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Aspects of Aramaic and Babylonian Linguistic Interaction in First Millennium BC Iraq

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Aspects of Aramaic and Babylonian Linguistic Interaction in First Millennium BC Iraq Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 358–378 brill.com/jlc Aspects of Aramaic and Babylonian Linguistic Interaction in First Millennium BC Iraq Paul-Alain Beaulieu University of Toronto [email protected] Abstract This article investigates four areas where the influence of Aramaic on the Neo- and Late Babylonian dialects of Akkadian can be detected (8th-3rd centuries BC): the pronominal system, the verbal prefixes, the precative (i.e., jussive) conjugation, and cognate loanwords. In each case Babylonian appears to have replaced native forms with Aramaic equivalents that bore a close morphological, but not necessarily functional similarity to them. Aramaic and Babylonian both belonged to the Semitic family and were in intimate contact for centuries, being spoken and written side by side in the same society. While the changes that occurred in Babylonian can in each instance be analyzed as individual cases of interference and contamination, I propose to view them together as evidence that the close genetic relation between the two languages trig- gered a process that induced speakers of Babylonian to adopt Aramaic forms in specific cases where morphological similarity between the two languages was the strongest. These changes were highly selective, however, and do not provide evidence for a massive influx of Aramaic on Neo- and Late Babylonian, as has often been argued in the past. Keywords Aramaic; Neo-Babylonian; Late Babylonian; Semitic; interference; contamination The Akkadian language, a member of the Semitic family, ranks as one of the oldest known languages in history. It also possesses one of the longest attested written records of any language, being documented from the mid-third mil- lennium BC until the beginning of our era. Akkadian became the dominant vernacular and cultural language of Iraq in the early part of the second millen- nium, and from that point on we have abundant documentation for its divi- sion between a northern dialect, Assyrian, and a southern one, Babylonian. By the beginning of the first millennium these two dialects had entered the last stage of their evolution, the Neo-Assyrian (NA) and Neo-Babylonian (NB) phases. At the end of the 7th century NA ceased to be attested in the wake of the disintegration of the Assyrian empire, after which NB evolved further into a final stage called Late Babylonian (LB). Whether LB represents a spoken © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/19552629-00602008 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:32:47AM via free access <UN> P.-A. Beaulieu / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 358–378 359 language or a grapholect remains a contentious issue. Recent assessment of the evidence assigns a longer life to Babylonian as living vernacular than previ- ously assumed (Hackl, 2007: 149-150).1 Written attestations of NA and NB/ LB remain confined mostly to administrative and legal texts as well as corre- spondence, while the language of learning, literature, and official inscriptions, in both Assyria and Babylonia, was Standard Babylonian (SB), a learned form of Babylonian that was not spoken in the general population but well known by scribes and members of the elite, with resulting diglossia. Sources for the study of NA and NB/LB span the entire millennium and come chiefly from Assyria between the 9th and 7th centuries, and then mostly from Babylonia between the 7th and 1st centuries, after which the cuneiform script which served as their support went into disuse. This rich documentation numbers over 100,000 texts by a conservative estimate, but is unevenly distributed in terms of time, locale and typology. In the early part of the first millennium, the linguistic situation of Iraq became more complex with the intrusion of Aramaic. Aramaic belonged to Northwest Semitic, a sub-branch of West Semitic, while Akkadian belonged to East Semitic. East and West Semitic had long separated before Aramaic and Akkadian came into contact, although we have much evidence for the interac- tion of Akkadian with earlier forms of Northwest Semitic in the second mil- lennium. Starting in the 12th century the Arameans, coming from Syria, gradually infiltrated northern Iraq, initiating a process of linguistic and cul- tural aramaicization of Assyria leading to the adoption of Aramaic in the 8th and 7th centuries as second administrative language of the Assyrian empire. A parallel development took place in Babylonia starting in the 9th century with the settlement of Arameans and Chaldeans, the latter being probably a dis- tinct branch of Arameans. The Arameans and Chaldeans eventually wielded political power in Babylon, with the result that during the time of the Babylonian empire of the 6th century, the royal administration of Babylonia had also become bilingual. The Assyrian and Babylonian chanceries very prob- ably played a role in the spread of a standardized form of Aramaic, variously called Official or Imperial Aramaic (7th-3rd centuries). After Babylon became part of the Achaemenid empire in 539, Official Aramaic continued to progress and acquired even more prestige when the imperial Persian bureaucracy adopted it as a language of administration and internal communication. Thus, during the greater part of the first millennium, Babylonia (central and southern Iraq) lived in a state of bilingualism, with two genetically related 1 This is argued in greater detail in Hackl, forthcoming. Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:32:47AM via free access <UN> 360 P.-A. Beaulieu / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 358–378 languages competing as spoken vernaculars and as official media of the state administration. The writing supports for Aramaic consisted mostly of parch- ment and papyrus, with the result that the documentation in Aramaic from those periods has almost entirely disappeared, making it very difficult to map the gradual progress of the language and its interaction with Babylonian. Yet we know the end result, language shift. By the beginning of our era Aramaic had become the vernacular language of Iraq, while Akkadian, which had almost certainly died out as spoken language in the 5th or 4th century in its LB form, ceased to be used even in writing as language of learning and culture. The political unification of the Near East by the Assyrian and Babylonian empires (9th to 6th centuries), culminating with the Persians (6th-4th centuries), favored the spread of Aramaic also in the Levant, the home of several other Northwest Semitic languages (Hebrew, Phoenician, Moabite). The process is particularly well documented for Hebrew, which by the beginning of our era had largely given way to a vernacular form of Aramaic among Jews in Palestine. By then various dialects of Aramaic had almost completely superseded the earlier languages of the region. Only the Arabian peninsula remained for the most part outside the zone of direct Aramaic influence. 1. Aramaic and Babylonian The first scholars who studied NB documents in the early part of the th20 century already noticed that their language displayed traits which could be attributed to the influence of Aramaic (Rimalt, 1932). However, whereas the question of Akkadian influence on Aramaic has received an exhaustive treat- ment by Kaufman (1974), there is to this day no systematic study of the impact of Aramaic on Akkadian. One major impediment to undertaking such a study is that we know only the cuneiform side of the equation, and even so, only part of it. Because the Aramaic documentation has vanished, we know almost nothing about vernacular Aramaic in Iraq during the period under consideration except from inferences based on later dialects of Eastern Aramaic, such as Syriac, Mandaic, and Babylonian Talmudic. These, however, are not attested before late Antiquity, several hundred years after the demise of Babylonian. Moreover, they were influenced to a certain degree by Akkadian during their formative stage, making it difficult sometimes to judge in which direction the influence went. On the other hand, the few pieces of Aramaic writing that survived from first millennium Iraq, such as the Assur Ostracon from 7th century Assyria, evidence a form of Aramaic that is very close to Official Aramaic. This allows us to use Official Aramaic papyri from Egypt Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:32:47AM via free access <UN> P.-A. Beaulieu / Journal of Language Contact 6 (2013) 358–378 361 dating to the 5th and 4th centuries as a basis for comparison, as well as the closely related and roughly contemporaneous corpus in Biblical Aramaic. The earliest known inscriptions in Aramaic come from Syria and reflect a dialect continuum loosely labeled as Old Aramaic. They amount to a rather small corpus dating between the 9th and 7th centuries.2 The standard view of Aramaic influence on Akkadian has long been domi- nated by the scholarship of Wolfram von Soden, whose opinions are enshrined in his Grundriß des Akkadischen Grammatik (von Soden, 1995: §192 §193) and a series of three articles he published in the journal Orientalia (Von Soden, 1966, 1968, 1977). Von Soden attributed many innovations of NB to Aramaic influence, but often without critical examination of the evidence or much consideration of historical linguistic methodology. Many of his proposals must be reexamined and modified. For instance, he attributes the loss of dis- tinction between cases in Babylonian to Aramaic influence. However, this was almost certainly an internal process, which began already in the Akkadian of the late second millennium, before the implantation of Aramaic in Iraq. NB moved from triptotic to diptotic declension before the 8th century, and LB seems to have abandoned case distinctions altogether in the 6th and 5th centu- ries. Cases were marked by final vowels, and the loss of case distinction was probably caused by substantial alterations in the phonotactics of Babylonian, which evolved new patterns of stress and syllable structure accompanied by apocope of final unstressed short vowels.
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