Sumerian language

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The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. Sumerian was
replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language
in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century. Sumerian is distinguished from other languages of the
area such as Hebrew, Akkadian, which also comprises Babylonian and Assyrian, and Aramaic, which are Semitic languages, and
Elamite, which may be an Elamo-Dravidian language.

Chronology

The chronology of the Sumerian language may be divided into several periods according to linguistic and historical considerations:
Archaic Sumerian - 3100 – 2600 BCE
Classical Sumerian - 2600 – 2300 BCE
Neo-Sumerian - 2300 – 2000 BCE
Post-Sumerian - 2000 – 100 BCE
From the beginning of the second millennium, Babylonians and Assyrians maintained and used the extinct Sumerian language in much
the same way that ancient Greek and Latin are used for artistic, religious and scholarly purposes today.

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.
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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 Halevy, argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was a secret code, 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
Halevy's arguments, not renouncing Halevy until 1897.
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 "starkest du mit dem Gugbulug(-Tranke) den
Gross-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-shaped", was later also used for Akkadian,
Ugaritic and Elamite. It was even adapted to Indo-European languages like Hittite (which also had a hieroglyphic script, as did
Egyptian) and Old Persian, though the latter merely used the same instruments, and the letter shapes were unrelated.
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. In an ergative language the subject of a sentence with a direct object is in the so-called ergative
case, which in Sumerian is marked with the suffix -e. The subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object (of a transitive verb) are in
the absolutive case, which in Sumerian, and most ergative languages, is marked by no suffix (or the so-called "zero suffix"). Example:
lugal-e e2 mu-du3 "the king built the house"; lugal ba-gen "the king went". A split ergative language is one that behaves as ergative in
some contexts and as a nominative-accusative language (like English) in others. Sumerian behaves as a nominative-accusative language
e.g. in the 1st and 2nd person of present-future tense/incompletive aspect (aka maruu-conjugation), but as ergative in most other
instances. Similar patterns are found in a large number of unrelated split ergative languages (see more examples at split ergativity).
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 3 person past
tense forms, see above).
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 is 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).
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Another characteristic feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones (words with the same sound structure but different
meanings) - or perhaps pseudo-homophones, since there might have been differences in pronunciation (such as tone) that we do not
know about. 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 = "to go", du3 =
dù = "to 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 unverifiability. Examples of
suggested related languages include:-
Altaic languages (see Turkish)
Hurro-Urartian languages (see Subarian, Alarodian)
Basque language
Dravidian language (see Elamo-Dravidian)
Munda languages (Igor M. Diakonoff)
Uralic languages such as Hungarian (Miklos Erdy)
Tibeto-Burman (Jan Braun).
Aymara language (see the Fuente Magna)
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.

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 (which is a distinct difference to many other ancient languages, but a similarity to many others);
third, the apparent lack of a closely related tongue (contrast with Akkadian to the Semitic tongues); 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.
When we make these claims, however, we must be acutely aware that our understanding of the language is frighteningly incomplete.
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.)
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

Since we have no first-hand description of the Sumerian phonology and since there is no first language speaker we could ask or listen to,
all what we can certainly say about Sumerian is that the language had phonemes. 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):
p (voiceless bilabial plosive),
b (voiced bilabial plosive),
t (voiceless alveolar plosive),
d (voiced alveolar plosive),
k (voiceless velar plosive),
g (voiced velar plosive).
A lot of scholars are convinced 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:
m (bilabial nasal),
n (alveolar nasal),
gg or ĝ (velar nasal, /ŋ/, as in sing).
a set of four sibilants:
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s (possibly a voiceless alveolar fricative),
z (possibly a voiceless alveolar affricate, /ʦ/, as in cats),
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),
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:
l (a lateral consonant),
r (a rhotic consonant).
Additionally, some Sumerologists are sure about the existence of a phoneme [h], as in house). Also [w] and [j] are much discussed.
The vowels that are clearly distinguished by the cuneiform script were a, e, i, and u. Some scholars suggest a vowel /o/, but that is very
doubtful.
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 queen, Ur-Namma built this temple. We will take as givens 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 = queen. Composits like lugal (from lu "man" and gal "great") 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 queen, 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 singluar agent of the action in the
.na. morpheme, as well as the .n. 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> morhpeme, indicating a non-verbalized marker for an ergative 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.
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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 9004126082.
Hayes, John L. (2000). A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts, 2nd ed., Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications. ISBN 0890035081.
Thomsen, Marie-Louise [1984] (2001). The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure, Copenhagen: Akademisk
Forlag. ISBN 8750036548.
Volk, Konrad (1997). A Sumerian Reader, Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico. ISBN 8876536108.
External links
In addition to the links listed in the entry on Sumer, (particularly The Sumerian Language Page and the links there), there are a couple of rather detailed
overviews and some very specialized linguistic articles on Sumerian grammar available on the Net:
An overview of Sumerian provided on the page of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian literature
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
Zólyomi Gábor
handout (PDF)
Cale Johnson
handout (PDF)
Jarle Ebeling (PDF)
Graham Cunningham (PDF)
Sumerian language article in 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
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