--- title: "Elamite and Akkadian Translations of the — Skalmowski 2026" description: "The paper asks what grammatical voice the Old Persian periphrastic perfect really has." authors: ["Wojciech Skalmowski"] year: 2026 venue: "Folia Orientalia 17" source: "https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2863" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/skalmowski-2026-elamite-akkadian-translations-old-persian/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/skalmowski-2026-elamite-akkadian-translations-old-persian/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/5/) / Elamite and Akkadian Translations of the Old Persian Periphrastic Perfect # Elamite and Akkadian Translations of the Old Persian Periphrastic Perfect **Authors:** Wojciech Skalmowski · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Folia Orientalia 17 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Folia Orientalia)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2863) · [PDF](https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/download/2863/2195) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7172073773) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary The paper asks what grammatical voice the Old Persian periphrastic perfect really has. In this construction a pronoun or noun in the genitive-dative is combined with a past passive participle in -ta-, as in tya manā kartam. Grammarians such as Kent read it as passive ("done by me"). Kuryłowicz and Benveniste instead saw it as active, equivalent to the habeo factum type ("I have done"). Skalmowski adds new evidence by collecting every surviving instance of the construction in the Achaemenid royal inscriptions together with its Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian versions, using Weissbach's edition. He sorts them by Benveniste's semantic types and glosses the Elamite morpheme by morpheme. Both translating languages normally render the construction with an active finite verb meaning "I did". They switch to passive participles only when no agent is expressed. The author concludes that the active reading is firmly supported. On tense, however, the evidence is mixed. Akkadian's preference for the preterite hints at a general-past value, which fits the later Middle Persian development, but whether the form was perfective stays unresolved. ## Key points - **Scope in Old Persian:** the construction occurs with only one verb, kar- "to do/make". - **Old Persian had a separate passive:** it used -ya- stems plus haca + enclitic -ma as an agent phrase. Akariya is attested twice (DSf 37, XPh 42), so the periphrastic form was not needed to express the passive. - **Typical translations:** Elamite renders the construction as u (h)utta ("I did-1sg"), and Akkadian as anaku epušu. - **Elamite -r in appa relative clauses:** the author reads it as a resumptive object pronoun, rejecting Reiner's view that it calques a possessive. He gives three arguments: - the expected possessive shape would be *u (h)utta-k-r; - pronominal possession in Royal Achaemenid Elamite works by plain juxtaposition; - XPc drops the pronoun, which a possessive would not allow. - **Rare Elamite calque:** the type uni-na (h)uttu-k appears only when translating this Old Persian form, which suggests it was a recent and marginal calque. - **Coverage gaps:** Benveniste's types 7 and 8 have no surviving translations. ## Interesting ideas - Parallel translations are used as independent witnesses to the function of an ambiguous construction, since translators render what a form does rather than how it looks. — For Mova (learn): Silver labels for contested constructions, such as voice or agentivity, could be decided by agreement across several independent renderings, much as witness parsers vote. - A form that is passive on the surface can carry an active meaning, and the agent is found in the genitive-dative noun rather than in the subject slot. — For Mova (frames): Role assignment should map surface patterns to the semantic agent explicitly, so that "what has been done by me" and "what I did" yield the same who-did-what frame. - A competing hypothesis is refuted by spelling out the exact form it predicts and showing that this form never occurs. — For Mova (learn): Each self-induced repair rule could come with a predicted-but-absent pattern, used as a negative control to check that the rule does not overfit. - A form found only in translated text is treated as a calque and kept apart from native usage. — For Mova (back): Generation and meta-world translation could flag outputs that copy source structure, preferring native idioms that express the same function. - A morpheme-for-morpheme "transposition" gloss serves as a transparent middle layer between a foreign form and its interpretation. — For Mova (tokens): Explicit morpheme-level glosses on tokens would make morphology decisions auditable before parsing. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [Akkadian and cuneiform NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/akkadian-cuneiform-nlp/) · [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{skalmowski2026elamite, title = {{Elamite and Akkadian Translations of the Old Persian Periphrastic Perfect}}, author = {Skalmowski, Wojciech}, booktitle = {Folia Orientalia 17}, year = {2026}, url = {https://wydawnictwo.pan.pl/index.php/fo/article/view/2863} } ``` - [← previous EL-MIA: Quantifying Membership Inference Risks of Sensitive Entities in LLMs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/satvaty-2026-el-mia-quantifying-membership-inference/) - [next → Elias, David L., The Tigre Language of Ginda‘, Eritrea, Short Grammar and Texts, 2014, Brill, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics, 75, 292 p. ISBN 978-90-04-27119-7](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/morin-2026-elias-david-l-tigre-language/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/5/)