Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.

Product Information

John Haywood (2005). The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civilizations. London: Penguin Books. p.28. Development [ edit ] Letter sent by the high-priest Lu'enna to the king of Lagash (maybe Urukagina), informing him of his son's death in combat, c. 2400BC, found in Telloh (ancient Girsu) Vase of Entemena, king of Lagash, with dedication. Louvre AO2674, c. 2400BC The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two-syllable root ( igi "eye", e 2 "house, household", nin "lady"), although there are also some roots with three syllables like šakanka "market". There are two grammatical genders, usually called human and non-human (the first includes gods and the word for "statue" in some instances, but not plants or animals, the latter also includes collective plural nouns), whose assignment is semantically predictable.

The copula verb /me/ "to be" is mostly used as an enclitic: -men, -men, -am, -menden, -menzen, -(a)meš. Kausen, Ernst. 2006. Sumerische Sprache. p.9". Archived from the original on 2009-09-27 . Retrieved 2006-02-06. Cone of Enmetena, king of Lagash". 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-02-27 . Retrieved 2020-02-27. Bomhard, Allan R. & PJ Hopper (1984). Toward Proto-Nostratic: a new approach to the comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic. {{ cite book}}: |work= ignored ( help)a b "Sumerian language". The ETCSL project. Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. 2005-03-29. Archived from the original on 2008-09-02 . Retrieved 2011-07-30. Very often, a word-final consonant was not expressed in writing—and was possibly omitted in pronunciation—so it surfaced only when followed by a vowel: for example the /k/ of the genitive case ending -ak does not appear in e 2 lugal-la "the king's house", but it becomes obvious in e 2 lugal-la-kam "(it) is the king's house" (compare liaison in French). a b Michalowski, Piotr (2008): "Sumerian". In: Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum. Cambridge University Press. P.16 Sylvain Auroux (2000). History of the Language Sciences. Vol.1. Walter de Gruyter. p.2. ISBN 978-3-11-019400-5. DIAKONOFF, Igor M. (1997). "External Connections of the Sumerian Language". Mother Tongue. 3: 54–63.

Halloran, J. A. (2007). Sumerian lexicon: a dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language. Los Angeles, Calif: Logogram. ISBN 0-9786429-1-0 The stems of the 1st type, regular verbs, do not express TA at all according to most scholars, or, according to M. Yoshikawa and others, express marû TA by adding an (assimilating) /-e-/ as in gub-be 2 or gub-bu vs gub (which is, however, nowhere distinguishable from the first vowel of the pronominal suffixes except for intransitive marû 3rd person singular). One of the advantages of cuneiform is that it could represent a variety of languages, rather like an alphabet that can write, say, English, German, Spanish and many other languages. Cuneiform was used to write in at least a dozen languages in addition to Sumerian, including Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite and Persian. And like our alphabets today, with German having an Eszett or "double-S" and Spanish including a "double-L," there were slight variations in cuneiform from language to language. Awaiting Translation Syllables could have any of the following structures: V, CV, VC, CVC. More complex syllables, if Sumerian had them, are not expressed as such by the cuneiform script.Monaco, Salvatore F., "Proto-Cuneiform And Sumerians", Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, vol. 87, no. 1/4, pp. 277–82, 2014 Kurtkaya, Mehmet (2017). Sumerian Turks: Civilization's Journey from Siberia to Mesopotamia. Independently Published. ISBN 9781521532362.

The key to reading logosyllabic cuneiform came from the Behistun inscription, a trilingual cuneiform inscription written in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. (In a similar manner, the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs was the bilingual [Greek and Egyptian with the Egyptian text in two scripts] Rosetta stone and Jean-François Champollion's transcription in 1822.) This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. a b Zólyomi (2000). "Structural interference from Akkadian in Old Babylonian Sumerian" (PDF). Acta Sumerologica. 22. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2021-02-28 . Retrieved 2008-07-20.The verbal stem itself can also express grammatical distinctions. The plurality of the absolutive participant [76] can be expressed by complete reduplication of the stem or by a suppletive stem. Reduplication can also express "plurality of the action itself", [76] intensity or iterativity. [45]

The standard variety of Sumerian was Emegir ( 𒅴𒂠 eme-gir₁₅). A notable variety or sociolect was Emesal ( 𒅴𒊩 eme-sal), possibly to be interpreted as "fine tongue" or "high-pitched voice". [84] Other terms for dialects or registers were eme-galam "high tongue", eme-si-sa "straight tongue", eme-te-na "oblique[?] tongue", etc. [85]The Sumerian finite verb distinguishes a number of moods and agrees (more or less consistently) with the subject and the object in person, number and gender. The verb chain may also incorporate pronominal references to the verb's other modifiers, which has also traditionally been described as "agreement", although, in fact, such a reference and the presence of an actual modifier in the clause need not co-occur: not only e 2-še 3 i b 2-ši-du-un "I'm going to the house", but also e 2-še 3 i 3-du-un "I'm going to the house" and simply i b 2-ši-du-un "I'm going to it" are possible. [58] Konstantopoulos started Sumerian as a graduate student at Michigan, learning the language alongside Akkadian. Her interest stemmed originally from ancient religion, but she was soon drawn to the inner workings of the language itself all the more so because of its status as a language isolate. She recalls being drawn in particular to the Cylinders of Gudea at the Louvre—the longest continuous piece of extant Sumerian text. Konstantopoulos remembers being attracted to the grammar of a particular line on Cylinder A—“Come on, come on! We should go and tell her!”—and how in the scribe’s initial repetition she heard a human voice that remained with us across millennia. Konstantopoulos studied the language with an instructor at Michigan through direct reading of primary texts supplemented with a range of grammars. But this can be a challenge for someone trying to start out on their own, since as Konstantopoulos jokes, following Diakonoff, that “there are as many grammars of Sumerian as there are Sumerologists.” The authors of this book also have an exhaustive video series on YouTube that I would suggest as a companion to the book. The channel is Digital Hammurabi. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before publication of an important treatment of a text, scholars 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. The traditional route to learning Sumerian is to learn Akkadian first. This helps overcome the first major hurdle in acquiring the language, namely, the cuneiform writing system. So, for a student interested in following this path, a book such as J. Huegneghard’s A Grammar of Akkadian [Scholars Press; Ref 4 PJ3251 .H84 1997] could be a place to start. But for those committed to diving directly into Sumerian, Konstantopoulos notes the following resources. D.A. Foxvog has published his Introduction to Sumerian Grammar [CDLI; available online] directly to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) preprints collection. The book contains an overview of the writing system, a complete grammar, and a handful of exercises for review. Used in combination with Foxvog’s Elementary Sumerian Glossary [CDLI; available online], this text offers the curious student a entry point into the language. (Beginners may also find it helpful to look at J. L. Hayes’s Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts [Undena; Large PJ4013 .H38 2000] and G. Zólyomi's A n Introduction to the Grammar of Sumerian [ELTE; available online].)