ziqiqu

Notes for a study guide of Akkadian verbs I’m working on.

Hopefully, the final product will be neater and more immediately decipherable.

Even in cuneiform, my penmanship (stylus-ship? qanûm-ship?) is rather pathetic.

I’ve been fascinated by cuneiform culture ever since I was a teenager and so I started learning Akkadian in college. Even after I decided to steer clear of a graduate degree in favor of law school, I kept it up as a hobby — as a rule, men in their early twenties seem to go for esoteric avocations nowadays, something I credit to a conditioning left over from the successive toy fads of their youth.

In any case, Akkadian was lost as a priority after I graduated and had to study up to pass the bar, then adjust to having a career. That was 2007, but in September of last year I picked it up again — going back to basics with Lesson One of the second edition of Huehnergard’s A Grammar of Akkadian.

Five months later and I almost feel caught back up to where I was. Now, I realize that learning on your own without the structure of a classroom setting will always be seen as less intensive and dilettantish, but two things stand out to me as I retrace my steps back through the maze of Akkadian (aside from the alacritous passage back to this point). The first being that something about my brain doesn’t seem to accept the signs themselves as easily as before, which I chock up to age and professional distraction.

The second is more profound, namely, that having a smart phone with me constantly means that now I can review signs — as well as vocabulary and grammar — in those small wasted moments that we use to check email or play Angry Birds. I’m not sure what its like to be a trial attorney elsewhere, but at least in my day-to-day work life, there are so many opportunities where just having a photo of a page of signs open on the iPhone in front of me not only feels like a productive use of those otherwise frustrating intervals, but also as a kind of restorative, ensuring that I don’t get so caught up in the skirmish du jour that I lose my calm.

Anyway, if I had more proficiency with Photoshop I’d figure out a way to put the cuneiform above into the header somewhere, since as explained in this post, I named this site after the Babylonian word for “breeze.” Moreover, it’s always a private source of amusement to me to think that after 2,000 years, we are again reading and writing on “tablets,” albeit ones that are — thanks to the aesthetic whims of Steve Jobs — not in need of a stylus.