page_title: Akkadian language
section_title: Descent from Proto-Semitic
hierarchical_section_title: Akkadian language / Phonetics and phonology / Descent from Proto-Semitic
caption_attribution_description: English: Inscription in Babylonian, in the Xerxes I inscription at Van, 5th century BCE "Ahuramazda is the great god, the greatest god who created the sky and created the land and created humans Who gave prosperity to the humans Who made Xerxes king King of many kings, being the only ruler of the totality of all lands “I am Xerxes, the great king, the king of kings, the king of the lands, king of all the languages, king of the great and large land, the son of king Darius the Achaemenian” The king Xerxes says: “the king Darius, my father, praised be Ahuramazda, made a lot of good, and this mountain, he ordered to work its cliff and he wrote nothing on it so, me, I ordered to write here. May Ahuramazda protect me, with all the gods and so my kingdom and what I have done."
context_page_description: Akkadian is an extinct East Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until its gradual replacement by Akkadian-influenced Old Aramaic among Mesopotamians by the 8th century BCE.
  It is the earliest attested Semitic language.
  It used the cuneiform script, which was originally used to write the unrelated, and also extinct, Sumerian. Akkadian is named after the city of Akkad, a major centre of Mesopotamian civilization during the Akkadian Empire.
  The mutual influence between Sumerian and Akkadian had led scholars to describe the languages as a Sprachbund.
  Akkadian proper names were first attested in Sumerian texts from around the mid 3rd-millennium BCE.
  From about the 25th or 24th century BCE, texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear.
  By the 10th century BCE, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria and Babylonia, known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively.
  The bulk of preserved material is from this later period, corresponding to the Near Eastern Iron Age.
context_section_description: Several Proto-Semitic phonemes are lost in Akkadian. The Proto-Semitic glottal stop *ʾ, as well as the fricatives *ʿ, *h, *ḥ are lost as consonants, either by sound change or orthographically, but they gave rise to the vowel quality e not exhibited in Proto-Semitic. The voiceless lateral fricatives (*ś, *ṣ́) merged with the sibilants as in Canaanite, leaving 19 consonantal phonemes. Old Akkadian preserved the /*ś/ phoneme longest but it eventually merged with /*š/, beginning in the Old Babylonian period. The following table shows Proto-Semitic phonemes and their correspondences among Akkadian, Modern Standard Arabic and Tiberian Hebrew:
  These are only distinguished from the Ø (zero) reflexes of /h/ and /ʾ/ by /e/-coloring the adjacent vowel *a, e.g. PS *ˈbaʿ(a)l-um ('owner, lord') → Akk. bēlu(m) (Dolgopolsky 1999, p. 35).
caption: Inscription in Babylonian, in the Xerxes I inscription at Van, 5th century BCE
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