Akkadian Sentences about the Present Time (II/2)

774 Morphosyntax and Text Structure in Akkadianin the sense ‘he holds, he is carrying/bringing, he has.’ 37 As all predicativeadjectives, these participles take phonologically reduced post-positivesubject pronouns of the 1st and 2nd persons: b-ī¯ay ¢"īn-nā ‘I hold (it) inmy hands.’ 38 It is also worth notice that leqûm and maārum display theirfamous productive “Haben” A readings of the SC in OB, but not in OA.A natural explanation will be that these are technical usages of law andbusiness that developed within OB. In business OA, the correspondingsenses must have been expressed by different exponents.VA marum ‘received.’(45) mâtum ‘to die’The SC is common in both OB and OA; it is better attested in OA, andoften appears in the syntactic slots of the Perf. or Pret., 39 while a purelyresultative usage of mēt is also well known in OA (unlike that of the SC Pof dâkum in the whole of our corpus): ANŠE.ÚI.ru-kà me-tù ‘Deine Esel sindtot’ (Prag I 426:11), 1 ANŠE me-et (ibid. 22), and passim in the accounts ofgains and losses. Death of humans is often reported in the same way, e. g.PN me-et ší-im-tù-šu ú-lá i-ší-im ‘PN has died without having left his lastwill’ (BIN 6, 2:3ff.), lā libbi ilim-ma aššitī me-ta-at ‘alas, my wife has died’(TCL 4, 30:4); cf. same kind of usage in a conditional clause: šummamin meta-ku‘if I had died/if I were dead’ (TCL 19, 32:30). An instance of the SC ina typically preterital slot: ½ TÚG i-nu-mì DUMU.MUNUS-sú me-ta-at-ni a-naPN ú-šé-bi 4 -il 5 ‘½ Stoff habe ich, nachdem seine Tochter gestorben war, zuPN geschickt’ (BIN 4, 141 = Ulshöfer 1995, No. 397:143), and see alsoe. g. KUG 35:8, Prag I 648:7. Actually, the Pret. of muātum seems to be underrepresentedin OA “in favour” of the SC. The Perf. has not been foundin main clauses.In OB, unlike in OA, the t-Perf. is well attested in main clauses, it isused oftener than the Pret., and this unusual evidence might be explainedby a “middle” (or, better, “unaccusative”) lexical meaning of thisverb coupled with the etymologically “middle voice” nature of the t-Perf.37Cf. also a very telling example from Mandaic, quoted in Nöldeke 1875:381,w-ngydy-l trysar malakia ‛und 12 Engel ziehen es’ (NGD ‛to draw, to lead forth’).38See Goldenberg 1998:610 for references to the grammars of Syriac that illustratethis feature, and for parallels with Hebrew.39Mâtum is another prime example of a verb with “improperly” used SC apudKouwenberg (forthcoming 7.3.3). His evidence comes from OA, MA, and SB.