Beginner's Assyrian

My New Year's resolution is preceeding in fits and starts (sometimes precipitated by my absent-minded professor habit of forgetting where my books are, and sometimes by the plethora of projects on which I am working) but I have begun Beginners' Assyrian, trusting in the similarities to Biblical Hebrew to give me a leg up, not under any illusion that the differences would present challenges.

The first challenge, of course, was the gross mismatch between the radical-based Semitic morphology of the Assyrian language and the determinative- and syllable-based orthography of cuneiform. One of the motivations for the adoption, if not creation, of the Semitic writing system (I suspect) was this mismatch. It was as if the problem with English transcription and translation in both Chinese and Japanese were combined!

The second challenge was the Assyrian reduction of the proto-Semitic consonants under the influence of Sumerian, which possessed a radically different morphology. I had thought the non-pronounciation of 'aleph and 'ayin in Modern Hebrew (which I had been using as my model for pronouncing Biblical Hebrew) created enough difficulties. Assyrian, on the other hand, witnessed the collapse of six proto-Semitic consonants (and waw) into near-indistinguishable phonological effects. Since Assyrian is a Semitic language, however, the tridical structure applies, even if two of the consonants are so weak as so to disappear entirely!

The third challenge was the tendency towards vowel harmony in Assyrian, which appeared also in its sister dialect of Babylonian. Sumerian had vowel harmony, possibly mitigated by tonal differences, but even Hebrew shows evidence of morphologically-specific vowel harmony. Babylonian was the language that replaced Sumerian in that language's ancient heartland, aand thus experienced the greatest level of vowel harmony (although not to the extent that it destroyed the typical Semitic structure), and Hebrew experienced a very low level, but the effect on Assyrian lay between the two. One has to wonder how much of the vowel harmony within the Assyrian Empire was the result of the infamous deportation policies, which mixed many tribes who spoke similar Semitic tongues; thus they shared structural similarities but not necessarily vowels.