In the project "Grammar of Neo-Assyrian", by the DFG from June 2019 to May 2022, a reference grammar of Neo-Assyrian will be created on the basis of the corpus of Neo-Assyrian letters, legal and administrative documents, state treaties and prophecies from the 9th to 7th centuries BCE.
The orthography, phonology, morphology and syntax of Neo-Assyrian will be presented on the basis of a comprehensive collection of documents. The position of Neo-Assyrian within Assyrian and, in a broader sense, the history of Akkadian is to be determined, for which good prerequisites have now been created by the Descriptive Grammar of Middle Assyrian (de Ridder 2018) and the Grammar of Old Assyrian (Kouwenberg 2017).
The basis of this investigation are Neo-Assyrian letters (mainly correspondence from the royal court), state treaties, and legal and administrative documents. Neo-Assyrian prophecies are also included (on the language of these texts, see Parpola 1997, LXVII.). On the other hand, literary texts (State Archives of Assyria Volume 3), inquiries to the sun god (State Archives of Assyria Volume 4), astrological reports to the Assyrian kings, which were only partly written by Assyrian scribes and also cite Babylonian omens (State Archives of Assyria Volume 8), as well as the extensive corpus of royal inscriptions, which is written in a literary Babylonian interspersed with Assyrianisms, can only be consulted in individual cases. These text genres deserve their own linguistic investigations.