Learn Assyrian › Grammar

The five big prepositions, up close

8 · Particles — the little connecting words · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

From Khan's Chapter 11, which is about what these words mean rather than what shape they take. the table above is the forms; this is the range.

The table above gives each preposition a one-word gloss, and for fifteen of them that is the whole story. For the five you use constantly it is not — each one covers a spread of jobs that no single English word matches, and picking the wrong one is the commonest way to sound translated.

b- — by means of, and a scattering of other jobs

Its core is instrument: the thing you did it with.

Around that core it also does an unenclosed place (sepi-da p-idi "my sword in my hand"), a time (b-lele "at night", b-yuma "during the day", b-shenne "for years"), the doer of a passive (The passive, Chapter 4B: peshli uldiyya b-Natan "I was deceived by Natan"), "with" in the sense of company, and an odd attributive use where it means having a quality: raba b-shennele "he is very old", literally "he is much with years".

gu — inside something

Where b- is loose about space, gu is the one for being within an enclosure, and it is what you should reach for by default when you mean "in":

It also pins a point in time — gu-de-dana "at that moment" — or a stretch of one.

al — to a place, on top of things, and half the verbs in the language

This is the busiest word in the chapter, and Khan explains why: it is two old prepositions that fell together, "to/for" and "upon". So it means "onto" and "to (a place)", and beyond that it has become the preposition that a very large number of verbs simply take.

Destination first:

And then the verbs, which is the part worth actually studying:

ka- — to a person, for a while, and because

Five jobs, and they are worth separating because only the first is what the one-word gloss prepares you for.

That fourth row is Chapter 4's ka- phrase seen from the other side — and the fifth is a plain lexical fact: the verb kare "to call" takes ka-, full stop.

men — from, with, and what you ask, fear and finish

It merged two old words as well, "from" and "with", which is why the table above gives it both glosses. Its own set of verbs:

And it builds the two everyday time words: m-bar-hada "after this", m-kam dana "beforehand" (esra yumane m-kam dana kay-tani "tell me ten days beforehand").

Verbs that come with a preposition attached

This is the practical heart of Khan's chapter, and his dictionary is the reason it is easy to check: he prints the preposition inside the entry itself, so a verb's entry in the Words tab tells you which one it takes. The pattern is not guessable from English — "to laugh b- someone", "to be afraid men something — so these are worth learning as units.

Saying a preposition twice

When b- means "together with", it is sometimes doubled, with a long form in front of the plain one:

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Go deeper

The other everyday prepositions, in use. bar "after, behind", khut "under", kam "before, in front of":

bar and kam also link whole clauses: "after he died", "before I change my mind". See Before, after, until (Chapter 9B).