit of an undertaking, but it will really help one of my goals of Ancient Scripts which is to enable readers to go deeper (pardon the Inception reference) into a subject by providing both online and offline resources.

Writing of a Different Mind

Wow it's November. I didn't post any entries for the entire month of October. Me bad. So I figure I return to this long-neglected blog and writing about something different for a change.

I am a huge science fiction fan. I especially like topics related to space and space exploration, and the news of more and more rocky exoplanets had me thinking about astrobiology or perhaps even xenolinguistics. If there are intelligent and sentient species out there, would they have writing systems, and if so, how would they look like?

For one I am a huge skeptic of UFO's as alien crafts so I am tossing out right away all the claims of "hieroglyphs" on supposed artifacts recovered in various Roswell-like incidents. Instead this is going to be a purely theoretical discussion and exploration.

Before we even start to think about alien languages and writing systems, we need to think about, well, how the aliens think and communicate. Here on Earth, humans communicate using sounds, primarily consonants and vowels but also pitch and clicks. Therefore all human writing systems always encode sound in various degrees. Even writing systems claimed as "ideographic" or "logographic" like Chinese do have roots in phonetic representation.

Now, imagine a species that communicates using non-sonic means. One possibility is communication via light. In that scenario, this species would have a light-emitting organ that generate light pulses in a certain range in the electromagnetic spectrum. Each recognizable frequency would represent a basic unit in their "language". Writing system is a way to record ephemeral communication into a more permanent form by a certain encoding scheme, so in the case of this species, their writing will encode light. Instead of "phonograms" (glyphs that represent sounds), maybe they'll employ "photoglyphs" (fyi the word "photograms" already mean something in photography) which would represent frequencies considered to have meaning in their language.

Polarization, the direction of the light wave oscillation, is also another property of light, and might also be encoded in this system. However, like tones among humans, perhaps some cultures of this species would use polarization to distinguish words while others might use it as a extra-linguistic information such as emphasis or subtext.

Another species might have echolocation capabilities and communicate via sonic means like songs or clicks like cetaceans (dolphins, whales, etc). This means that just be focusing their sound "beams" they can visualize three-dimension structures. So it is possible that signs in their writing is three-dimensional. To human eyes, their writing would appear to be abstract sculptures. Like our two-dimensional scripts, shape and position will carry certain meanings or sounds, but depth of indentation or protrusions can also carry linguistic values as well.

The material on which this species's writing system is inscribed might also affect how information is presented. For example, texture of the surface might encode information. Some beams can even penetrate certain materials so there might be nested levels or "shells" of writing inside one another. Echo might also come into play in this writing system, as certain materials might generate echoes that would represent yet another level of meaning, a phenomenon perhaps exploited by the poets of this species.

Another possibility could be a purely chemical-based language. Because chemicals are less transient than light or sound, it is possible that instead of encoding the language in a stable medium, the species could invent a technology to capture the communication chemicals that can be released later by replicating the compounds from the captured ones. Therefore in this scenario, the writing system is not an encoding mechanism, but a purely record/replay mechanism. It might not even be a writing system at all.

While it was a lot of fun coming up with this crazy stuff, whatever imagined species and their languages I can come up with will no doubt be nowhere near as amazing as real extraterrestrial species that we encounter in the future. However, I kind of doubt we'll have any alien contact in my life time. I'll just be happy with some bacteria on Mars or Europa. Just to know there's life out there.

Surat Batak

A few weeks ago I received an email from Indonesia, from someone named Andre Samosir who said that he was a member of the Batak tribe, and that he had emailed me years ago about writing a paper on the Batak script but hadn't gotten the chance to complete it until recently.

Remarkably I actually remembered that email conversation from 2007. So I opened the attachment and read through the paper on the Batak script, or Surat Batak. I thought that it was pretty well-written, especially about the script's changes through time from the earliest stage to the modern age. And since I haven't gotten a chance to write a page on Batak yet, I figured that I would share it here on the blog.

Here is a quick preview:



The full paper can be downloaded through this link. Also, the bibliography is separately listed below:

• Sihombing, T.M. (1986). Filsafat Batak: Tentang Kebiasaan-kebiasaan & Adat-istiadat. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka.

And here is a little about Andre as written by himself:

I am Andre Somba Gugun Samosir, a 28-year-old guy from the Batak tribe in Indonesia. Andre means "man". The "Somba Gugun" in my name is a wordplay from Batak words meaning "asked/prayed for fervently". Samosir is just a family name (albeit being also the name of the island in the center of Lake Toba in Indonesia) of hundreds of people in Batak Toba. Batak clans zealously keep track of their family trees, so for that matter, I am the 15th Samosir in my line of genealogy. I graduated from the medical school of Padjadjaran University, Bandung, West Java in early 2007, and now worked as a general practitioner in a small hospital in Palembang (South Sumatra). In my leisure time among the tiring weeks, I am a passionate reader of just about everything except economy and political stuff. Supercars, gems, quantum physics, linguistics, Esperanto studies, world writing systems, philosophy, and Walt Whitman and Michael Crichton to name a few interests.

To contact Andre, you can find him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/k273

Inspirations

Over at Archaeology magazine there's a blog post titled "How Henry VIII’s Racy Sex Life Turned Me into An Archaeological Writer" that talks about how archaeologist Heather Pringle got inspired for her choice of career by reading popular historical fiction.

This got me thinking why I'm so interested in archaeology and linguistics and all things old that I've been working on Ancient Scripts on and off for almost 15 years now. I can think of a few different reasons why.

When I was a kid way back in the early 80's there was this French/Japanese cartoon/anime called "The Mysterious Cities of Gold" which a mash-up of various legends including El Dorado and Atlantis set among the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century. I was more fascinated by this anime more than big giant mecha or kung-fu superheroes or Ultramen. It didn't take me long to figure out all the Atlantis stuff was fluff, but the fascination with Aztecs and Mayas and Incas stayed to this day.

Another thing that really caught my eye when I was growing up in Hong Kong was the front of my Chinese class workbook at 1st grade (I think). It had ten simple Chinese characters like 山 (mountain), 月 (moon), 水 (water), etc, and their evolution from pictograms and Oracle Bone script through the seal and calligraphic scripts to modern types. I recalled being fascinated by the fact that the pictograms are stylized but recognizable natural objects. I didn't know how far back in time the pictograms were, but I understood that writing systems are not static but fluid and changing. Most of all, I think I developed an understanding of the time scales of human history.

I also have to credit my excellent education in St Francis College in Moravia, Costa Rica ("college" or "colegio" is actually secondary school in Costa Rica, sort of equivalent to middle school and high school together in USA), for inspiring my interests in all things ancient. First in 7th grade there was Maya arithmetic in math class. Learning to do math in base-20 is fun! Then there was units on ancient history and for some reason I got really interested in Ancient Egypt. I even did a project on Pre-Dynastic Egyptian art for Art class. The teacher took a look at my giant tome and promptly gave me 100%.

Then there was Linguistics 11 at UC Berkeley. While I was pursuing a computer science degree in university, I also took a lot of archaeology and linguistics classes. I even tried to figure out if there was an anthropology minor, but they didn't have that at the time. Linguistics 11 was Writing Systems. In other words, that was the beginning of Ancient Scripts. I started the website shortly afterwards, around 1996, and it's been alive ever since.

Future Plans

It's been a while since I've last posted as I've been just ridiculously swamped. So instead of talking about something really interesting, I'll talk about what interesting things I'd like to do on Ancient Scripts. Aside from creating new pages for scripts, I'm planning some new higher-level content:

• Bibliography on each page. Right now all my references are jammed into a single page. I would like each page to display its source material, as I actually get quite a few number of requests for that.
  
• More interactive pages. I'm working on an Alphabet comparison chart. It's sort of based on the South Asian script comparison widget but a bit more complicated because alphabets are far more diverse than South Asian abugidas. One letter in one alphabet could correspond to two letters in another alphabet.
  
• Page(s) on decipherment. This will walk through how the decipherment of a writing system actually happens. And why some scripts can't be deciphered yet.
• Unicode. A lot of ancient scripts are being included in the Unicode standard, which means if there's a font for it, you can see it on your computer/smart phone/tablet screen. It'd be cool to display which scripts have Unicode and assemble a more comprehensive list of fonts.
  
• Glossary. Certain keywords like "logogram" or "boustrophedon" will be active when the mouse pointer is over them and display a brief explanation

Script-wise right now I'm working on Lao, but for some reason I can't get it to work on my ancient version of Photoshop. So I'm using GIMP instead which is just different enough that it drives me bonkers. But do expect that coming soon.

I also uploaded a revised Aztec page the past weekend. I added the syllabary and new examples of glyphs including pure logograms, rebus, and phonetic signs. The link is http://www.ancientscripts.com/aztec.html

Lastly I have a lot of suggestions and corrections to make. Keep those emails coming!

What's in a name? Part II

Years ago when we were expecting our first child, my wife and I decided to name our son Alexander. We thought that it's a good solid name because it (a) can't be teased, (b) is not the most common but not too rare or weird, and (c) is a very ancient name. According to dictionaries, it is Greek in origin, Αλέξανδρος, meaning "protector of men" (while seemingly a lofty goal, in fact it has a martial connotation and implies one who protects others in battle).

Perhaps the most famous Alexander in history was Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 BCE), also known as Alexander the Great who conquered a big chunk of the eastern Mediterranean as well as Mesopotamia, Persia, and even bits of India. But even at this time, the late Classical Greek/Early Hellenistic period, Alexander was already an ancient name. There were earlier Alexanders from Classical Greece, such as Alexander of Corinth who lived from the 9th to 8th century BCE.

However, the name is even earlier than that. A clay tablet from the Mycenaean period (16th to 12th century BCE) of Greece found in Mycenae itself contains the sequence of Linear B signs a-re-ka-sa-da-ra (see figure 1.b), which reads Alexandra, the female form of Alexandros. Since Greek names typically can have both male and female forms, there is no doubt that Alexandros was being used as a name at least in the 12th century BCE.

Coincidentally, the late Mycenaean period is also widely believed to correspond to when the Trojan war happened. In the 19th century German archaeologist Henrich Schliemann discovered the ruins of Troy in Asia Minor (Turkey), bringing the Trojan war from legend into history. Later archaeological discoveries revealed the powerful Hittite Empire which ruled much of Turkey except for the very western part where a number of somewhat independent principalities existed. The imperial Hittite archives mention one particular kingdom named Wilusa, and one of its king was called Alaksandu (see figure 1.c) who lived around 1280 BCE.

What is really interesting is that Troy is actually Ilion in Classical Greek, and likely Wilion in Homeric and Mycenaean Greek. This means that Wilusa mentioned in the Hittite archives was probably Troy.

And what about this king Alaksandu, whose name suspiciously sounds like Alexander? Going back to the Iliad, we find that Paris, the prince of Troy who stole away Helen, was in fact also named Alexander. In other words, the mythological Paris of Troy was based on the historical Alaksandu (or Alexander) of Wilusa. Once again we find some grain of truth in myths and legends.

This brings up an interesting question. Earlier I mentioned that Alexander is a Greek name, but Trojans in the 13th century BCE most likely did not speak Greek. The most probable language spoken in Troy/Wilusa was Luwian. Does this mean that Alaksandu was actually a Luwian name that the Greeks adopted and reinterpreted into having a Greek meaning? Or Alaksandu a Greek name adopted by Luwians? Or maybe even a Greek named Alexander somehow weaseled his way into being king of a foreign city? Like the Trojan War, it's part history and part fantasy and we'll always be guessing as to what really happened nearly three thousand years ago.



Regardless of whether Alexander is Greek or Luwian, I find it amazing the depth of history and stories carried in everyday names. Why don't you investigate your name and see where it leads you?

References:

• Chadwick, John, et al, "The Mycenae Tablets III", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 52, No. 7 (1962), pp. 1-76
• Hahn, E.A., "Hittite genuš(š)uš, genuš(š)i, and pankuš(š)i", Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1965), pp. 295-307