Sumerian language

Sumerian (autoglottony: 𒅴𒂠 emeg̃ir) was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BCE. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around the 19th century BCE. C., but it continued in use as a sacred language and for scientific use in Mesopotamia until the beginning of our era. From then on it was forgotten until the 19th century.

It is not related to the other languages of the area since it is neither Semitic nor Hamitic (it is not Hamito-Semitic), nor Indo-European, nor Elamo-Dravidan (the latter group, to which the Elamite language belongs, for example) and is therefore considered a language isolate.

The Sumerian language is the oldest known written language. His writing, which is called cuneiform because of the wedge shape of its strokes, was later used to write very different languages such as Akkadian, Ugaritic, Elamite, etc. It was also adapted for some Indo-European languages, such as Hittite, which also had its own hieroglyphic writing like that of the Egyptians, although independent of the latter. The Achaemenid Persian also adopted cuneiform writing.

During the third millennium B.C. C., an intimate cultural symbiosis developed between the Sumerians and the Semitic-speaking Akkadians, including widespread bilingualism. The influence between Sumerian and Akkadian (East Semitic) is evident in all areas, from lexical borrowing on a substantial scale, to syntactic, morphological, and phonological convergence. This has led scholars to refer to "Sumerian and Akkadian" in the III millennium BC. C. as a Sprachbund.

In the XXI century, few experts study this language. There are courses in higher education centers such as the San Dámaso University, in Madrid, Spain.

Stages

Sumerian evolved over time and went through different stages that archaeologists have tried to classify. Archaic Sumerian corresponds to the first stage of inscriptions, during the period of Jemdet Nasr (Uruk III), around the third millennium to. C. Between the XXX and XX centuries B.C. C. Several more stages followed one another, although Sumerian gradually weakened as a native language in favor of Akkadian.

Although there is no clear consensus among researchers, texts written after the second millennium B.C. C. are usually considered post-Sumerian, since the language would have already become extinct and the written texts would have reached us through Babylonian scribes, who used Sumerian cuneiform writing for religious, scientific or literary purposes. It is then usually considered, approximately, that the Sumerian language disappeared at the end of the third dynasty of Ur, the last predominant Sumerian state in Mesopotamia, around 2000 BC. C. However, the imprint that it exerted remained among the upper class, which kept it for a while longer as a cultured and prestigious language, in a similar way to Latin in the European Middle Ages.

Decryption

Cuneiform writing tablet.

Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895) deciphered Mesopotamian cuneiform using the Behistun inscription, a trilingual inscription written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian (just as the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics was the Rosetta stone transcribed by Jean François Champollion in 1822). In 1838 he deciphered the Old Persian portion thanks to his knowledge of Modern Persian, and when he recovered the remainder of the text in 1843, he and others were able to gradually translate the Elamite and Akkadian sections, beginning with the 37 signs he had deciphered from Persian. ancient. Rawlinson helped prepare the West Asian Cuneiform Inscriptions (5 vol., 1861–84) for the British Museum. These huge volumes of transcription cuneiform tablets were the primary source texts for early cuneiform experts, e.g., Father Johann Strassmaier who compiled an Alphabetisches Verzeichnis (cuneiform syllabary) in the 1880s, but Rawlinson's volumes contained little Sumerian because they reproduce mainly Akkadian tablets—spoken in Nineveh and Babylon.

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 Discoveries in Chaldea (Découvertes en Chaldée) with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884. The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumer, at Nipur, in 1888. A classified list of Sumerian ideograms by R. Brünnow appeared in 1889. He was Paul Haupt (1858-1926) is credited with having treated a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text scientifically for the first time, who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze: in Keilschrift, Transcription und Übersetzung: nebst ausführlichem Comment und zahlreichen Excursen: eine assyriologische Studie (The Sumerian Family Laws) (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1879).

The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that Sumerian signs could have led to an unfortunate deviation in the understanding of the language. A Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halevy, had argued since 1874 that Sumerian was a secret code. The most important Assyriologists have been discussing the issue for more than a decade. Even the great Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halevy's arguments from 1885 to 1897. Delitzsch would go on to publish a dictionary and grammar: Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, both published in 1914.

In 1923 Arno Poebel, a student of Delitzsch, published a grammar with the same name as the one published by his teacher, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, which for 50 years would be the standard work for scholars of the sumerian. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 when Marie-Louise Thomsen's The Sumerian Language, An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure appeared.

The difficulty in translating from Sumerian is well illustrated in a quote by Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago in which he refers to a tablet that explains how to make beer:

Two previous attempts by J.D. Prince in 1919 and M. Witzel in 1938 had produced quite unsatisfactory results. A line that currently any first-year Sumerian student translates as "You are the one who spreads the toasted malt in a great mat (to cool)", translated as "your real lightning producer, exalted official, mighty!"by the first author and as "stronger with the Gugbulug(-potion) the great-visir"for the second. Two developments during the 1950s allowed a better understanding of submersical literature. In Chicago Benno Landsberger was editing material for Sumerian Lexicon. In Philadelphia, where I had worked before 1963, Samuel Noah Kramer was busy making available to scholars as many tablets as possible from the collections of Philadelphia, Istanbul and Jena.

Landsberger worked on the publication of the important Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual tablets from the Babylonian period, which have greatly aided our knowledge of vocabulary. Kramer and Thorkild Jacobsen increased our understanding of Sumerian by publishing and translating Sumerian literary texts.

Transcription or interpretation

Transcription, in a cuneiform context, is the process by which an epigrapher makes a drawing that shows the signs on a clay tablet or a stone inscription and that is suitable for publication or with the original to see if some sign, especially the broken or damaged ones, could be represented in another way.

Transliteration

Transliteration is the process by which a Sumerologist renders cuneiform signs into Latin 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, or as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC) or as a determinative (semantic category marker, as in the case of jobs or places).

Some Sumerian logograms were written with various cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri, after the 'diri' which is written with the signs SI and A. Transliteration of a tablet will show only the logogram, such as the word 'diri', but not the separate components of the sign.

Classification

It is an agglutinative language, which means that words can be formed based on a series of more or less distinguishable and more or less separable suffixes. It is a partially ergative language.

Unsuccessful attempts have been made to relate Sumerian phylogenetically to almost every other known agglutinative language. In particular with the agglutinative languages of the ancient Middle East and the Caucasus. Examples of suggested relationships include Hurrito-Urartian languages, Alarodian languages, Basque, Dravidian languages (see Elamo-Dravidan languages), Munda languages (Igor M. Diakonoff), Uralo-Altaic languages such as Hungarian (Miklos Erdy) and the Tibeto-Burmese languages (Jan Braun). More credence is given to the inclusion in the Nostratic and Dene-Caucasian superfamilies.

Linguistic description

Phonology

The Sumerian consonant inventory is given by:

CONSONANTS	Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labio-velar	Laringal
Plosive	p	d		k g	(gw)1
Nasales	m	n		g 2
Fellowship		s	š			h
Africada		3
Approximate		r, l

¹ Sumerian texts show alternations between b and g in certain contexts, so some authors propose that there was a labiovelar phoneme /(gʷ)/ that was represented either by b or g, its existence as a phoneme is unclear.
² This sign, initially identified as a velar plosive, turned out to be a velar nasal /ŋ/, therefore it was chosen for denoting it with the sign g̃ so as not to break with tradition,
³ The phonetic realization of this phoneme is unclear; he has been rendered as dr, d^r, or ř. It has recently been proposed that it corresponds to an affricate /ʦʰ/.

The vowel inventory consists of four distinctive units denoted as /i,e,a,u/. There does not appear to be a difference in vowel quantity, unlike in Akkadian.

Grammar

Sumerian has a distinction between animate and inanimate gender.

It is a partially ergative language, that is, it behaves as an ergative in some contexts and as a nominative-accusative language (like Spanish) in others.

In an ergative language the subject of a phrase with a direct object (transitive verbs) 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 not marked by a suffix.

Example:

There are a large number of cases: nominative, ergative, genitive, dative, locative, commitative, equative ("same, like"), terminative ("a"), ablative ("of"), etc. The list varies somewhat depending on the grammars.

Another feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones (words that sound the same, but have different meanings) - or perhaps pseudohomophones as there may be differences in pronunciation that we are not aware of. The different homophones and the different cuneiform signs that indicate them are marked with numbers by convention, with the numbers 2 and 3 replaced by acute (´) and grave (`) accents respectively. For example, du = "go", du3 = dù = build.

Verb

Sumerian behaves as a nominative-accusative language for example in the 1st and 2nd person present-future tense of the incompletive (conjugation also known as maruu), but as an ergative in almost all other cases. Similar behaviors are found in a number of unrelated languages.

Example:

You can see the contrast with 3rd person past tense above.

It has been said that the language has two tenses (past and present-future), but currently they are described as a complete and incompletive aspect. The Sumerian verb has two conjugations, the transitive and the intransitive, and (for Akkadio speakers) it had two aspects, called hamtu and maru, according to those names given in lists Akkadian lexicographies of Sumerian; these verbal aspects probably refer to the degree of "completeness" of the verbal action (hamtu: finished, perfective; maru: unfinished, imperfective), something that must have caught the attention of the Akkadian scribes, who collect in their translations, together to verb forms, the hamtu or maru aspect of the concrete verb.

The verb endings are:

1.a person, sing., intransitive, -

1.a person, pl., intransitive, - in-dè-en

2.a person, pl., intransitive, - in-zè-en

Nominal morphology

Sumerian words are normally made up of a root of one or two syllables, although words of three syllables can also exist. There are a number of markers that can be attached to the root, and in a certain order. As a guide, the order in which the markers are added to the noun is as follows: noun-adjective-number-genitive-relative-possessive-plural-case. This order is exemplified in the following transliteration:

/dig̃ir gal-gal-g̃u-ne-ra/ “Great God (repeated) – mi – plural – dative”

The cuneiform transliteration, whose approximate translation into a logical order in Spanish could be “for my great gods”, comes to represent the order in which morphemes are added to the nominal root. As we can verify the order in this case is noun-adjective-adjective-possessive-plural-case.

Continuing with the nominal markers, the plural marker is considered to be -(e)ne for nouns of the human gender, while non-human nouns are not plural marked. However, it is not clear that it is the only procedure for the formation of the plural, since there are other methods such as repetition, the use of words whose referent is a group ("several") or through verbal complements.

As for case markers, according to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at the University of Oxford, transliterations generally make use of Ø (absolutive), -e (ergative), -e (adlative), -ak (genitive), -gin (equative), -ra (dative), -ese (directive), -da (commitative), -a (locative), -ta (ablative).

Attested personal pronouns in the Sumerian language are g̃a-e for the first person singular, za-e for the second person plural, a- ne/ e-ne for the third person singular human and a/e-ne-ne for the third person plural human. Likewise, the attested possessives are -g̃u in the first person singular, -zu in the second person singular, -(a)n(i) in the third person singular human and -b(i) in the third person singular non-human. The possessive for the first person plural is -me, for the second person plural is zu-ne-ne and for the third person -(a)-ne -ne.

However, these transliterations must be taken with caution, they are based on texts transmitted to us by Babylonian scribes, who were no longer native speakers of Sumerian.

Lexicon

The first Sumerian dictionary was begun by the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s XX, based on the works of Ake Sjoberg. Briton Steve Tinney began collaborating on the dictionary project in 1991 and later directed it; the team was completed by Tonia Sharlach and Phil Jones.

Evolution of the writing system

Sumerian was one of the first languages to be written. The system used to fix the Sumerian language has been called "cuneiform", due to the shape of the signs that were carved on wet clay tablets, in the shape of a wedge. In the early stages of Sumerian writing, pictograms were used, visible signs that express meaning without being conventionally associated with a linguistic form. They schematically represent a symbol, a real object or a figure. An example of this stage is found in the Kish tablet.

However, over time, the Sumerian cuneiform script gave way to signs further removed from those pictograms. From around 2600 B.C. C., the logograms were generalizing, giving shape to the cuneiform writing. The archaic cuneiform coexisted, in any case, with the previous forms of the pre-cuneiform. Some researchers such as Rosengarten (1967) have listed 468 signs used in pre-Sargonic Sumerian from Lagash.

When Sumerian speakers disappeared around 1900 B.C. C., their language continued to be cultivated by the Akkadians. Even as native Sumerian speakers dwindled, Sumerian continued to be used as a means of literate and literate expression. Ultimately, Sumerian survived the decline of the Sumerian population, and although the use of the Akkadian language spread, Sumerian continued for centuries to be remembered as a written language. The first attempts by the Akkadians to write their language with Sumerian cuneiform date from the middle of the third millennium. However, Akkadian is a different, unrelated language from Sumerian, so transcriptions of Akkadian with Sumerian cuneiform were obviously subject to major transformations and caused changes in the writing system. These changes translate into a variation in the relative frequencies of appearance of the different types of signs between the Sumerian and Akkadian texts. For example, from the first to the second, the frequency of logograms decreases and that of syllabograms increases.

These changes introduced in the new script seem to be related to the efficiency of the linguistic structure. The increase in syllabograms introduces an important factor in terms of linguistic efficiency. That is, a system of signs in which the sounds are independent of the meaning as opposed to another in which the elements are only differentiable by the meaning. The reduction, therefore, of signs in circulation is notable, and allows through the combination of signs to represent any word, generating a new level of linguistic abstraction. However, the Akkadians adopted most of the Sumerian logograms and continued to use them. The increase in the use of syllabograms by the Akkadians can also be explained as a consequence of the syllabic structure of Akkadian, for which the Sumerian syllabograms would have been insufficient. Finally, syllabograms were developed to represent syllables with more than one sign (ša-du-u, `mountain´), and were used as complements to logograms, indicating their own pronunciation or form. In short, logograms, determinatives and syllabograms were adapted by the Akkadians.

Logograms were the first to be adapted to the Akkadian system. It was the simplest step, and it consisted of associating the cuneiform signs with the Akkadian words equivalent to the Sumerian ones. On the other hand, the determiners were used more frequently by the Akkadians. Partly because the Sumerians only had determinatives for names. The Akkadians developed a system of phonetic determiners, which served to provide a specific sound associated with a meaning, for example, in verbs. This allowed Sumerian logograms to be disambiguated. Finally, the syllabic signs were adapted as such. Since the Sumerian syllabic signs indicated consonant and vowel, these were invariably taken over by Akkadian. However, as stated above, since the Sumerian inventory was insufficient to represent the syllabic structure of Akkadian, new syllabograms were created by adding sound values.

Sample text

Entemena of Lagaš Inscription

This text was inscribed on a small clay cone around 2400 BC. It recounts the beginning of a war between the city-states of Lagaš and Umma during the III Early Dynastic Period, one of the earliest recorded border conflicts.

Cone de Enmetena, King of Lagash, Room 236 Reference AO 3004, Louvre Museum.