#317
Oct 27, 2024
Work
I’ve taken next week off work—time to laze around / work on some projects.
Books
No books this week!
Roleplaying Games
The Halls of Arden Vul
When I write up my notes for each session1 I like to give them a title reflecting the events of the session, to help me find the appropriate file if I need to look something up later.
Sometimes a session is really unfocussed and so get a title like “Exploring”, but this week’s was “The Not-So-Great Cavern”, as the players realised that some caves they were exploring were not in fact the Great Cavern, and they were looking in totally the wrong place.
Whoops.
Well, at least they rescued a colony of mushroom-people from a fearsome Black Pudding, and gave them a bag of compost as an apology for cutting down a mushroom last week.
Akkadian
This week I’ve been working through various sound changes in Old Babylonian, such as:
Vowel syncope: where a sequence of two “light” syllables2 elides the vowel of the second, hence singular “napištum” (na-piš-tum) turning into plural “napšātum” (nap-šā-tum) and not “napišātum” (na-pi-šā-tum).
Assimilation of “n”: where an “n” immediately before another consonant usually turns into that consonant instead, hence singular “šaknum” turning into plural “šakittum” and not “šakintum”.
Consonant loss: where several proto-Akkadian consonants were lost, which then altered the words which used to have them in a bunch of different ways.
These effects (and others) are tricky. They stack (e.g. a word could undergo vowel syncopation which then causes an assimilation of “n”) and also give rise to “weak verbs”, where the root form of the verb changes in strange ways in different conjugations.
…plus several other small grammatical points. Huehnergard does a good job of breaking things up and not spending too long on a bunch of similar topics (letter changes, in this case) while still explaining everything in sufficient detail.
I’m now fully sold on Huehnergard being a better resource than Worthington.
Next week I’m going to change things up a little and use my usual study sessions to work through my translation of the complaint tablet to Ea-nasir. I’m a little over half done, and I’m aiming to get it finished and on my website by the end of the week. I’m also going to look into flashcard software (maybe Anki? is that what everyone still uses?) to help with vocab: a key thing is I want to be able to sync cards between my phone and my desktop, because being able to review cards while commuting would be great, but writing on a phone is awful.