Akkadian-Sumerian

عربت شارّو دنّوتوم شا الام يپوشو ابویا
the four strong kings who built this city are my fathers

I don't have a cuneiform keyboard on my computer but I guess as a fellow semitic language, arabic letters will do. Yesterday me and Pooya went to the archeology museum in Sultan Ahmet and I was loving the section on Babylon. I remember writing about what an obscure and under-appreciated time in history babylon is (why don't the bengals write songs about them? No Disney movies take place in Ur ( I can see it now, a wise cracking stork helps Gildur find his way out of the swamps to stop Hammurabi from wrongly killing his kid-sister Ammu)) and it was so satisfying to see their collection of multiplication tables and debt receipts for pieces of silver and even a mini-Hammurabi's code. I looked up Akkadian and turns out it's semitic although has a lot of borrowing from non-semitic languages for large parts of its vocabulary. But to think they said قتل back 4000 years ago, and now use it in rap songs, that sort of unbroken semantic chain, well that's just neat.

also some more from the linguistic topology grab-bag. Sumerian was an Ergative language which means that the subject is what gets the special marker and not the object where the verb is transitive. As in:
the king-x improved the city walls
as opposed to say, Turkish:
the king improved the city walls-x.

I think that my focus in Lundinish, from the beginning, has been the focus on the ease and logic of forming verbal nouns, Like John Perry says in his immortal essay "Language reform in Turkey and Iran" the importance of a flexible and inventive morphological structure is crutial. I think that in Lundinish it comes at the expense of what are still problems to be worked out in syntax, especially with the role of Adverbs as a stand-in for verb tense.

This is why Lundinish is always a work in Progress. In other language news I found a copy of for whom the bell tolls in Farsi yesterday at a Sahaf.