Sumerian language

The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BC. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 0 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 is an Elamo-Dravidian language. Sumerian has been controversially identified as related to Tibeto-Burman (Jan Braun) and Ural-Altaic languages such as Hungarian (Miklos Erdy).

Sumerian was 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 the Egyptians) and Old Persian, though the latter merely used the same instruments, and the letter shapes were unrelated.

Sumerian is agglutinative, meaning that each word consisted of one or more clearly distinguishable and separable parts; as opposed to isolating languages like Chinese, in which each word appears in only one form, and inflectional languages, like English, Latin, and Russian, in which words appear (to a greater or lesser degree) in a variety of different forms with affixes which cannot be easily separated from the root. Sumerian made heavy use of compounding. For example, the words for great and man are compounded for the Sumerian word for king, "lugal".

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). Besides, Sumerian is a language with Suffixaufnahme (see more at the relevant entry).

It has no grammatical gender, but an animate/inanimate word class distinction instead. 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).

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 that we don't know about. The different homophones (and the different cuneiform signs that denote them) are marked with different numbers by convention, 2 and 3 being replaced by acute and grave accent diacritics repectively. For example: du = to go, du3 = dù = to build.

Bibliography

Edzard, Dietz Otto. (2003) Sumerian Grammar.
Hayes, John L. (2000) A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts.
Thomsen, Marie-Louise. (2001). The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure.
Volk, Konrad. (1997) A Sumerian Reader.

External links

In addition to the links listed in the entry on Sumer, (particularly The Sumerian Language Page and the links there), there are some rather specialized linguistic articles on Sumerian grammar available on the Net:

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)

eo:Sumera lingvo et:Sumeri keel de:Sumerische Sprache nn:Sumerisk språk no:Sumerisk språk