Akkadian and Amorite Phonology

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8 Giorgio BuccellatiMap 1. Geo-Chronological Distribution of Akkadian Dialectsand of Amorite
Akkadian and Amorite Phonology 9a diagrammatic rendering of the dialects across this area). Akkadian (withEblaite) is the language common to all city-states in this region; in otherwords, we are assuming the presence of native speakers of Akkadian fromthe Gulf to the Mediterranean. The term "Akkadian," which continues tobe used for the language as a whole, is taken from the name of the politicalentity which controlled most of Syro-Mesopotamia in the third quarter ofthe third millennium. Amorite is originally the language of the rural classesof the Middle Euphrates (see $ 1.2.2), which extended originally to thesteppe and began towards the end of the third millennium to migrate towardssouthern Mesopotamia. The term "Amorite" is derived from theHebrew rendering of an original Amorite term, which is rendered as Marduin Sumerian and Arnumu in Akkadian, by which these people identifiedthemselves as an ethnic group.In the early second millennium there begins a marked differentiation betweenBabylonian and Assyrian, an innovation which mirrors the politicaldevelopment which resulted in the establishment of vast macro-regionalstates. (Obviously, the names of the two languages are derived from those ofthe political capitals.) Babylonian covers the entire area of Syro-Mesopotamia,while Assyrian is limited to a small enclave in the northeast (at least interms of native speakers, excluding merchant colonies which are establishedas far west as central Anatolia). Individuals bearing Amorite names are nowfound over the whole of Syro-Mesopotamia, and we may assume that theywere becoming more and more assimilated in the urban (Akkadian) setting;we presume that their competence as native speakers decreased as theybecame assimilated, until we lose all trace of even their names by the middleof the second millennium. (The political entity known as the kingdom ofAmurru in the later second millennium may in fact be an efflorescence ofearlier Amorite migrations, but it has no direct linguistic connection withAmorite.)In the latter part of the second millennium, the geographical domainwhere we can expect native speakers becomes progressively restricted to thecore areas corresponding to present-day southern and northern Iraq, respectively;Babylonian and Assyrian spoken (or often just written) outside theseareas are juxtaposed to distinct local languages. (Of these, the most importantis Aramaic, which may be seen as analogous to Amorite in its developmentfrom a rural base, except that it was protected by independent politicalinstitutions and it acquired the status of scribal language-hence it was preservedthrough textual evidence and not only through onomastics.) The
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