Akkadian

Akkadian is a dead language now : it was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia during 2,500 years (after, it was replaced by Aramaic). It's not an Indo-European language, but belongs to the semitic group (like Arabic). It evolved into 2 dialects : Assyrian and Babylonian.


The famous Epic of Gilgamesh was originally written in Sumerian, an even older language, then Akkadian.

Those very old languages...I still wonder how they did to decipher them. It's incredible! (Akkadian was deciphered in the XIXth century)

What woke my interest in Akkadian (and Sumerian...) are the tablets covered with cuneiform inscriptions. Some of them look really impressive. How on earth did they manage to read those?

Brief overview : (very brief : hey what, I haven't learnt Akkadian yet *wicked*) : Akkadian is an inflected language (declension alert! -nominative, accusative and genitive), and has two genders : feminine and masculine, and an interesting detail : even the second person pronoun makes a difference between you-masculine and you-feminine.

Here you'll find a very good site if you want to know Akkadian better.

Various links :
=> Parser for finite verbs
=> 23 video lessons that you can watch if you understand French.