Customer Reviews

Beginner's Assyrian (Beginner's (Foreign Language))

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Overall, this is a pretty decent book, esecially for the price, but it is definitely not for a complete novice or for someone who wants to learn to read Assyrian fluently. In both those respects, Huehnergard's "Grammar of Akkadian" is far superior to this (but unfortunately out of print and a little bit pricier). If you're interested in learning Assyrian, this is still a good book to have.

A few things that I liked about the book were as follows: it has a good concise treatment of Assyrian grammar. The bulk of the book is made up of Akkadian texts in transcription. It also includes a sign list and a number of texts in cuneiform and also one translated text for comparison. These make for good reading practice, but . . . that brings me to the things I didn't like.

Though the grammar section was concise, there were no excercises, and it was painfully vague in many places. Because there were no excercises, the student is expected to simply memorize the sign list and grammatical forms and then begin reading unedited Akkadian texts with the help of the notes in the back of the book. Also, the grammatical explanations and vocabulary assume that the reader is already familiar with Biblical Hebrew (the vocabulary list is written in Hebrew letter rather than cuneiform).

In summary, this is a nice book for some extra reading practice (especially for the price), but there really are a number of other grammars available that are much better for a true beginner (try Huehnergard's if you can find it, or Sayce's if you can't).

This books is a test of the will, as well as one's desire to become anything like a linguist. If you picked up this book to gain an understanding of assyrian in a sense of fluency, well, there are reasons this book only costs eleven dollars. I have never seen another easily accessible guide to assyrian, and was forced to buy this book for want of a competing volume. It is arranged poorly and one gets the impression it is the product of some editor stealing an assyriologist's notebook. It reads like an archaeologist's private joke, and could turn many people off to the language as a whole. Another word of caution: the triliteral roots used in the back only make sense if one has a solid grounding in ancient hebrew. My own skill at the language is spotty, at best; I eagerly await a better volume for instruction in what I cannot deny is an overlooked and fascinating language.

I was searching for a reference that could help me learn the fundamentals of the Assyrian language.

I also found the format to be a little confusing. It appears as one long index. If you want to view the old Assyrian or Aramaic characters and language, this book may be a start. However this is not a grammer, phrase or vocabulary style book.

Warning, this book is not very good if you want to actually learn assyrian. It is short and cheap, though, and it gave me an idea about what the morphology of the language. The wonderful thing is that the title is so quirky and eccentric, it is the only book on my coffee table that people actually pick up (no, they don't read it). The only thing better might have been "Teach Yourself Assyrian" or "Assyrian in 30 days".

But no, I still can't decipher the stele at the Met Museum...

This is not an especially good beginner's book; a more appropriate title would be "A Linguist's Beginner's Assyrian," as it presumes too much previous knowledge of grammar and of Semitic family languages. It would not be appropriate as a first learning text for most people, in my opinion. However, for someone who's main interest, like mine, is in comparative linguistics and not in learning the language per se, but who wants to learn the something about the language, about the grammar, and how it works and is structures, this book is fine.

The book's approach is straight out of late 19th century language pedagogy in it's use of rote memorization and the inclusion of lengthy passages to translate. And the style reads like it was actually written many years ago, and republished by Hippocrene. I'd like to know more about this, but the publication page only lists the date of the Hippocrene edition.

On the pro side, the book includes an alphabet and phonetic guide, a 45-page discussion of the grammar, a glossary of about 800 words, and 30 pages of smaller print footnotes discussing various aspects of the Romanized phoneticizations for translations. There is a list of 215 ideograms and a list of 360 phonograms. So despite its problems, I did learn quite a bit about Assyrian from this book. The language is based on the typical tri-consonantal root system for Semitic family languages, like Arabic, Aramaic, Ugaritic, and Hebrew (but not Hittite, which is now known to be of Indo-European origin).

To highlight some of the mains points of the grammar that I learned, nouns in Assyrian have two genders, male and female. Nothing is needed to form the male gender, and the female ending involves simply adding a "u" to the end of the word. There are five noun declensions or cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and locative, as in classical Arabic. (In current Arabic there is only the nominative, accusative, and dative, and those are no longer used in the modern spoken Arabic).

I couldn't find a precise breakdown of tenses, moods, or aspects, but the author states that the Assyrian verb has imperfect, permansive, imperative, infinitive, and participial forms. In addition, there are causative and reflexive verbs, and strong and weak verbs. The "permansive," which was new to me, is defined as having an intransitive quality, and denotes continuation of state or being. Examples of permansives are "they dwell," or "sapuh," "it is spread," or " sabtu," "they were left," or "purruku," and "it was situated," or "massura." There are four primary, four secondary, and two tertiary verb stems, the 2nd and 3rd being formed from the primary by adding "ta" and "tan."

Weak and strong verbs don't have the same meaning as in the Germanic family languages, where strong verbs form the past tense by an internal vowel change, as in "speak" and "spoke." A weak verb just means that verbs with stem endings in certain letters lose these letters when adding the conjugational endings.

As far as modifiers go, there are adverbs of manner, time, and place, as in English. Adjectives are similar also. There is only one indeclinable relative pronoun which doesn't change for person, gender, or number. Demonstrative pronouns (this, that) are the same as in English and most languages.

So although not an especially good beginner's book, I was still quite entertained by this book, and I was able to use it to gain at least a basic understanding of a language is probably little changed since about 3800 B.C. The author states that Assyrian is quite similar to Akkadian. (I should mention here that Sumerian is quite different, however, and is in fact not a Semitic language according to linguists). Assyrian finally died out 2500 years ago, about the time Pericles was giving his orations in the Greek senate. And after reading this book, I can see why. :-) However, at 12 bucks, the price is relatively inexpensive.

Note: since I first posted this review, I did a web search and found D.G. Lyon's name in the following reference: "D.G. Lyon, Harvard Excavations at Samaria, 1908-10." So Lyon was active in the early part of the last century, and the book probably dates from that period. So Hippocrene is likely reissuing an old book whose original copyright has expired, which accounts for the dated writing style and learning approach.