Do You Want Fries With That?

Had I been interested in becoming wealthy, I suppose I might have made different educational choices. As an undergraduate, I went to a small Christian college, a liberal arts institution, where I majored in history because I was fascinated by the topic, not because I thought it had great career possibilities.

I did very well in college, becoming but the third individual in the school’s fifty plus years of existence to have graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. My advisor encouraged me to go to the University of Chicago to pursue a graduate degree in history. However, my interests had shifted to field of study with even poorer job prospects: the study of ancient dead languages, specifically, the Semitic languages. After having spent two summers working on a kibbutz in Israel, three years studying Biblical Hebrew and Old Testament, I decided that studying the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East was the thing for me.
So I applied to and was accepted into the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. I chose to major in Semitic languages.

I was expected to focus on three language areas. Two were required: Hebrew and Aramaic. For the third language focus, I had the option of choosing either Arabic or Akkadian. Given that my reason for learning these languages was my fascination with the Bible’s Old Testament, I of course opted for Akkadian, the dead language that dominated the ancient Near East rather than the living language that dominates it today.
What’s Akkadian? It is better known by its two dialects, Assyrian and Babylonian and was spoken in what is today Iraq from about 2000 BC until around 600 BC.

Once you’ve learned one Semitic language, the others are relatively easy to pick up, since the basic grammar and vocabulary is mostly the same for all of them. Sort of like how knowing Spanish makes learning Portuguese, Italian and French relatively easy, since all those languages evolved from Latin. Likewise, all the various Semitic languages descended from a common root.

Nevertheless, Akkadian is a bit trickier to learn than the other Semitic languages. Not because the grammar or vocabulary is any tougher, but because of its nightmarish writing system. Whereas Hebrew and Aramaic are both written with a 22 letter alphabet, Akkadian is not. Alphabetic writing systems allowed for widespread literacy. The Akkadian writing system, in contrast, made literacy rare and ensured the continued employment of the scribes who alone could read and write. Akkadian uses a writing system originally developed for a different and unrelated language: Sumerian.

The writing system that the Sumerians developed and that the Akkadian speakers adopted is known as cuneiform. It was written on mostly pillow-shaped clay tablets that could be easily held in one hand. The scribes used a wedge-shaped stick to make impressions in the clay, leaving wedge shaped marks (the word cuneiform means “wedge writing.”) The cuneiform writing system is incredibly complicated. Each symbol represents either a whole word, or for a part of a word—a syllable. Reading cuneiform is like reading a rebus, where for instance one might write the phrase, “I believe” by drawing a picture of an eye, a bee, and a leaf. Thus, the first picture is a homonym of the pronoun “I,” while the word “belief” is represented by symbols that individually could be understood as an insect and a part of a tree, but in this context represent the two syllables of the word “believe.” The entire Akkadian writing system functions in this way, so that every tablet you read is a complex puzzle.

It gets worse. There are about 650 different cuneiform symbols. And each of them is polyvalent—that is, each symbol can be read more than one way, with some having upwards of twenty or more possible readings or meanings. And you thought English spellings were hard! Understanding what a given cuneiform symbol means is dependent upon the historical period when it was written, its genre (that is, whether it is a religious text, an economic text, poetry, or history), and the context of the symbol—that is, what are the symbols around it. So for instance a symbol that can represent the name of the goddess Ishtar, might also be read as the word “god,” “heaven,” “sky,” or simply as a syllable in some other word.

Akkadian was but one of the thirteen languages I ended up studying during my graduate program at UCLA. Not all were Semitic languages directly related to my major. For instance, I took two years of Sumerian and a couple of quarters of ancient Egyptian just because I had the opportunity. I would have enjoyed studying more Egyptian, but the class conflicted with Ugaritic, which was a required course for my major.

Obviously learning all these peculiar languages was hard—especially given that I was also working 40 hours a week driving a shuttle bus at the Burbank Airport. And often I was studying four or more languages at the same time.

No possible job achieved as a consequence of studying these dead languages could ever come close to making me rich. Had I wanted to be rich, I should have studied engineering, science, or medicine—or maybe majored in business or economics. My educational choices were about as economically reasonable as betting the rent money on a game of three-card Monte. On the bright side, I do know how to ask, “do you want fries with that?” in several languages…that no one speaks anymore.

Send to Kindle

About R.P. Nettelhorst

I'm married with three daughters. I live in southern California and I'm the interim pastor at Quartz Hill Community Church. I have written several books. I spent a couple of summers while I was in college working on a kibbutz in Israel. In 2004, I was a volunteer with the Ansari X-Prize at the winning launches of SpaceShipOne. Member of Society of Biblical Literature, American Academy of Religion, and The Authors Guild
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *