Irving Finkel

And sometimes it makes no difference, and sometimes it's really quite misleading.

And so what people do when they learn Akkadian is they learn the Akkadian word and they learn the English translation.

You have the parasu is to divide.

So whenever you have the verb parasu, it's some form of divide or division.

But actually, it's not, because divide is like the primary root, but there's maybe 10 nuances of what that can mean in English, where the one at the bottom and the one at the top, you'd hardly know they were connected.

And the Chicago Dictionary, which is such a magnificent thing, when you come to the museum and see me,

I'll show you this Chicago.

It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history.

It's the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, which is this long.

There's only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course.

But the two of them, I think, are your countrymen's greatest achievements.

It started in the 20s, and they made a dictionary of the Babylonian language, A to Z, so to speak.

And it's as long as this table.

It's a magnificent thing, and this big.

And there, the people who worked on it were real translators, so they knew that it wasn't lexically A means B, but they had... So if you have something in a proverb...

The meaning is going to be a little bit different from in a letter.

So, people really, really understand Akkadian.

They really do.

But this thing about the modal verbs is an interesting conundrum to me because there's no way it's reflected in the writing.

So, I can only assume that there was some kind of drawing out of the vowel in a verb