Akkadian OB Guidelines

This document sets out Oracc's recommendations for OB Akkadian; it assumes a knowledge of the Akkadian Stylesheet.

General Rules

• Always use the Conventional-Akkadian citation form (CACF) as the CF in lemmatizing and in the glossary entries; CACFs are always mimation-less: šipru.
• Preserve the actual mimation attested in the written instance in the normalization of the instance: ši-ip-ri = +šipru[sending]N$šipri.
• Normalize the morphology according to standard paradigms rather than the instance spelling, e.g., orthographically non-geminated radicals such as i-le-qe₂ are geminated in normalization: ileqqe.
• When normalizing logograms consistently use the mimated forms, unless there are good reasons not to (e.g., consistently non-mimated syllabic spellings of the same form in the same text).

Dates

Dates are problematic because so much of the date may look like Sumerian, and it is often unclear whether the date was really read in Sumerian or Akkadian.

As is normal in corpus-building, Oracc adopts a policy of consistent strategies which are not intended to prejudice debate.

• Month names are taken as Akkadian when written in logograms. The CF (i.e., the CACF) conforms to the Concise Dictionary of Akkadian, and the OB CF is mimated according to the rules above. Logograms are normalized in the nominative case.
• In day notations, U₄ and the numbers are separate words. U₄ is normalized in the absolute, ūm.
• Year names which look like Sumerian are language-tagged as Sumerian; if a year name has one or two Akkadian words, it is still simpler to treat it as Sumerian and treat the Akkadian words as loans (the alternative is to try to normalize the entire name in Akkadian, which is often difficult if not impossible).

Eleanor Robson & Steve Tinney

Eleanor Robson & Steve Tinney, 'Akkadian OB Guidelines', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/akkadian/obakkadian/]