Kirjahaku

This book sets out a new reconstruction for the Semitic case system. It is based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and relations in the attested Semitic languages and, for the first time, brings typological methods to bear in the study of these features in Semitic languages and their reconstruction for proto-Semitic. Professor Hasselbach supports her argument with detailed analyses of a wide range of data and presents it in a way that will be accessible to both Semitists and typologists. The volume is divided into seven chapters: the first discusses basic methodologies used in Semitic linguistics and the limitations thereof. The second presents the evidence for morphological case-marking in the individual Semitic languages, the conventional reconstruction of Proto-Semitic, and the evidence which conflicts with it. The third introduces typological concepts and methods and their deployment in Semitic. Chapter 4 considers the case alignment of early Semitic. Chapter 5 presents a detailed study of marking structures and patterns and considers what these reveal about the nature of the original case system. Chapter 6 looks at the functions of case markers, considers the light they cast on the nominal system, and shows that the reconstruction of early Semitic as ergative is implausible. In the final chapter the author argues that early Semitic had a different nominal system from that of the later Semitic languages. She shows that the course of its development has parallels in other Afroasiatic languages, including Berber and Cushitic. Her book sheds important new light on the history of the Semitic languages and on the early development of the Afro-Asiatic language family as a whole.

Since the second edition of I.J. Gelb's Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar in 1961, which is still the standard grammar of Old Akkadian to this day, a significant number of new texts from the Old Akkadian period has been discovered and important improvements have been made regarding the analysis of Old Akkadian and Early Semitic grammar - particularly phonology - and writing. The present volume seeks to update our understanding of the syllabically written textual material from the Sargonic period (2350-2100 BCE), which contains most of our evidence for the Akkadian used at this period. It consists of a detailed investigation of the Sargonic Akkadian syllabary, phonology and morphology, with specific focus on geographical and dialectal variations that are noticeable in this text corpus, but which have not yet been examined thoroughly. The grammatical investigation further compares specific linguistic features of this period with the two later Akkadian dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian, in order to establish the position of the individual sub-groups of Sargonic Akkadian within the dialect geography of Akkadian.