Complete Babylonian

by Martin Worthington

Is this the right book for me?

Do you want to engage with Babylonian culture and literature in the original language?
The course will introduce you to a fascinating world of gods and demons, heroes and kings. The readings are drawn from myths, letters, law-codes, medical incantations, and other authentic, ancient writings. The language is presented in the Roman alphabet, with an explanation of cuneiform script, and the main features of Assyrian - cognate with Babylonian - are also explained. Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features in this book from Teach Yourself, the No. 1 brand in language learning.

Complete Babylonian includes:

Part one - Getting started
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: How to use this book
Chapter 3: Pronunciation
Chapter 4: Writing Babylonian in Roman Characters
Chapter 5: Roots and patterns

Part two - Nouns and adjectives
Chapter 6: Overview of nouns and adjectives
Chapter 7: Nouns and adjectives, singular
Chapter 8: Nouns, plural
Chapter 9: Adjectives, plural
Chapter 10: The construct state
Chapter 11: Possessive suffixes
Chapter 12: The dual
Chapter 13: Prepositions

Part three - Strong verbs
Chapter 14: Overview of verbs
Chapter 15: The present
Chapter 16: The preterite
Chapter 17: The perfect
Chapter 18: The stative and the verbal adjective
Chapter 19: Verbs with accusative, dative and ventive suffixes
Chapter 20: The imperative
Chapter 21: The precative
Chapter 22: The infinitive

Part four: Weak and irregular verbs
Chapter 23: III-weak verbs
Chapter 24: I-weak verbs
Chapter 25: II-weak verbs
Chapter 26: I-w verbs
Chapter 27: Doubly weak verbs
Chapter 28: Three irregular verbs
Part five - Clauses into sentences
Chapter 29: Verbless clauses
Chapter 30: Joining clauses into sentences
Chapter 31: Particularities of relative clauses with sa
Chapter 32: The interrelation of clauses

Part six - Further topics
Chapter 33: The Gtn, Dtn and Stn systems
Chapter 34: The Gt, Dt and St systems
Chapter 35: Participles
Chapter 36: Adverbs
Chapter 37: Independent pronouns
Chapter 38: Quadrilateral verbs
Chapter 39: Numbers
Chapter 40: Cuneiform: some worked examples
Chapter 41: The main features of Assyrian
Chapter 42: Taking things further

Part seven - Reference
Chapter 43: Some common words
Chapter 44: The main features of syllabic spellings
Chapter 45: Summary of strong verbs' cores and suffixes
Chapter 46: Forming nouns and patterns
Chapter 47: Some sound changes

Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features:

Not got much time?
One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.

Author insights
Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.

Test yourself
Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.

Extend your knowledge
Extra online articles to give you a richer understanding of the subject.

Five things to remember
Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts.

Try this
Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

Genres: Language, Reference, Linguistics

377 pages, Paperback

First published August 27, 2010

Reviews

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A victim of its concern for its accessibility. In aiming to be understood perfectly even by people who have absolutely no experience with any language other than English, and even that not in a scholastic context, Worthington ends up over-explaining a lot of very basic concepts, ironically often making them considerably harder to grasp at a glance. Though the book's brevity shouldn't really be an issue (except when it comes to vocabulary, obviously; Babylonian/Akkadian, though alien to someone used to Indo-European languages, is a very straightforward language), his unwillingness to introduce much more than one new concept per chapter means he ends up repeating himself a lot as well, eating up space to the point that by the end he's clearly racing through it—numerals, quadriliteral roots, and numerals deserve more than one page each.
I suppose a book like this is best thought of as a taster to see if you want to get into a language rather than a useful introduction in its own right, and it does work as that. There's no bibliography, but Worthington will point you in the general direction of more traditional resources.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A decent attempt at transliteration-based learning of an interesting ancient language ... but I felt like the effort to simplify and make it more accessible actually undermined the education/teaching value. Yeah, you can get a decent sense of the language from this book, but I seriously question whether you could get very far with what you learn here. But I suppose you can use this as an easy entry-level test of whether you're really interested and want to commit to a more rigorous program of study.

[Beluosus · Rating 5 out of 5]

quttâku ! šattam u šaddaqdim gimir šiṭirti ātamar u ūmišam liginnī aqtabi. kīma ummânum šuruš lišānim išariš almad. dimmatam ištiat īšu : tikip santakki ul ulammad-ma ṭuppī šaṭāram ul ale''e.

[PS]

Great introduction to Babylonian. Will revisit this later this year when the new edition is released which includes the cunéiforme script – this edition uses transliteration.