Syntactic marginalia in Old Babylonian.

• Author: Cohen, Eran

This review article consists of two parts: the first briefly refers to the edition itself, while the second and more substantial part points out various important syntactic issues which arise from a close examination of the letters therein. These issues are discussed and expanded upon, based on additional information gathered from other Old Babylonian (henceforth OB) letters.

1. GENERAL REMARKS

   This letter volume contains, by and large, two groups of letters: TCL 1, letters 1-54, a new edition of the texts previously edited by A. Ungnad (VAB 6) in 1914; and TCL 17-18, prepared by E. Ebeling (MAOG 15) in 1942. Since both TCL 1 and 17-18 are often quoted in the grammatical literature, it is especially important that new editions be prepared in light of the growing Assyriological and linguistic knowledge of Akkadian.

   A few innovations have been introduced in AbB 14: lexical remarks are given in a list at the end rather than in footnotes (in fact, an old practice in the ARM series). Also, the results of collations, more than five hundred of them, are found drawn in an appendix at the end, an excellent idea which renders the volume in a way self-sufficient.

   However, unlike any previous AbB volume, the level of editing and proofing here leaves much to be desired; one finds innumerable typos (even in the transliterations!), dittogra-phies, missing footnotes and lexical entries, etc. These are serious flaws in a work of this sort, whose scientific value lies first and foremost in its precision and faithfulness to the original. Unlike the former AbB volumes, the translation renders several lines together; this befits texts whose interpretation is problematic (e.g., the archaic OB letters in AS 22), but here it is uncalled for and renders reading cumbersome. The English used in the translations is occasionally unnatural, and English copy-editing might have been useful. These flaws aside, the linguistic material contained in this edition is truly stimulating and forms the basis for the present paper.

2. SYNTACTIC ISSUES

   Many syntactic issues in AbB 14 merit discussion, but space allows treatment of only a few. In the following are discussed only issues which are scarcely dealt with in the volume, new solutions to old problems as well as new insights. The issues are grouped according to their syntactic affiliation.

   2.1 Substantival Content

   This is an important issue which hardly ever gets the attention it deserves. Deutscher 2000 does look extensively into what he terms "complementation," but without specifically examining strategies of representing the verbal contents of substantives such as temum, unnedukkum, tuppum, etc. Deutscher (ibid., 10-11) maintains that there is no fundamental difference between clauses which are verb complements and those which are "noun complement," but his reasoning is semantic. The syntactic reason could be that both complements are (again, fundamentally) substantival clauses. However, the OB material points to different linguistic facts, viz., that these two types of clauses are not the same--they are constructed differently and have different commutation groups.

   The most prevalent construction for the representation of the substantival content is a sa clause (rather than kima in a typical object clause):

   [1] u unnedukki sa subatka isterwna uhht.tr ana PN ustabilassu "And I sent over to PN my sealed document (saying) that only one garment of yours is left." (119: 1 1-14; cf. 35: 20-21) (1) This example features the expression of indirect content. The second person refers to the addressee, but the tablet is directed at a third party. An expression of direct content would be "one garment of his ... "Note that this is not a relative clause, since the antecedent unnedukki does not have a function inside the Sa clause, as would any antecedent of a relative clause. The content is often represented as direct speech inside this sa clause:

   [2] ana 10 sabim nadanim aspurakkum meher. tuppiya. sa sabi anaddin [ul l]aspuram "I wrote you to give (me) 10 workers, (but) [you did not] send me an answer to my tablet (saying) that 'I will give my workers.'" (95: 5-9; cf. 120: 8-9; 10-11; 9, 117: 7-9) Here we see an interesting occurrence of direct speech inside this sa clause. This clause can even precede the substantive (which is unattested with relative clauses in everyday OB. as far as I know):

   [3] sa atapalsu meher tuppini subilam "Send me an answer to my tablet (saying) that 'I have paid him." (157: 19-20; cf. 9, 231: 30) Another way to convey such finite content is to make it a genitive-equivalent attribute:

   [4] aran sumni damgam [in] "the crime by which he dishonored our good name [in] our town" (29: 38-40) Another strategy, with a question, is to juxtapose a direct question to the content substantive, for which see below, [section]2.6.2.

   Now, in order to judge these examples syntactically, we must compare them to their non-finite counterparts. The first is a (rather expected) sa ... parasim construction:

   [5] temka sa gersdnim mahah'uu ul taspuram "You did not send me your instructions for soaking the leek (seeds)." (141: 22-23; cf. 9, 112: 29-32, and perhaps 4, 156: 7-9) This strategy of juxtaposing a sa parasim construction to the substantive is discussed in Cohen 2005a: 194-96. Somewhat unexpectedly, there are several examples of such content represented by ana parasim (adnominal use of ana parasim is quite limited in OB):

   [6] ana eqlim suati ana PN ... nadaahn ruppi beliya illikam-ma "The tablet of my lord (namely) to give that field to PN ... reached me ..." (6: 10-13; cf. 85: 15-16, and possibly, with inverted order, 84: 10-13) In the Mari letters one also encounters assum parasim (ARM 1, 22: 7-9; ARM 5, 62: 10). Another strategy involves a direct attributive construction:

   [7] assum tem kamasiya "as for the order that I finish" (132: 7, see 1. 9 imp. kimis; cf. 6, 75: 6'-7', and ARM 26, 411: 60-61) To conclude this section, the first construction (sa clause, exx. 1-3) is very different from the common way in OB to express verbal content, viz., by a kima-clause (which is not attested with a substantive in OB, as far as I know). The same applies to the second strategy (the attributive slot, exx. [4], [7]). On the other hand, other means more commonly represent verbal contents: sa + infinitive is used as a modal verbal content (see Cohen 2005a: 190-94), as well as a regular complement for epesum "see to it that ..." The construction ana + infinitive is also regularly used to represent a modal verbal content (e.g., of the verb qabum; see [section]2.3.2 below). In short, the paradigms representing the content of a substantive, on the one hand, and the contents of a verb, on the other hand, are different enough syntactically to justify a separate description. The following table illustrates these differences graphically:

   means content of content of substantive verbal form 1 clause substantival substantival different means sa clause kima clause (exx. 1-3) -- attributive clause (ex. 4) -- ... parasam 2 infinitive attributive -- infinitive (ex. 7) sa ... parasim similar means ana ... parasim 2.2.FSP Issues

   FSP (functional sentence perspectives, or information structure) is the subsystem containing the mechanisms signaling old and new information, as well as information salient for other reasons, such as contrast, exclusivity ("only," see above, ex. 1), sealar addition ("even," e.g., 179:21). Several such mechanisms are described in Cohen 2005a: 31-36.

   2.2.1 Focal Pattern #Object + (Explicit) Subject + Verbal Fonn# (2). This pattern (described Cohen 2005a: 34-35 (3) and exemplified for the letter corpus in the first part of ex. [9] below) is by now often recognized in translation (notably so in 31:11 12; 88: 14-16; 188: 5-7, less so in other cases). It is often found with interrogative pronouns (11: 18-20; 31:6-8; 40: 4-5), since they are naturally the informationl peak of their clauses.

   2.2.2 The Particle -ma. The nfunction of this particle is now well understood (n. 21b: "-ma stresses the contrast"). A note, however, is needed to clarify to clarify the lack of symmetry in focus marking, especially when ul (which is a focus marker in its own right; see Cohen 2005a: 34) is involved. Unlike -ma, which occurs wherever such focus marking is desired, ul is very rate in any other but preverbal position. For example:

   [8] 12 kur se'am ul taddina 8 kur se am-ma taddina "You did not give me 12 kor of barley; you gave me only 8 kor of barley." (34:8 9; similarly 68: 4-7) The salient issue here is in fact the amount given, rather than the giving itself. This is well reflected in the position of -ma (8 kur se am-ma). However. ul occurs immediately preceding the verb even though it is expected symmetrically to mark as focus the 12 kor of barley. This inflexibility of the language in the case of ul is seldom broken. Compare:

   [9]2 immeri(n) ... sa P[N] iddin{am] anaku apqid [akkum] ul suhari ipqidakkum "I handed out [to you] two ... sheep which PN gave [me]: (it was) not my servant (who) handed (them) out to you," (3, 76: 4-9) The function of the particle -ma after adverbial (as well as substantival) clauses to mark the entire subordinate clause (which is analogous in this respect to any simple substantive or adverb) as focus is not quite reflected in the edition:

   [10] rekbam istu ummasu ezbet sanum ihuzusi-ma ina bit ahizisa warkim ulissu "The mounted...