Akkadian Sentences

I have officially begun writing sentences in Akkadian!

Taking Latin for four years has been an incredible help for learning Akkadian. As I already learned about genitives and nominatives in Latin, I don't have to spend any time learning about what they are when they have come up in my Akkadian textbook. This means that I can quickly focus in on how the grammar is applied rather than on what the terms actually mean.

I am going to dissect a simple sentence in Akkadian to show what I have learned so far:

mārtum ša šarrim šī

mārtum - nominative, singular, feminine form of "mārtum" (daughter)

ša - determinative pronoun meaning "of" or "the one of", ša always takes goes with a genitive

šarrim - genitive, singular, masculine form of "šarrum" (king), it is genitive because it goes with ša and is possessive

šī - third person, nominative, feminine pronoun (she). It is at the end of a sentence because subjects of verb-less clauses (if they are pronouns) are placed at the end of the sentence. 

Akkadian has no verb "to be" - a "to be" clause (known as a verb-less clause) is expressed when you juxtapose the subject and the predicate.

So the translation of "mārtum ša šarrim šī" is "She is the daughter of the king".