Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern.

• Author: Testen, David
• Position: Book review

Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern. Edited by J. N. POSTGATE. Cambridge: BRITISH SCHOOL OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN IRAQ, 2007. Pp. ix + 187, illus. $37.50 (paper). [Distributed by David Brown Book Co., Oakville. Ct.]

As Nicholas Postgate, the editor of this volume, observes, "Today the people of Iraq speak at least four languages from three major language groups: Arabic, Aramaic, Kurdish and Turkman. Four thousand years ago, in 2000 B.C., the same was true: Akkadian, Amorite, Hurrian, and Sumerian" (p. 1). This handy collection--the outcome of a November 2003 "study day" conducted at the British Academy--consists of nine chapters, devoted to the most prominent of the languages spoken and/or written in Mesopotamia over the course of its five millennia of documented history.

Postgate's observation highlights the importance of seeing linguistic continuity and change as two aspects of the same phenomenon. It is certainly possible to point to isolated linguistic facts that seem to have defied the passage of time--to cite Postgate once again. "On the back of my office door in Cambridge I keep a palm-fibre belt used by date harvesters, not in case I feel a sudden urge to climb a palm-tree, but as a reminder that its modern Iraqi name, tebelye, can be traced back to the time of Hammurapi" (p. 2). Such linguistic fossils are genuinely thought-provoking, but it should not be forgotten that the overall grammatical and lexical matrix in which we find them embedded is no less the linear outcome of the countless preceding phases of history and prehistory. In very many instances, the relation between the past and the present may not be visible to the casual observer. However, once linguistic historians have untangled the various linguistic transformations that history has introduced--transformations that will often, to be sure, prove to be of considerable subtlety or complexity and the accumulated effects of the sociocultural and geopolitical influences to which speech communities are subject, we find that the entire linguistic world as we know it is pervaded by the shadows of the past.

Among the authors of this book's nine chapters are philologists, archeologists, historians, and linguistic field researchers. Each of the volume's chapters is designed to provide the educated layperson with an overview of one of Iraq's chief languages or language-groups. At the same time, however, differences in the focus of each author reflect his or her particular background...