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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
Brigitte Groneberg's book is a thoughtful and discursive essay on a number of problems in the grammar, understood in the broadest sense, of a Babylonian dialect. With one comprehensive dictionary complete and another, even more comprehensive, moving in that direction, with a basic general grammar of Akkadian and several survey-grammars of the various historical stages and geographical dialects in existence, it is entirely appropriate that we should have a close study of a chronologically limited and genre-bound corpus of texts which nevertheless broaches wider questions not dealt with by the more general grammars, and approaches them from a viewpoint which is not blind to contemporary developments in general linguistics and literary studies. If this book proposes new answers to questions about the character of the Akkadian language, and suggests new ways of looking at the analysis of forms, syntax and style, then it may be accounted a success, even if not all readers will agree with all the positions taken. In a way, Syntax, Morphologie und Stil … is a successor to Erica Reiner's A Linguistic Analysis of Akkadian, which also brought modern linguistic work – in this case the theory of generative grammar – to bear on its subject, with brilliant results, but concentrated more on a systematic survey of the entire grammar. Groneberg's book is more selective in its aim.
1 Or should klassisch be “classic”, a term already proposed by Rowton (in JNES 21 [1962], pp. 233ff.) but for a different purpose?
2 It is a pity that his article “On verbless clauses in Akkadian” appeared too late, in ZA 76 (1986), pp. 218–49Google Scholar, to be included in G.'s bibliography.
3 On pp. 65–7 Subj. is an abbreviation for Subjunktion, not Subjekt; Konj. (also pp. 65–7) = Konjunktion, also not explained. This and other obvious corrections the reader will make for himself. In addition to the sheets of corrigenda (which themselves contain errors), the author published an extra but still not definitive note in NABU (1987), 120. Jakobson (!) and Levi-Strauss (1962), cited on p. 177, is not identified in the bibliography.