Yes, very true. I should have said that the
fact that we transliterate the "heart" word (or rather the Akkadogram in
question) as <gir> rather than <kir> reflects the accidental
preferences of _modern philologists_, since in Old Akkadian the same character
(a.k.a. #346 in Borger) was available to represent phonetic [kir], [gir]
and [qir] (voiceless, voiced, velar or uvular, not to mention [pis^] etc.).
Actually, it appears that its most common phonetic value at Kültepe (Kanesh) was
[kir], which would mean that what the Hittites adopted was in fact the best
Akkadographic approximation of their [ki:r] < *k^e:r.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2001 12:56 AM
Subject: Re: Odp: Odp: [tied] gr!
The whole question is meaningless, since <gir> and
<kir> are in fact the same sign (#244 in Ruester and Neu's Zeichenlexikon:
[phonetic:] gir, kir, pis^, (pas^), pus^3, bis^, [akkadogram:] qir,
[sumerogram:] HA6). The word would usually have been written S^A3-ir,
anyway, with the Sumerogram for "heart".