Sumerian language: Difference between revisions

Sumerian (𒅴𒂠 EME.GIR₁₅ "native tongue") was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language in the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary and scientific language in Mesopotamia until the first century AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century. Sumerian is a language isolate.

Chronology

The chronology of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods.

• Archaic Sumerian — 3100 – 2600/2500 B.C.
• Old or Classical Sumerian — 2600/2500–2300/2200 B.C.
• Neo-Sumerian — 2300/2200 – 2000 B.C.
• Late Sumerian — 2000 – 1800/1700 B.C.
• Post-Sumerian — 1800/1700 - 100 B.C.

Alternatively, some versions of the chronology may omit the Late Sumerian phase and regard all texts written after 2000 BC as Post-Sumerian. The term "Post-Sumerian" is meant to refer to the time when the language was already extinct and only preserved by Babylonians and Assyrians as a liturgical and classical language (for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes). The extinction has been traditionally and roughly dated to the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the last predominantly Sumerian state in Mesopotamia, about 2000 BC; however, some scholars believe that Sumerian persisted as a spoken language in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia (Nippur and its surroundings) until as late as 1700 BC. We are fortunate to have many literary texts and bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists from the Late Sumerian period scribal school of Nippur. This, along with the particularly intensive official and literary use of the language in Akkadian-speaking states during the same time, is the basis for the distinction between a Late Sumerian period and all subsequent time.

Decipherment

26th century BC document listing gifts to the high priestess of Adab on the occasion of her election

Since Henry Rawlinson's (1810–1895) discovery of the Behistun inscriptions in 1835, Akkadian texts written in cuneiform script were gradually deciphered.

By 1850, Edward Hincks (1792–1866) came to suspect a non-Semitic origin for cuneiform. Semitic languages are structured according to consonantal forms, whereas cuneiform was a syllabary, binding consonants to particular vowels. Furthermore, no Semitic words could be found to explain the syllabic values given to particular signs.

In 1855 Rawlinson announced the discovery of non-Semitic inscriptions at the southern Babylonian sites of Nippur, Larsa, and Erech. Julius Oppert suggested that a non-Semitic, "Turanian" language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that this language had evolved the cuneiform script.

In 1856, Hincks argued that the untranslated language was agglutinative in character. The language was called "Scythic" by some, and wasn't differentiated from Akkadian by others. In 1869, Oppert proposed the name "Sumerian", based on the known title "King of Sumer and Akkad". If Akkad signified the Semitic portion of the kingdom, Sumer might describe the non-Semitic annex.

Ernest de Sarzec (1832-1901) began excavating the Sumerian site of Tello (ancient Girsu, capital of the state of Lagash) in 1877, and published the first part of Découvertes en Chaldée with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884.

The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888.

A Classified List of Sumerian Ideographs by R. Brünnow appeared in 1889.

Credit for being first to scientifically treat a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt (1858-1926), who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze (The Sumerian family laws): in Keilschrift, Transcription und Übersetzung : nebst ausführlichem Commentar und zahlreichen Excursen : eine assyriologische Studie (Leipzig : J.C. Hinrichs, 1879).

The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to an unfortunate detour in understanding the language—a Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halévy, argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was not a natural language, but rather a secret code (a cryptolect), and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue. For a dozen years, starting in 1885, even the great Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halévy's arguments, not renouncing Halévy until 1897.

It should be mentioned that François Thureau-Dangin working at the Louvre in Paris was a reliable scholar who made significant contributions to deciphering Sumerian with publications from 1898 to 1938, such as his 1905 publication of Les inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad.

In 1908, Stephen Langdon summarized the rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca, a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud, in an article 'Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies', which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable. In 1944, a more careful Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, provided a detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his Sumerian Mythology, accessible on the Internet.

Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, both appearing in 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel, published a grammar with the same title, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, in 1923, and for 50 years it would be the standard for students studying Sumerian. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language, An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure, by Marie-Louise Thomsen.

The difficulty in translating Sumerian can be illustrated by a quote from Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, regarding a tablet for making beer:

"Two previous attempts, by J.D. Prince in 1919 and M. Witzel in 1938, had produced less than satisfactory results. A line that now even a first year Sumerian student will translate "you are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat (to cool)," was translated "thou real producer of the lightning, exalted functionary, mighty one!" by the first author, and "stärkest du mit dem Gugbulug(-Tranke) den Gross-Sukkal" ["strengthen thou with the Gugbulug (drink) the large Sukkal"] by the second."

"Two developments during the fifties made possible a better understanding of Sumerian literature. In Chicago, Benno Landsberger was editing the Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon. In Philadelphia, where I had been working before 1963, Samuel Noah Kramer was busy making available to scholars as many literary tablets as possible from the collections in Philadelphia, Istanbul, and Jena."

Landsberger worked to publish important bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical tablets from the Old Babylonian period, which have greatly helped our knowledge of Sumerian vocabulary. Kramer and Thorkild Jacobsen both increased our understanding of Sumerian by publishing and translating Sumerian literary texts.

Transcription, in the context of cuneiform, is the process in which an epigraphist makes a line art drawing to show the signs on a clay tablet or stone inscription in a graphic form suitable for modern publication. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before a scholar publishes an important treatment of a text, the scholar will often arrange to collate the published transcription against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.

Transliteration is the process in which a Sumerologist decides how to represent the cuneiform signs in Roman script. Depending on the context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms, each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). See the article Transliterating cuneiform languages. Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri-spellings, after the logogram 'diri' which is written with the signs SI and A. The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word 'diri', not the separate component signs.

Classification

Sumerian is the first known written language. Its script, called cuneiform, meaning "wedge-shape", was later also used for Akkadian and Elamite. It was even adapted to Indo-European languages like Hittite. Other languages, such as Ugaritic and Old Persian, were written using different and much simpler writing systems based on cuneiform shapes (but without Sumerian logographic signs).

Sumerian is an agglutinative language, meaning that words could consist of a chain of more or less clearly distinguishable and separable suffixes and/or morphemes.

Sumerian is a split ergative language. It behaves as a nominative-accusative language in the 1st and 2nd person of present-future tense/incompletive aspect (a.k.a. maruu-conjugation), but as ergative-absolutive in most other instances. In Sumerian the ergative case is marked by the suffix -e and the absolutive case (as in most ergative languages) by no suffix at all (the so-called "zero suffix"). Example: lugal-e e₂ mu-du₃ "the king built the house"; lugal ba-gen "the king went". Further example: i₃-du-un (< *i₃-du-en) = I shall go; e₂ i₃-du₃-un (< *i₃-du₃-en) = I shall build the house (in contrast with the three person past tense forms, see above). Similar patterns are found in a large number of unrelated split ergative languages (see more examples at split ergativity).

Sumerian distinguishes the grammatical genders animate/inanimate (personal/impersonal). Accordingly, Sumerian does not have separate male/female gender pronouns. Sumerian has also been claimed to have two tenses (past and present-future), but these are currently described as completive and incompletive aspects instead. There are a large number of cases - nominative, ergative, genitive, dative, locative, comitative, equative ("as, like"), terminative ("to"), ablative ("from"), etc (the exact list varies somewhat in different grammars).

Another characteristic feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones (words with the same sound structure but different meanings), which are perhaps pseudo-homophones, as there might have been differences in pronunciation (such as tone) that are unknown. The different homophones (or, more precisely, the different cuneiform signs that denote them) are marked with different numbers by convention, "₂" and "₃" being replaced by acute accent and grave accent diacritics repectively. For example: du = "go", du₃ = dù = "build".

Sumerian has been the subject of controversial proposals purportedly identifying it as genetically related with almost every known agglutinative language. As the most ancient known language, it has a peculiar prestige, and such proposals sometimes have a nationalistic background and generally enjoy little popularity in the linguistic community because of their inverifiability. Many of the proposed connections belong to the realm of pseudoscientific language comparison rather than scientific comparative linguistics. Examples of suggested related languages include

• Aymara language (see the Fuente Magna)
• Burushaski language
• Dravidian languages (see Elamo-Dravidian)
• Hurro-Urartian languages (see Subarian, Alarodian)
• Munda languages (Igor M. Diakonoff)
• Tibeto-Burman (Jan Braun).
• Uralic languages (Miklós Érdy, Simo Parpola )

More credibility is given to inclusion of Sumerian in proposed super-families like Nostratic or Dene-Sino-Caucasian, but the mere identifiability of these super-families is itself controversial.

Varieties

The only recorded dialect (or rather, sociolect) of Sumerian is eme-sal (𒅴𒊩 EME.SAL "fine tongue") . The name is usually translated as "women's language". Eme-sal is contrasted to the standard variety, eme-ĝir, and it is used exclusively by female characters in some literary texts (this may be compared to the female languages or language varieties that exist or have existed in some cultures, e.g. among the Chukchis and the Caribs, and to women's use of Prakrit as opposed to men's use of Sanskrit in the Indian classics); in addition, it is dominant in certain genres of cult songs etc.. The special features of eme-sal are mostly phonological (e.g. m is often used instead of ĝ as in me vs standard ĝe₂₆, "I"), but words different from the standard language are also used (e.g. ga-ša-an vs standard nin, "lady"). Sumerian words adapted into Akkadian were sometimes of the eme-sal variety, so that it may have been the more colloquial variety.

Phonology and grammar

Finding a place for the Sumerian language in modern analytic linguistics has proven to be a formidable challenge since the first steps of decipherment. Contributing to this dilemma are, first and foremost, the lack of any native speakers (a problem with all ancient tongues); second, the sparseness of linguistic data (unlike some other extinct languages such as Ancient Greek); third, the apparent lack of a closely related tongue (contrast with Akkadian to the Semitic languages); and finally, the comparatively small amount of research dedicated to the task so far.

These issues notwithstanding, researchers have generally agreed on a few broad typological classifications for the language, as seen above. Sumerian is an agglutinative language, in which many small affixes may be attached to a word, gradually building up refinements in meaning and specificity to the typically abstract lexical root. Furthermore, we see strong indications of at least partial ergativity, where we have the morphological marker for intransitive subjects identical to that of transitive direct objects.

Leaving aside the problems of classification and typology, however, linguists have pieced together what might be termed a "framework" descriptive grammar of the language, aided lexically by lists of Sumerian words with Akkadian counterparts left to us by ancient scribes. (These lists were necessary as Sumerian was, apparently, the "official language" of Mesopotamia for some time after the language ceased to be spoken by the local population, just as Latin long survived among officialdom in the Middle Ages after it ceased to be a popular tongue.)

It is this grammar, albeit incomplete and often frequently revised and updated, that we can use to read the basic meanings from a wide variety of the extant texts found throughout Mesopotamia and the surrounding lands, and it is this grammar that is presented below.

Phonemic inventory

We have no first-hand description of the Sumerian phonology and there is no first language speaker we could ask or listen to. But the original inscriptions and the Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual texts give us some hints what the phonemic inventory of the Sumerian language could have looked like.

Sumerian probably had at least the following sounds:

• a simple distribution of six stop consonants, in three places of articulation distinguished by voicing (at least from the period of Classical Sumerian):
  1. p (voiceless bilabial plosive),
  2. b (voiced bilabial plosive),
  3. t (voiceless alveolar plosive),
  4. d (voiced alveolar plosive),
  5. k (voiceless velar plosive),
  6. g (voiced velar plosive).

Many scholars believe that in the older stages of Sumerian the distinction of the two series of stop consonants was not voicing, but another feature like aspiration or glottalization.

• a phoneme usually represented by ŕ (sometimes written dr) that was possibly an alveolar tap or an aspirated affricate.
• a simple distribution of three nasal consonants in similar distribution to the stops:
  1. m (bilabial nasal),
  2. n (alveolar nasal),
  3. g̃ or ĝ (velar nasal, /ŋ/, as in sing).
• a set of four sibilants:
  1. s (possibly a voiceless alveolar fricative),
  2. z (possibly a voiceless alveolar affricate, /ʦ/, as in cats),
  3. š (this phoneme has traditionally been described as a voiceless postalveolar fricative, /ʃ/, as in ship, but some recent research based on correspondencies with Akkadian and on a new analysis of the sibilants in that language has suggested that it was a voiceless postalveolar affricate, /ʧ/, as in church),
  4. ś (only extant in the oldest Sumerian, perhaps a voiceless postalveolar fricative, /ʃ/, as in ship).

The exact sound of these sibilants is much discussed in recent works about Sumerian, without a common opinion.

• a dorsal or radical fricative ḫ (sometimes just written h).
• two liquid consonants:
  1. l (a lateral consonant),
  2. r (a rhotic consonant).

I.M. Diakonoff lists evidence for two l-sounds, two r-sounds, two h-sounds, and two g-sounds (excluding the velar nasal), and there may have been more sibilants than we are aware of. There must have been a phonemic difference between the consonants that were dropped at the end of a word and the consonants that were kept, e.g. the g is amissable in zag > za3, but not in lag. Diakonoff writes, "when we try to find out the morphophonological structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system which had not been basically aimed at the rendering of morphophonemics."

The vowels that are clearly distinguished by the cuneiform script were a, e, i, and u. The mid-range vowel /o/ should accompany the mid-range vowel /e/. Although the Akkadian transliteration does not indicate it, in some Sumerian words the vowel u should probably be o.

Syllables could have any of the following structures: V, CV, VC, CVC. More complex syllable structures are hidden by our insufficient knowledge about the cuneiform script.

A complete Sumerian sentence

As an example, consider the short (and unattested) Sumerian sentence Inanna, nin.ani.r, Ur. Namma.k.e e.0 mu.na.n.du = For Inanna, his lady, Ur-Namma built the temple. We will take as given the two proper names Inanna and Ur. Namma, the names of a deity and a ruler, respectively. For the rest of the sentence, we need to do a little linguistic exploring.

Noun

The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two syllable root, occasionally more, of simple structure. Examples are igi = eye, e = temple, or nin = lady. Composites like lugal (from lu "man" and gal "big") are also common. Most frequently, a noun is seen with one or more morphological case markers, which modify the meaning of the noun or attach certain syntactic roles. For instance, the 3rd person possessive marker, -ani, might be suffixed to make lugal.ani = his/her king.

Nouns may also be placed in adjunction to form a genitive compound, or more simply, two nouns in direct succession with no other markings will often imply a "X of Y" relationship. Proper names, for instance, often take the form Ur. Namma = Man of Namma (Namma being a particular city's patron deity). The genitive case marker .k is not pronounced in this case and surfaces only due to the affixation of the ergative .e.

In our example sentence above, we see immediately that we have two noun formations, nin.ani.r = for his lady, and e.0 = temple, where we have assumed the .r morpheme to be the dative case marker and .0 to be the absolutive. We have thus translated most of our example sentence just by considering nouns and noun formations; this leaves only what must be the verbal form at the very end of the sentence.

Verb

The Sumerian verb, typically a short one or two syllable root, has two conjugations, transitive and intransitive, and two aspects, referred to as hamtu and maru (following the terms in Akkadian grammars of Sumerian).

The prototypical verbal endings are

1st person, sg., intransitive, -en;

1st person, pl., intransitive, -en-dè-en;

2nd person, pl., intransitive, -en-zè-en.

However, the construction of a Sumerian verbal form is a bit more complex than in many modern tongues, especially English. The verb not only indicates the relationship or activities of the other syntactic players in the sentence, but will also restate many of those relationships in the verbal form itself. For instance, a common verbal form in dedicatory inscriptions (left as "cornerstones" under large building projects) is mu.na.n.du.0 = he built. We have verbal agreement expressing the 3rd person singular agent of the action in the .n. morpheme, as well as the .na. morpheme noting that there was a dative clause (or a "X did Y for Z" form) somewhere in the meaning. Further, linguists have added the .0 = <null> morpheme, indicating a non-verbalized marker for a patient (object) clause. Finally, and most cryptically, the introductory mu. marker has yet to be given a definitive, or even plausible, interpretation. It has been argued by some Sumerologists that its meaning is ventive, indicating movement or general orientation towards the speaker, but for most actual cases the claim is difficult to either prove or disprove. Others (Thomsen 1984:179) only venture to state that it is "preferred with animate and agentive subjects". The functions of other introductory prefixes that may occur instead of mu. (the whole group is sometimes referred to as "conjugation prefixes") are also poorly understood.

So the verbal form in our example sentence means something like he built it for her, where the it and her are references to some of the noun formations earlier in the sentence, in this case, the temple and Inanna respectively.

There is clearly much work to be done in the decipherment of the language itself. There is strong motivation to do so, however, as Sumerian is uniquely positioned as one of the few languages for which a writing system was developed without foreknowledge of other systems, and as such, a firm understanding of the connection between the Sumerian tongue and the development of the writing system would shed light on not a small number of interesting linguistic and psycholinguistic areas.

Bibliography

• Edzard, Dietz Otto (2003). Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-12608-2. (grammar treatment for the advanced student)
• Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8. (Well-organized with over 800 translated text excerpts.)
• Diakonoff, I. M. (1976). "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written Language: Pitfalls and Peculiarities in the Study of Sumerian". Assyriological Studies. 20 (Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jakobsen): 99–121.
• Rubio, Gonzalo (2007). "Sumerian Morphology." In Morphologies of Asia and Africa, vol. 2, pp. 1327-1379. Edited by Alan S. Kaye. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-109-0.
• Attinger, Pascal (1993). Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du₁₁/e/di. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht. ISBN 37-2780-869-1.
• Volk, Konrad (1997). A Sumerian Reader. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico. ISBN 88-7653-610-8. (collection of Sumerian texts)
• Michalowski, Piotr, 'Sumerian as an Ergative Language', Journal of Cuneiform Studies 32 (1980), 86-103.

Further reading

• Ebeling, J., & Cunningham, G. (2007). Analysing literary Sumerian : corpus-based approaches. London: Equinox. ISBN 1845532295
• Halloran, J. A. (2007). Sumerian lexicon: a dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language. Los Angeles, Calif: Logogram. ISBN 0978642910

See also

• List of languages by first written accounts

External links

• Sumerian Language Page
• Sumerian language article in 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
• An overview of Sumerian provided on the page of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian literature
• CDLI: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative a large corpus of Sumerian texts in transliteration, largely from the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods, accessible with images.
• Electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (EPSD)
• Sumerisch (An overview of Sumerian by Prof. Dr. Kausen, in German)
• The Life and Death of the Sumerian Language in Comparative Perspective by Piotr Michalowski
  • handout (PDF)
• Cale Johnson
  • handout (PDF)
• Jarle Ebeling (PDF)
• Graham Cunningham (PDF)