Akkadian Audio
One of the incidents of my years at college stands out for sheer oddity. I was in a class studying Koine Greek - the Greek used in the first century and which is the language of the New Testament. There was also a Greek lad in the class, born and brought up in Greece and speaking Greek as his first language. He had expected to "walk" the class, but in fact he was struggling a bit because of the fact that Greek has changed so much over the years.
Of course, that is only to be expected: just look at English. Four hundred years ago thou wouldst be reading these words in a booke for which thou wouldst have payed a handsome pryce and thy wyffe would be looking over thy shoulder and demanding that thou shouldst stop wasting go and go our and mowe the lawn. Give it another four hundred years and the ignorant swine of the future will be putting apostrophe's i'n every'thing and sprink'ling their pro'se with "innit" and "like" - in fact, shades of Big Brother, those might well be the only words that survive and we will be reduced to communicating with grunts and gesticulations.
So, as I said, poor old Aristotle struggled, but the iron really entered his soul one day when the prof called me to one side and asked me to record a piece on tape, to be used in the college's new Language Lab. My accent and pronunciation, said the prof, were the best in the class. He was particularly scathing about the modern Greek habit of pronouncing "beta" as "v" and the letter "upsilon" as "f", two faults of which Aristotle simply could not rid himself.
That led me onto considering how we know what ancient languages sounded like and I discovered that it is a considerable can of worms. Experts still argue as to whether Julius Caesar declared "Vene, Vidi, Vici" or "Weeny, Weedy, Weaky" (as the book "1066 and All That" alleges) and if Latin can hold such areas of disagreement, what hope is there for ancient Egyptian or other languages of the Middle East?
Of course the bottom line is that we simply cannot know how dead languages were pronounced. All we can do is make educated guesses. For example, Champollion deduced that certain hieroglyphic characters sounded like "k" and "t" because he found them in the names of Greek rulers such as Cleopatra and Ptolemy. Other letters and even complete words were guessed at on the basis of similar words in Coptic, the descendant from ancient Egyptian.
Yet even when we have done all the research, we still cannot be 100% certain how a word was pronounced. Should we say "tom-ah-to" or "tom-ay-to" as the Americans do? And what poor student of English - whether from darkest Africa or the far distant future - could ever guess that the pronunciation of "tomato" is not a guide to the pronunciation of "potato"?
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| Dr Martin Worthington has produced audio files of ancient Babylonian. |
Nevertheless, Dr Martin Worthington of Cambridge University has been working hard on discovering how to pronounce ancient Akkadian and is sufficiently confident of his conclusions that he has recorded a number of cuneiform documents and put them on the internet! If you want to know what Harmmurabi's laws sounded like when they were first promulgated, visit his website and you will be automatically redirected to the Cambridge University website where you can listen to such treasures as the Law Code of Hammurabi, parts of the Gilgamesh Epic, the story of Ishtar's descent to the Underworld and, most useful of all, the correct incantation to be said if you have been bitten by a dog.
Unfortunately, despite the redoubtable scholarship displayed by Dr Worthington in ancient documents, it would appear that his expertise in modern documents is not nearly so formidable. Not only does the URL given above redirect to a horribly poorly-designed website, but the transcription and translation of the text disappears if you want to listen to it and instead of being able to follow the text as it is read, you find yourself on another page entirely watching a normal audio player countdown to zero as the file is played.
Add to that the immortal line, "In the extispicy which I am performing" and I can only recommend the good doctor to stick to his Akkadian and get one of his first-year students to write his websites for him. In fact, he could probably find greater expertise down at his local primary school and at least the kids down there won't be eager to show off their expertise in Latin at the expense of the casual reader.
Having said all that, I can only commend Dr Worthington and his team for their diligence in working out the pronunciation of this long-dead language. Whatever faults there may be, they are at least well-researched faults. With luck, the professor's efforts will attract more people to the study of cuneiform and the rich heritage of documents the Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians have left to the world. I look forward to the issue of a CD of Akkadian love songs!
expertise in Latin "Extispicy" is the practice of consulting animal entrails in order to predict the future. Only a Cambridge professor would use the word on a website intended for the general public without bothering to provide an explanation or definition. No doubt, like the inhabitants of Barnsley, he and his fellow dons speak of little else. Return
the inhabitants of Barnsley According to the (possibly apocryphal) story, the famous lawyer Gilbert Gray QC was appearing before a particular judge in defence of a man from Barnsley in Yorkshire. Wishing to impress the great man, the judge interrupted him at one point to ask, "I take it, Mr Gray, that your client is familiar with the maxim: 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes'?" (Who guards the guardians?)
Without missing a beat, Gilbert Grey replied, "In Barnsley, m'lud, they speak of little else." (It is only fair to add that the quip has been attributed to various legal gentlemen in a variety of legal cases and applied to a wide range of legal maxims.)
© Kendall K. Down 2010
