was searching up how to read akkadian (yknow, the average thursday) and found this lmao, enjoy
I should mention that this (kind of) doesn’t teach you how to read the Akkadian alphabet, only the language itself (so transliterated)
Cuneiform is wild. I did a semester of Akkadian on my year abroad and it was very cool, but even people who have spent their whole adult lives studying it still can’t read it easily because of how convoluted it is. We had to learn to read something like 60 ‘basic’ symbols for the exam (although we still got a cheat sheet in the exam), which were just consonant-vowel symbols, but there are so many symbols with so many readings to learn, you would have to dedicate your entire life to it.
I thought i’d have a better experience understanding it than most since i speak a semitic language (Arabic). I didn’t. I fucking didn’t 😭 It’s a clusterfuck of a logographic/syllabaric language and that fucking weird ass Tthga sound. I thought it would be pronounced ṣad like every other semitic language but wtf is Tthga???
Tbf i do recognize a lot of the words (pam:fam,mouth) (abdu:'abd,slave) (shamash:shams,sun) etc, but its still incredibly weird. I have a better time reading hebrew than that stuff lmao. Makes sense since akkadian is very lexically distant from arabic/hebrew, but arabic/hebrew only split ~4000 years ago.
