Curious Case of the Vanished Coordinative Conjunction in Neo-Assyrian

While most Akkadian dialects use two coordinators, a phrase and clause level u= and a clause level =ma, in the Neo-Assyrian period both are mostly missing from native Assyrian texts. Not only is lack of overt coordination exceptional among the Semitic languages, cross-linguistically asyndeton is a rare strategy, only attested in languages with no writing tradition. In this paper, we will concentrate on u=. We sketch the various environments where u= is no longer used in Neo-Assyrian and consider what other strategies are used to mark coordination in this dialect. Finally, we propose a diachronic path to explain which processes contributed to the loss of the coordinator u

Akkadian · Arabic · Art · Conjunction (astronomy) · Linguistics · Literature · Phrase · Semitic languages · Sketch · Ancient Near East History · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy