Modern understanding of the
phonology of East Semitic languages can be derived only from careful study of written texts and comparison with the
reconstructed Proto-Semitic. Most striking is the reduction of the inventory of back consonants, the
velar and
pharyngeal fricatives, as well as
glottals. Akkadian preserves and (partly) only as a single
phoneme transcribed and usually reconstructed as a
voiceless velar or
uvular fricative. All of the sounds have been lost. Their
elision appears to give rise to the presence of an
e vowel where it is not found in other Semitic languages (for example,
Akk. bēl 'master' <
PS. *ba‘al). It also appears that the series of interdental fricatives became
sibilants (for example,
Akk. šalšu 'three' <
PS. *). However, the exact phonological makeup of the languages is not fully known, and the absence of features may have been the result of the inadequacies of Sumerian orthography to describe the sounds of Semitic languages, rather than their real absence. The
word order in East Semitic may also have been influenced by Sumerian by being
subject–object–verb, rather than the West Semitic
verb–subject–object. == References ==