zompist bboard

his is a language in an altworld where small amounts of Babylonian Akkadian speakers survived to the modern day, though of course with a large amount of influence and borrowing from Aramaic and Arabic. There are about 17,000 speaker worldwide, who all belong to Non-Arab ethnic group called Kaschdeans. Their historical home has been the Al-Qādisiyyah region of Iraq, though only c. 5,500 speakers still live in that country, mostly living in the Mesopotamian Marsh alongside the Marsh Arabs, the rest having left as part of the Iraqi Diaspora. There are c. 2,500 speakers in Iran (as most Kaschdeans are Shia Muslims-in other parts of the diaspora and for some of the Iraqi speakers a religion called Kaschdean Gnosticism survives.) c.1,500 in North America and the UK each, 2,000 in Sweden and 4,000 in Germany, whose system for transcribing names this thread's romanazation is based on.

EVERYTHING BETWEEN HERE AND viewtopic.php?f=4&t=44096&p=1112813#p1112813 REPRESENTS AN EARLIER DRAFT OF THE LANGUAGE, AS IT HAS BEEN REDONE.

PHONOLOGY:
/m n/ <m n>
/b t tˤ k q ʔ/<b t ṭ k q '>
/f s sˤ ʃ x ɣ h/ <f s ṣ sch ch gh h>
/ts tsˤ/ <z ẓ>
/r/ <r>
/l/ <l>
/j w/ <j w>

/a a: i u e o/ <a ā i u e o>


PERSONAL PRONOUNS:
Pronouns have 2 cases, Common and Genitive-Dative.
1P Sing. Common: Anāk
1P sing. Gen.-Dat.: Jāt
1P PLR. Common: Ninu
1P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Neāti
2P Sing. Masc. Common: Atta
2P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Kāt
2P Sing. FEM. Common: Atte
2P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Kate
2P PLR. . Common: Atton
2P PLR. . Gen.-Dat.: Kāton
3P Sing. Masc. Common: Schuwa
3P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Schāsch
3P Sing. FEM. Common: Schija
3P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Schāscha
3P PLR. Masc. Common: Schun
2P PLR. fem. Common: Schina
3P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Schāschon

NOUNS:
Nouns have two genders, Masculine and Feminine. Most nouns are Masculine, except for those with feminine referents, parts of the body and those that end in /t(V)/.

Nouns have two cases, Common and Genitive, and two numbers, Singular and Plural. A large class of Masculine nouns end in <o>, especially those that would otherwise end in a consonant cluster.

Declension of regular Masc. noun <Kalbo> "Dog":
Sing. Common: Kalbo
Plr. Common: Kalbānu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbe
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāni

Declension of regular Fem. noun <Kalbat> "Bitch":
Sing. Common: Kalbat
Plr. Common: Kalbātu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbate
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāti

Nouns can take Pronominal Possessive suffixes:

1P Sing. : -i
1P PLR. : -no
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-ki
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -scho
3P Sing. FEM. : -scha
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
2P PLR. fem. : -schen

Example:
Mare kalbat
"The boy's bitch"

Kalbatscho
"His bitch"

"Mari"
"My son"

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE:
Kaschdean has no definite article, per se, but has borrowed the Arabic "Al" for certain usages. When used with words that begin with coronals, the <l> is deleted and the initial consonant is geminated. It is also used with adjectives that describe the nouns to which it applies.
It has two usages:
1. Certain Arabic loans, usually relating to Islam:
Al-Qur'ān "The Quran"
Ar-Rasul "[Appellation of] The Prophet Muhammad"
2. Proper nouns not referring to people:
Al-Baghdād "Baghdad"
Al-Berlin "Berlin"
Al-Alamani "German language"
A-Leschān A-Labār "The Ancient Language" (Name of Kaschdean)

VERBS:
The Kaschdean verb was six stems I-VI, each which has a different valancy. In this post, I will only be considering Stem I, the Simple Active. I will be using the stem S-K-R "say; speak" for all presentation of Verb form.
The Verb has five Tense-Mood-Aspects, Past, Non-Past, Interrogative, Imperative and Stative.


Examples:

Mare kalbat mandat e'akkali
"The boy's bitch eats the gift"

Mare kalbo mandat e'takal
"The boy's dog ate the gift"


Mandat ta'kol?
"Did you eat the gift?"

I've attempted to make a neo-Akkadian lang myself too! I'm interested to see what Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish influences you put in! What motivates the transliteration of /ʃ/ as <sch>? What are the sound changes that you've imagined from ancient Akkadian to the present day?

Arzena wrote:What motivates the transliteration of /ʃ/ as <sch>?

Shemtov wrote:4,000 in Germany, whose system for transcribing names this thread's romanazation is based on.

Baghdad doesn't have a definite article in Arabic. Neither does Berlin. What is the borrowed definite article used for? It would make sense if it was borrowed as an incorporated part of the word it was attached to (ilwakit for example could be borrowed for 'time'), although I would expect that as bilingualism with Arabic increased, most loanwords would be treated increasingly like they are in Arabic. Incidentally, Berliin and Almaani (not Alamaani) have long vowels in Arabic too. As it stands you seem to be using it for purposes totally unlike what it's used for in Arabic, which seems bizarre.

Yng wrote:Baghdad doesn't have a definite article in Arabic. Neither does Berlin. What is the borrowed definite article used for? It would make sense if it was borrowed as an incorporated part of the word it was attached to (alwakit for example could be borrowed for 'time'), although I would expect that as bilingualism with Arabic increased, most loanwords would be treated increasingly like they are in Arabic. Incidentally, Berliin and Almaani (not Alamaani) have long vowels in Arabic too. As it stands you seem to be using it for purposes totally unlike what it's used for in Arabic, which seems bizarre.

Originally, mst loanwords which were borrowed with Al- were proper nouns that aren't people's names, so it began to be analyzed as a marker for such nouns.

That seems quite unlikely to me, but it's your language. I'm not familiar with any language that has a marker for proper nouns which is only used for that purpose, which was borrowed from another language (presumably via bilingualism) and then used in a way completely distinct from the way that it is used in that original language.

Edit: not to mention the fact that the place that al- probably occurs LEAST is with proper nouns in Arabic. All non-proper nouns can and often do take al- in a range of morphological contexts, but place names either have a definite article or don't, and lots of them don't (Damascus, Baghdad, Amman, Ankara, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Sanaa - none of these have definite articles).

Incidentally, it would probably have been borrowed as el- or il- given that those are the forms in surrounding dialects.

Yng wrote:That seems quite unlikely to me, but it's your language. I'm not familiar with any language that has a marker for proper nouns which is only used for that purpose, which was borrowed from another language (presumably via bilingualism) and then used in a way completely distinct from the way that it is used in that original language.

Not quite the same thing, but I ran across this paper that claims the Greek verbalizer -iz- was borrowed into other Balkan languages as a "loanverb" marker: Greek alat-iz-o "to salt", Turkish bit-mek "to finish," Macedonian biti-s- "finish (uninflected stem)."

Yng wrote:That seems quite unlikely to me, but it's your language. I'm not familiar with any language that has a marker for proper nouns which is only used for that purpose, which was borrowed from another language (presumably via bilingualism) and then used in a way completely distinct from the way that it is used in that original language.

Edit: not to mention the fact that the place that al- probably occurs LEAST is with proper nouns in Arabic. All non-proper nouns can and often do take al- in a range of morphological contexts, but place names either have a definite article or don't, and lots of them don't (Damascus, Baghdad, Amman, Ankara, Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Sanaa - none of these have definite articles).

Incidentally, it would probably have been borrowed as el- or il- given that those are the forms in surrounding dialects.

Actually, it's the fact that I'm positing that the original borrowers would have mostly kept al- in words that ARE the exception ie proper nouns, for cultural reasons (See my examples of use 1), that would allow its spread into use 2. (I am thinking of also having al- indicating collective nouns).
Also, as for your last point, given what I just said, al- was probably borrowed from Classical Arabic. Similiarly, a lot of the pronounciations of Arabic loans are taken from MSA, especially more modern and technical terms

How did the language borrow so much from Classical Arabic? In other languages this was via the educated ulema class, who were obviously fluent Arabic speakers and typically trained in grammar. Given the stress on grammar in traditional Islamic studies, it's no surprise that generally speaking classical Arabic borrowings into other languages have made sense within Arabic grammar and often maintained Arabic plurals. It would surprise me if the language then borrowed al- (especially given that it's surrounded by Arabic) and then butchered its usage. Is there no bilingualism with Arabic? This seems completely implausible to me in Mesopotamia, where I would expect significant numbers of speakers (and probably the most prestigious ones too) to have very fnctional knowledge of Arabic.

Is there no borrowing from actual Arabic dialects?

Also, your conjugation looks functionally identical to the actual Akkadian conjugation. 3000 years (or more) is quite a long time for a language to only undergo a handful of minor sound changes (i > e, u > o). Bear in mind that in the same amount of time, English developed from Proto-Germanic.

Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic are more like Ancient Hebrew and Classical Arabic than English is like Old English in terms of sound change. Why shouldn't Akkadian? Also, languages which are neither dying out nor at the center of population/economic activity/innovation tend to be conservative, both grammatically and phonologically.

mèþru wrote:Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic are more like Ancient Hebrew and Classical Arabic than English is like Old English in terms of sound change. Why shouldn't Akkadian? Also, languages which are neither dying out nor at the center of population/economic activity/innovation tend to be conservative, both grammatically and phonologically.

Mind you that Modern Hebrew is a conscious revival of a language that had been dead for nearly two thousand years, even with the changes it has undergone due to the influence of Indo-European languages, and modern Arabic dialects can vary considerably from Classical Arabic, even with the continual classicizing influence of Classical and Modern Standard Arabic. If the Norman Conquest had never occurred but the same phonological and grammatical changes had occurred, I suspect modern English would look quite a bit more like Old English; with this alternate reality modern English versus the real Old English, it would suspect that English would have not undergone that much more change than modern Arabic dialects.

mèþru wrote:Modern Hebrew and Modern Arabic are more like Ancient Hebrew and Classical Arabic than English is like Old English in terms of sound change. Why shouldn't Akkadian? Also, languages which are neither dying out nor at the center of population/economic activity/innovation tend to be conservative, both grammatically and phonologically.

What do you mean by Modern Arabic? Modern Hebrew is a completely irrelevant example since it was dead for most of the time in question. If you mean MSA, then yes - MSA is the result of a literary culture that is attempting to reproduce Classical Arabic and in which people (at least historically) were taught to try and emulate the grammatical, phonological and lexical norms of that language, so it's hardly surprising that MSA looks like Classical Arabic. If you're talking about dialects, I can only a) conclude that you probably don't know very much about Arabic dialects and b) remind you that we are talking a much greater time depth, in any case, than Classical Arabic > Modern Arabic or Old English > Modern English.

If you want to make a language that could plausibly be a descendant of Akkadian in the modern age, you need to have sound changes (and syntactic changes and everything else) that reflect this kind of huge time depth. In this respect I can't really help you since I myself am not actually very good at working out nice, diverse, wide-ranging sets of sound change or of working out reasonable time depths for huge shifts. But what I can tell you is that a paradigm which is functionally identical to Classical Akkadian, with only a few very small changes, is something that I could imagine after a couple of centuries of development. Your nominal shifts are more interesting (loss of mimation and collapse of accusative into nominative), but are still quite limited in scope, and ultimately are changes which were already happening or had happened by the end of the Akkadian period anyway.

Sound change aside, I suggest looking into actual situations of contact within the Middle East and the Arabic-speaking area. Many of my Moroccan-speaking friends say that they find Moroccan Amazigh dialects very strange to listen to because it sounds exactly like Moroccan Arabic and is full of Moroccan Arabic loans but the majority of Berber they can't understand, so it gives a sort of Glossolalia kind of impression. I find the same with Syrian Kurdish, which sounds phonetically exactly like northern Syrian Arabic dialects spoken in the same areas and is also full of pervasive Arabic loans (and often code-switching). The same again goes for Tajik and Uzbek (a Persian dialect and Turkic language respectively) spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - the two languages, despite completely distinct genetic origins, are full of calques and similar structures and have very similar sound systems. Languages in contact draw very close together.

This is particularly true for languages which are already quite similar. Other Semitic languages which do exist as minority languages in the Arabic-speaking region have been in contact with it for more than a millennium and a half, and again, we find that they have very similar sound systems and ultimately very similar structures to the Arabic dialects around them. In Yemen, the Razihi language (which is an Old South Arabian language, i.e. Semitic) is difficult to classify specifically because it is a Semitic language which has borrowed so much from and been so influenced by local dialects of Arabic that in many ways it is difficult to distinguish, but it has many features which simply cannot be explained diachronically through reference to Arabic. In Iraq itself, a quick glance at the phonologies of Chaldean or Assyrian finds phoneme inventories which are nearly identical to surrounding Arabic dialects. These languages too have heavily calqued on, borrowed from and ended up with internal structure similar to Arabic.

What I would expect to happen in the case of Akkadian surviving is that it would be very, very heavily affected by first Aramaic and then Arabic bilingualism, possibly to the point where it would be difficult to classify it as a descendant of Akkadian specifically and where its status within the Semitic languages was disputed.

While the vowel system is very conservative, the consonant system isn't and neither is the grammar. Actually, note how the first three TAMs on the conjugation chart, despite being descended directly from Akkadian aspects, have very different uses then in ancient Akkadian, one becoming a mood, and the other two became tenses.

Probably a good example of three millennia of language change to a language which remains a coherent whole all the while, where we actually know the starting points, ending points, and everything in between, is going from Mycenaean Greek to Dhimotiki, i.e. there is a good amount of change in between, but at the same time it is recognizably the same language the whole while (even if Linear B is alien to Modern Greek speakers). But Greek is conservative, to the point that Modern Greek speakers can oftentimes understand in part Ancient Greek in writing, whereas say Proto-Germanic is utterly alien to speakers of Modern English, despite being more recent than Ancient Greek. And Greek has not been under that much external influence, Balkan Sprachbund aside, whereas a Semitic language, as Yng says, will be under very great influence from other, more widely spoken Semitic languages.

Verbs can take pronomial suffixes that indicate the person and number of the direct object. These are only used when a pronoun would otherwise be used, or very rarely, for intense emphasis on the object. They are also commonly used in Verbs in Stem form IV and VI, but I will discuss this use when I discuss the other verb root froms:
1P Sing. : -ni
1P PLR. : -nāsch
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-ke
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -(a)sch
3P Sing. FEM. : -schi
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
3P PLR. fem. : -schen

Examples:
Efallachuni
"She fears me"

Aẓtabatasch
"I captured it"

Travis B. wrote: whereas a Semitic language, as Yng says, will be under very great influence from other, more widely spoken Semitic languages.

That's exactly why the vowel system is more conservative then the consonants or morphosyntax: The Akkadian vowels are closer to Central Semitic vowels then the the consonants or morphosyntax, therefore, there is less to influence them. Do you want me to start introducing front rounded vowels or something? Because that seems even more unlikely. The meanings of the paradigms have shifted greatly, for example, Akkadian didn't really have tense the same way as the other Semitic languages have it, which my conlang has changed. The only reason why the paradigms look so similiar is because the consonants involved just happen to be the ones that have been stable, the only change in this specific paradigm being that /dz/ in the root has shifted to /s/.

Yng wrote:
Is there no borrowing from actual Arabic dialects?

No, only more more modern and technical terms are taken from MSA. There is <Ghulab> "Heart", which is borrowed from the local dialect. Similiarly, while, <Daqiqa> means "Minute" in the sense of "a set unit of time" the dialectical variation "Daghigha" is used to mean "an unspecified small amount of time".

How did the language borrow so much from Classical Arabic? In other languages this was via the educated ulema class, who were obviously fluent Arabic speakers and typically trained in grammar. Given the stress on grammar in traditional Islamic studies, it's no surprise that generally speaking classical Arabic borrowings into other languages have made sense within Arabic grammar and often maintained Arabic plurals. It would surprise me if the language then borrowed al- (especially given that it's surrounded by Arabic) and then butchered its usage. Is there no bilingualism with Arabic? This seems completely implausible to me in Mesopotamia, where I would expect significant numbers of speakers (and probably the most prestigious ones too) to have very fnctional knowledge of Arabic.

See what I said above about the fact that a large amount of Kaschdeans live among the Madan in the northern part of the marshes. These tended to be less educated in Arabic then the non-marsh dwelling Kaschdeans, and they were the ones who innovated the other uses of <al->, after their more educated brethren introduced them to Islam (Also note that Kaschdean Gnosticism has absorbed a lot of Islamic influence; some have even described it as a syncretism of more traditional Gnosticism and Islam) . They began to move out of the Marshes under the Mamluks (esspecially that given their marked linguistic identity, there were not well-treated by the Madan) and the Marsh dialect use of al- began to influence the other speakers.

I don't really understand what point you're trying to make by constantly pointing out that your vowel system has remained almost the same for three millennia, but it's certainly not demonstrating that your sound changes represent any kind of realistic time depth. Could you maybe outline for us the basic sound changes and also the development of the modern morphosyntax? Obviously a table with the same morphological forms as the Akkadian Wikipedia page shows but some different headings doesn't tell us very much about how these forms work. How did the preterite turn into an interrogative for example?

A cynic might suggest that what appears to be a misreading of the Wikipedia article on Iraqi Arabic is not enough knowledge of the area to produce realistic borrowings. 'Minute' is an everyday term to me, and apparently daqiiqa (with the two qaafs) is the usual form in much of Iraq. ghumar is presumably supposed to be from colloquial Arabic gumar but that is the Baghdadi (not the Marsh Arabic, which is a more obvious source for historic borrowings) term for 'moon', not 'heart' as you seem to think.

Why do all of these backwater marsh hicks who can't even use al- properly become the prestige speakers? Even assuming that they managed to remain isolated enough that they neither innovated a definite article (very likely both independently and given intense language contact with Arabic) nor knew enough of the omnipresent prestige language to at least have a vague idea of how the Arabic one worked, it seems pretty bizarre that when they actually started moving out of the marshes (the one thing presumably preserving their language) they didn't a) adopt Arabic and b) shift towards the dialect of the more prestigious non-marsh dwellers, who after all are presumably much more socially adept.

Even in ancient times, there were very few sound changes (that people know of) over many centuries of Hebrew. Yes, I meant Modern Standard Arabic. What I knew about it is that MSA is like a zonelang for the Arabic languages using lots of classicisms. What I was saying is that Semitic languages seem very resistant to sound change. I might be completely wrong about that. However, I feel like my other point about minority languages is a valid argument and much more interesting than the first. About English and Old English, I was actually thinking about the Germanic roots rather than the Romance ones. These have changed dramatically over time.
As for the vowel system - you can have sound changes that leave you with the same phonemes as you started with, modifying only the distribution of the vowels and perhaps the consonants.

mèþru wrote:Even in ancient times, there were very few sound changes (that people know of) over many centuries of Hebrew.

please see: http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_bib_heb_history.htm

Yes, I meant Modern Standard Arabic. What I knew about it is that MSA is like a zonelang for the Arabic languages using lots of classicisms. What I was saying is that Semitic languages seem very resistant to sound change. I might be completely wrong about that.

You are. We're talking about a time depth here not that different to a period probably markedly less than the time between Akkadian and Common Semitic. Semitic languages are not particularly conducive (because of templatic morphology) to conditioned consonant changes. MSA is irrelevant - if we want to look at how spoken languages naturally change, we should look at Arabic dialects. Even these are not comparable to the case of Akkadian because they have been informed by and saturated with corrections, hypercorrections and borrowings from MSA. But they still show wide-ranging sound change and structural change.

However, I feel like my other point about minority languages is a valid argument and much more interesting than the first.

It's true that isolated languages often show very conservative features, but also that they often show widespread and dramatic innovations. It goes both ways. Also, this Akkadian would presumably have remained longer than actual Akkadian at the heart of cultural life - and even if it didn't, it would have been in very close contact with Marsh Arabic dialects, which is another circumstance in which language change tends to happen. If you want me to give you even more examples of languages in contact situations around the Middle East I can.

As for the vowel system - you can have sound changes that leave you with the same phonemes as you started with, modifying only the distribution of the vowels and perhaps the consonants.

Yes, but a quick comparison of Akkadian paradigms and the ones given by the OP show that that is not what is going on here.

I have redone the language, especially in the phonology:
PHONOLOGY:
Parenthesis indicate loan phonemes from Arabic.
/m n/ <m n>
/b t tˤ d k q ʔ/<b t ṭ d k q '>
/f θ ð ðˤ s sˤ z ʃ x ɣ (ħ) (ʕ) h/ <f th dh ḍ s ṣ z sch ch gh (ḥ) (c) h>
/tʃ d͡ʒ/ <tsch dsch>
/r/ <r>
/l/ <l>
/j w/ <j w>

/a a: i u e o/ <a ā i u e o>

Sound changes:
/kʼ tʼ tsʼ/>/q tˤ tsˤ/
/ts tsˤ q dz/>/s sˤ ɢ z/ V_V _V
/g/>/ɣ/
/ɢ/>/g/
/e/>/a/
/ĭ/>/e/
/ŭ/>o
/ts tsˤ dz/>/t͡ʃ t͡ʃˤ d͡ʒ/ _i _e
/t͡ʃˤ/>/t͡ʃ/
/ts tsˤ dz/>/tθ tθ dð/>/θ θˤ ð/
In the same syllable as or adjacent to an emphatic /x ɣ/>/ħ ʕ/
/g/>/d͡ʒ/
/p/>/f/
/θˤ/>/ðˤ/
/k x ɣ/>/t͡ʃ ʃ ʒ/ _i _e
/f/>/h/ V_V
/ʒ/>/z/

Some words that show the sound changes. Ancient Akkadian in parenthesis:
/d͡ʒekru/ (/dzikru/) "Name"
/eʃa:t/ (/iʃa:tu/) "Fire"
/esˤðˤor/ (/isʼ:uru/) "Bird"
/fu/ (/pu:/) "Mouth"
/rud͡ʒ/ (/ru:kʼu/) "Foreign"
/efro/ (/ipru/) "Sand"
/ert͡ʃet/ (/irsʼitu/) "Mud



PERSONAL PRONOUNS:
Pronouns have 2 cases, Common and Genitive-Dative.
1P Sing. Common: Anāk
1P sing. Gen.-Dat.: Jāt
1P PLR. Common: Ninu
1P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Nāti
2P Sing. Masc. Common: Atta
2P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Kāt
2P Sing. FEM. Common: Atte
2P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Kate
2P PLR. . Common: Atton
2P PLR. . Gen.-Dat.: Kāton
3P Sing. Masc. Common: Schuwa
3P sing. Masc. Gen.-Dat.: Schāsch
3P Sing. FEM. Common: Schija
3P sing. Fem . Gen.-Dat.: Schāscha
3P PLR. Masc. Common: Schun
2P PLR. fem. Common: Schina
3P PLR. Gen.-Dat.: Schāschon

NOUNS:
Nouns have two genders, Masculine and Feminine. Most nouns are Masculine, except for those with feminine referents, parts of the body and those that end in /t(V)/.

Nouns have two cases, Common and Genitive, and two numbers, Singular and Plural. A large class of Masculine nouns end in <o>, especially those that would otherwise end in a consonant cluster.

Declension of regular Masc. noun <Kalbo> "Dog":
Sing. Common: Kalbo
Plr. Common: Kalbānu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbe
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāni

Declension of regular Fem. noun <Kalbat> "Bitch":
Sing. Common: Kalbat
Plr. Common: Kalbātu
Sing. Gen.: Kalbate
Plr. Gen.: Kalbāti

Nouns can take Pronominal Possessive suffixes:

1P Sing. : -i
1P PLR. : -no
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-tschi
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -scho
3P Sing. FEM. : -scha
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
2P PLR. fem. : -schen

Example:
Mare kalbat
"The boy's bitch"

Kalbatscho
"His bitch"

"Mari"
"My son"

THE DEFINITE ARTICLE:
Kaschdean has no definite article, per se, but has borrowed the Arabic "Al" for certain usages. When used with words that begin with coronals, the <l> is deleted and the initial consonant is geminated. It is also used with adjectives that describe the nouns to which it applies.
It has two usages:
1. Certain Arabic loans, usually relating to Islam:
Al-Qur'ān "The Quran"
Ar-Rasul "[Appellation of] The Prophet Muhammad"
2. Names of languages:
Al-Alamani "German language"
A-Leschān A-Labār "The Ancient Language" (Name of Kaschdean)
3.For Collective nouns:
Al-Kalbo
"Dogs" (Collective)

Al-Mar
"Boys" (collective)

VERBS:
The Kaschdean verb was six stems I-VI, each which has a different valancy. In this post, I will only be considering Stem I, the Simple Active. I will be using the stem Dh-K-R "say; speak" for all presentation of Verb form.
The Verb has five Tense-Mood-Aspects, Past, Non-Past, Interrogative, Imperative and Stative.


Examples:

Mare kalbat mandat 'akkalu
"The boy's bitch eats the gift"

Mare kalbo mandat e'takal
"The boy's dog ate the gift"


Mandat ta'kol?
"Did you eat the gift?"

Verbs can take pronomial suffixes that indicate the person and number of the direct object. These are only used when a pronoun would otherwise be used, or very rarely, for intense emphasis on the object. They are also commonly used in Verbs in Stem form IV and VI, but I will discuss this use when I discuss the other verb root froms:
1P Sing. : -ni
1P PLR. : -nāsch
2P Sing. Masc. : -ka
2P Sing. FEM. :-tsche
2P PLR. . : -kon
3P Sing. Masc. : -(a)sch
3P Sing. FEM. : -schi
3P PLR. Masc. : -schon
3P PLR. fem. : -schen

Examples:
Efallachuni
"She fears me"

Atschtabatasch
"I captured it"

FORM II OF THE VERB:
Form II of the Verb doubles the middle radical, and makes an intransitive form I verb Transitive and intensifies already Transitive verbs:

Examples:
Form I:
Edhtakar
"He said"

Form II:
Odhtakkarni
"He spoke to me"


Form I:
Mare kalbat mandat 'akkalu
"The boy's bitch eats the gift"

Mare kalbat mandat O'akkalā
"The boy's bitch devours the gift"


THE FUTURE TENSE:
The Future is considered a sub-category of either the The Non-Past, or the Interrogative given that it is derived from one of those forms, depending on the verb.
Most verbs form their future by prefixing <sa> to the Non-Past:
Sa-Efallachuni
"She will fear me"

Sa-A'akkalasch
"I will eat it"

Some verbs, mostly those used in the Kaschdeans' legends (ie. not very practical verbs in the modern day) or those referring to religious practice, though only when referring to the religious practice of the minority Kaschdean Gnostics or other non-Islamic religions, form their future with the prefix <Ki> before the Interrogative:
Ki-Arkob
"I will ride [the horse]"

Ki-Eqborā
"They will bury [in a non-Islamic ceremony]"

If you are already using diacritics for emphatic phonemes, you might as well use diacritics for /θ ð ʃ x ɣ/. Also, your orthography looks German, whereas Iraq was an area of British influence.
To me, the sound changes listed in http://www.houseofdavid.ca/anc_heb_bib_heb_history.htm is a very small amount for the vast stretch of time considered.
The Babylonian dialect of Akkadian seemed to have at some point palatalised /s/ in all occurrences.
I get that the language is supposed to resemble Arabic more, but you might have went a little too far in eliminating /p/. Many Arabic-influenced languages maintain <p>. I also don't get why there is no /g/ at all.
I read while researching for this post that Jewish and Christian Baghdadi Arabic has many features from Classical Arabic that were not preserved in Muslim speech, such as /q/. /r/ in Akkadian was probably realised as /ʁ/ and patterned as the voiced equivalent of /x/, so it would probably merge with /g/>/ɣ/. As ħ and ʕ can be produced from native sounds via your sound changes, they are native phonemes.

mèþru wrote:The Babylonian dialect of Akkadian seemed to have at some point palatalised /s/ in all occurrences.

Source?

KathTheDragon wrote:

mèþru wrote:The Babylonian dialect of Akkadian seemed to have at some point palatalised /s/ in all occurrences.

Source?

Okay, now I need to give a lecture on Semitic sibilants. (Well, at least those in Akkadian.)

It is suspected that, in Akkadian, <s> was [ts], <ṣ> was [tsʼ], and <š> was either [s] or [ʃ] depending on the particular dialect. We don't really know what <š> was in Proto-Semitic, it may have been [s] or [ʃ], but there is pretty strong evidence that <s> was [ts] (even though some still insist it was [s]), as shown by things like Akkadian <t> + <š> > <ss> (i.e. [tsː]) (note that otherwise <š> never becomes <s> in Akkadian) and loans of Semitic words and names in other languages which render Semitic <s> as an affricate or cluster, and it is widely agreed upon that <ṣ> was an affricate (which is still reflected in Ethio-Semitic and Modern Hebrew).

Nevermind, the source just says that the Assyrian dialect realised /s/ as [s], while Babylonian dialect realised it as [ʃ]. The source is the Wikipedia page on Akkadian, which cites the following:

John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge) Pages 218-280