# Akkadian : tones?



## raptor

In the ePSD Akkadian lexicon, there are some words with subscript numbers, which I have taken to mean different things.  I think this is similar to words in English (or Spanish, German, Russian, etc) that are spelled the same but mean different things.

Does anyone know if tones, such as those used in some Chinese dialects were used in Akkadian, or is this knowledge lost?  Otherwise, would context be the only way to distinguish different meanings?  Some of them have so many different meanings, it would be confusing. 

Thank you!

raptor


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## Q-cumber

raptor said:


> In the ePSD Akkadian lexicon, there are some words with subscript numbers, which I have taken to mean different things.  I think this is similar to words in English (or Spanish, German, Russian, etc) that are spelled the same but mean different things.
> 
> Does anyone know if tones, such as those used in some Chinese dialects were used in Akkadian, or is this knowledge lost?  Otherwise, would context be the only way to distinguish different meanings?  Some of them have so many different meanings, it would be confusing.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> raptor



Hi *raptor*!

   In fact, tones (four tones + 5th neutral) are in used Mandarin, which is the official spoken language of China; different tones can completely change a meaning of a word (a phrase) in Chinese.
    In Russian language, we use stresses (emphasis), that might generally change meanings of words. However, stressing is a secondary language tool, so to speak. In most cases, improper stresses make words sound illiterate, but don't affect the semantics.


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## Tjahzi

Hm, since Akkadian is/was a semitic language I think it's very unlikely that it has/had a tone system. On the other hand, we can't know for sure since there are a few Afro-Asiatic languages which still today are tonal. Those are spoken prettty far away (from where Akkadian was spoken) though. 

I don't know what it could be, maybe references to how it was written? Or maybe I they denote other orthografic pecularities? Sorry, I don't know. 


On a side note, next to all "Chinese dialects" have tone (or pitch accent) and tone could be seen as a way to create additional vowels. Just as English distinguishes "a", "e", and "i" from each other, Mandarin distinguishes "á", "à" and "ā".


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## Outsider

When transcribing ancient extinct languages which scholars have had to reconstruct, it often happens that they know there was a certain phoneme in the language, and they know its approximate value, but they aren't completely sure how exactly it was pronounced. The subscript numbers are used to distinguish between words that were probably homophones or had a very similar pronunciation, but had different meanings and were spelled differently. This site seems to explain this well. I have never heard of Akkadian having tones.


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## palomnik

Outsider said:


> When transcribing ancient extinct languages which scholars have had to reconstruct, it often happens that they know there was a certain phoneme in the language, and they know its approximate value, but they aren't completely sure how exactly it was pronounced. The subscript numbers are used to distinguish between words that were probably homophones or had a very similar pronunciation, but had different meanings and were spelled differently. This site seems to explain this well. I have never heard of Akkadian having tones.


 
The fact of the matter is that we know very little about how ancient languages like Akkadian, Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian were pronounced, and any specialist on the subject will concede as much; the spelling that we see in history books is largely determined by convention among scholars, sometimes just to make the words pronounceable.

And languages can change profoundly in pronunciation structure over the course of several thousand years; some scholars claim that Chinese was not tonal 2500 years ago.  If that's true, who's to say that Akkadian was or wasn't tonal, just based on the evidence of modern Afro-Asiatic languages?


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## Outsider

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neither is it evidence of presence. 

Tonality seems to be a feature which is easily borrowed by neighboring languages (they don't even need to be genetically related). If Akkadian had been tonal, one would expect other languages in the same region to be tonal, and (possibly) one of them to have remained tonal long enough for that information to be avaliable. Yet as far as I know there are no tonal languages in the Middle East, and no known language spoken there in the past was tonal.

To answer Raptor's question perhaps more directly, the fact that scholars use a similar notation for Akkadian than the one used in Pinyin to represent tones is not because they are convinced that Akkadian had tones.


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## Tjahzi

I very much believe Outsider is correct here. However, the fact that thse numbers are there to "distinguish words which are written with the same syllables" does indeed imply that there is a pronounciation that we either cannot write in any better way, or simply don't know about. So in theory, why couldn't it be tones? 

I stated that it was unlikely that Akkadian was tonal since no (closely) related languages are tonal nor any other in the region (as Outsider pointed out).


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## raptor

Thank you especially to Outsider, for the website link.  It does explain that homophones were written quite differently, "having the same phonetic value".  If tones were not used then, is context the only hint at which meaning is implied?

Thank you all!

raptor


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