In recent years, single volume dictionaries of ancient Near Eastern languages, ostensibly for the use of beginner students unable or unwilling to invest in a copy of CAD or AHw, have been all the rage. The Concise Dictionary of Akkadian (CDA) and Halloran's Sumerian Lexicon, for instance, both attempt to present in a single inexpensive volume the wealth of lexical material that has been assembled by Assyriologists over the past century and a half (see the important review of Halloran's Lexicon by Balke, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 104, 2009, 634–43). Parpola and Whiting's Assyrian–English–Assyrian Dictionary seems at first to fall into the same general category, but there are important differences, notably the focus on a single dialect (Neo-Assyrian) as well as the provision of an English–Akkadian section (see also Jonathan Taylor's short notice in Journal of Semitic Studies 55/2, 621, January 2010).

Parpola and Whiting take the lexical materials assembled by the State Archives of Assyria project as their basis and then attempt to reprocess and reformat those materials into a coherent lexical compendium. One suspects that the editors originally hoped to include compact references to attestations in the SAA volumes themselves, but at least in the review copy made available to me, no such references exist and the only ways to locate actual attestations are either: (i) to use the multivolume dictionaries; (ii) to look through the individual indexes at the end of each SAA volume; or (iii) one can now search for particular attestations of a given word in SAA Online (SAAo), which is one component of the ORACC aggregation site maintained by Steve Tinney, see: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saa (including both Akkadian glossaries and prosopographical data). If used in conjunction with the online materials, the volume under review offers a quick and easy set of definitions for each headword, subcategorized according to dialect (with diacritical signs indicating words attested in Old and Middle Assyrian, Aramaic and so forth), but for those unwilling constantly to move back and forth between online attestations and printed lemma, use of the dictionary in isolation can be somewhat frustrating (of course much the same goes for CDA and Halloran's Lexicon).

One part of the dictionary that is particularly useful is its English–Assyrian section. As an example of the kind of linguistic research that the dictionary makes possible, let me walk through a brief case-study. Over the past few decades, syntacticians have defined three relatively robust syntactic types of psychological predicate (see Belletti and Rizzi, “Psych-verbs and θ-theory”, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 291–352, for the original tripartite subdivision); in Idan Landau's recent The Locative Syntax of Experiencers (MIT, 2010), for instance, these three classes of psychological predicate are described as follows: Class I (nominative experiencer, accusative theme) = “John loves Mary”, Class II (nominative theme, accusative experiencer) = “The show amused Bill”, and Class III (nominative theme, dative experiencer) = “The idea appealed to Julie”, Landau, Locative Syntax, 5–6. Given the broad polysemy of the English translations in the volume, it is relatively easy, in the course of a leisurely afternoon, to highlight all of the psychological predicates in the English–Akkadian part of the dictionary and then reorganize and list them according to the tripartite model proposed by Landau: Class I = G-stem predicates like palāḫu with experiencer as nominative subject, Class II = D-stem predicates like pulluḫu with experiencer as accusative direct object and Class III = D-stem predicates like ḫuddû with libbu + possessive pronoun (referring to experiencer) as accusative direct object (for a more sophisticated description of Classes I and II in Akkadian, see Huber, “Complex predicate structure and pluralised events in Akkadian”, in É. Kiss (ed.), Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages (de Gruyter, 2005), particularly 202–04).

In order to fit the regular and ubiquitous use of libbu + possessor to code quirky experiencers into Class III, we have to recognize libbu as a relational noun that functions like an adposition in certain contexts (see discussions of libbum in the locative-adverbial case in CAD sub libbu and Macelaru, “Coding location, motion and direction in Old Babylonian Akkadian”, in E. Shay and U. Seibert (eds), Motion, Direction and Location in Languages (=Fs. Frajzyngier), 190 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003); for Sumerian analogues, see Jaques, Le vocabulaire des sentiments dans les textes sumériens (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2006), 433–45; Johnson, Unaccusativity and the Double Object Construction in Sumerian LIT 2010, 136–7). The non-agentive character of Class III predicates (hypothesized by Landau) has already been noted by Kouwenberg for Akkadian Type IV D-stems (Gemination in the Akkadian Verb, 98–9 (Van Gorcum, 1997)). Parpola and Whiting are exceedingly careful to distinguish lexemes and senses in which either the subject or the direct object consists of libbu + experiencer and there seem to be at least seven Class III predicates in the volume under review: balāṭu, ḫadû, lamānu, namāru, nuāḫu, šapālu, ṭiābu (citation forms). If we then turn to the online version of the SAA volumes (SAAo), however, not a single example of a D-stem psychological predicate with libbu + experiencer as direct object is attested. This is an accident of attestation of course, and if we return to CAD, we quickly discover the subsections for D-stem forms with libbu as direct object under each headword. My point, however, in carrying out this little experiment with experiencer predicates is that there are indeed crucial bits of critical lexicographical work hidden away in the volume, but I fear that unless it is used directly in conjunction with both the standard multivolume dictionaries and online corpora such as CDLI or ORACC, the usefulness of the volume may be underestimated. Even if not ideally suited, therefore, to beginning students, the volume does fulfil one of its central aims, namely to encourage “experimental research and teaching” that would not otherwise have been possible.