Athar Alrafedain

Abstract

Phonetics is regarded as one of the most important aspects of the Akkadian language through which the explanation and analysis of human sounds can be known. This is achieved by studying the origin of words and the changes that happened to these sounds, the explanation of  their place of articulation, and their properties. Hence, phonetics has become of great importance in structuring the syntactic and morphological features of speech in all languages. Because the glottal catch (Hamza) has many difficulties and complications in written and spoken forma, this research aims at shedding light on this sound. It is more complicated in Akkadian language , because both this language and its speakers are dead. However, the linguistic proximity between this language and Arabic shows that hamza wasil and hamza badil  occurred through the transformation  of guttural sounds (هــ ، ع، ح ، غ) into  glottal catch. A special sign for ( خ )  is used; it sometimes keeps itself, and at other times, it becomes glottal stop according to it speakers. It is affirmed in this research that the guttural sounds which took the shape of glottal stop have been pronounced according to the place of articulation. It was ignored by Akkadian writers, and they truly recorded their language. Actually, they followed the reductive system of Cuneiform signs, which is part of the reductive and derivative system known in old languages. The reader can discover this through the close reading of the research.