I saw an
article on BBC today about a new online poetry archive that is bringing ancient Babylonian writings to the public. The language is known in academia as Akkadian, and it ceased to be a living language about 2000 years ago. As a student of Hebrew and Arabic, related Semitic languages, this was obviously of huge interest to me. The article also links to the archive of the poetry, and if you speak Arabic or Hebrew you will recognize some of the words and forms.
The Professor in the interview about the archive has also released a book designed to a person to teach himself Akkadian. I might pick this up since I'll eventually study other Semitic languages if I go on to Ph.D. studies someday.
The product has only been released in the U.K. so far, but it will be out worldwide sometime soon.
Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide
For some reason, I just love learning dead languages!
4 comments:
oh my i just read that you speak somali that's so cool i'm from djibouti and i speak somali it's probably a different dialect from the one you speak, how did you learn it. Btw could you check out my blog http://withlovefromlondon-mona.blogspot.com/ and follow it please :)
good points and the details are more specific than somewhere else, thanks.
- Thomas
I've heard of this recently. Dead langauges hold lost of clues about the past.
Thanks very good for report, I follow your blog
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