Sumerian language

Stages

thumb|This proto-literate tablet (c. 3100 – 2900 BC) records the transfer of a piece of land ([[Walters Art Museum, Baltimore).]]

thumb|The first known Sumerian–Akkadian bilingual tablet dates from the reign of [[Rimush. Louvre Museum AO 5477. The top half is in Sumerian, the bottom half is its translation in Akkadian.]]

The history of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods:

Proto-literate period – c. 3100 BC to c. 3000 BC
Archaic Sumerian – to
Old or Classical Sumerian – to
Old Akkadian Sumerian – c. 2350 – 2200 BC
Neo-Sumerian – to , further divided into:
Early Neo-Sumerian (Lagash II period) – c. 2200 BC to c. 2100 BC
Late Neo-Sumerian (Ur III period) – c. 2100 BC to c. 2000 BC
Old Babylonian Sumerian – c. 2000 BC to c. 1600 BC
Post-Old Babylonian Sumerian – after .

The pictographic writing system used during the Proto-literate period (3200 BC – 3000 BC), corresponding to the Uruk III and Uruk IV periods in archeology, was still so rudimentary that there remains some scholarly disagreement about whether the language written with it is Sumerian at all, although it has been argued that there are some, albeit still very rare, cases of phonetic indicators and spelling that show this to be the case. The texts from this period are mostly administrative; there are also a number of sign lists, which were apparently used for the training of scribes.

The next period, Archaic Sumerian (3000 BC – 2500 BC), is the first stage of inscriptions that indicate grammatical elements, so the identification of the language is certain. It includes some administrative texts and sign lists from Ur (c. 2800 BC). Texts from Shuruppak and Abu Salabikh from 2600 to 2500 BC (the so-called Fara period or Early Dynastic Period IIIa) are the first to span a greater variety of genres, including not only administrative texts and sign lists, but also incantations, legal and literary texts (including proverbs and early versions of the famous works The Instructions of Shuruppak and The Kesh temple hymn). However, the spelling of grammatical elements remains optional, making the interpretation and linguistic analysis of these texts difficult. during which Mesopotamia, including Sumer, was united under the rule of the Akkadian Empire. At this time Akkadian functioned as the primary official language, but texts in Sumerian (primarily administrative) did continue to be produced as well. and even the royal court actually used Akkadian as their main spoken and native language.

By the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000 – c. 1600 BC), Akkadian had clearly supplanted Sumerian as a spoken language in nearly all of its original territory, whereas Sumerian continued its existence as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes. In addition, it has been argued that Sumerian persisted as a spoken language at least in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia (Nippur and its surroundings) at least until about 1900 BC For this reason, this period as well as the remaining time during which Sumerian was written are sometimes referred to as the "Post-Sumerian" period. The Old Babylonian Empire, however, mostly used Akkadian in inscriptions, sometimes adding Sumerian versions.

The Old Babylonian period, especially its early part, can be dated to that time, and it is often seen as the "classical age" of Sumerian literature. Conversely, far more literary texts on tablets surviving from the Old Babylonian period are in Sumerian than in Akkadian, even though that time is viewed as the classical period of Babylonian culture and language. and there are also grammatical textsessentially bilingual paradigms listing Sumerian grammatical forms and their postulated Akkadian equivalents.

After the Old Babylonian period and only part of the literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied after its end around 1600 BC. but Akkadian seems to have taken the place of Sumerian as the primary language of texts used for the training of scribes and their Sumerian itself acquires an increasingly artificial and Akkadian-influenced form. In some cases a text may not even have been meant to be read in Sumerian; instead, it may have functioned as a prestigious way of "encoding" Akkadian via Sumerograms (cf. Japanese kanbun). and it retained that role until the eclipse of the tradition of cuneiform literacy itself in the beginning of the Common Era. The most popular genres for Sumerian texts after the Old Babylonian period were incantations, liturgical texts and proverbs; among longer texts, the classics Lugal-e and An-gim were most commonly copied.

Classification

Sumerian is a language isolate. At one time it was widely held to be an Indo-European language, but that view has been almost universally rejected. Since decipherment began in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because of its prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity often have a nationalistic flavour. Dravidian, Uralic, Sino-Tibetan, Bolgar and Turkic (the last being promoted by Turkish nationalists as part of the Sun language theory). Additionally, long-range proposals have attempted to include Sumerian in broad macrofamilies, often including other notable isolates like Basque or small families like Koreanic. Such proposals enjoy virtually no support among modern linguists, Sumerologists, or Assyriologists, and are typically seen as fringe theories due to their unverifiability. However, no conclusive evidence beyond a handful of typological features can be found to support this view. A more widespread hypothesis posits a Proto-Euphratean language family that preceded Sumerian in Mesopotamia and exerted an areal influence on it, especially in the form of polysyllabic words that appear "un-Sumerian"—making them suspect of being loanwords—and are not traceable to any other known language family. There is little speculation as to the affinities of this hypothetical substratum language, or these languages, and Sumerian is thus best treated as unclassified. Other researchers disagree with the assumption of a single substratum language and argue that several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period ( 3350–3100 BC) is really an early extinct branch of Indo-European language which he terms "Euphratic" which somehow emerged long before the accepted timeline for the spread of Indo-European into West Asia, though this is rejected by mainstream opinion which accepts Sumerian as a language isolate.

Writing system

Development

thumb|Letter sent by the high-priest Lu'enna to the king of [[Lagash (maybe Urukagina), informing him of his son's death in combat, , found in Telloh (ancient Girsu)]]

thumb|Vase of [[Entemena, king of Lagash, with dedication. Louvre AO2674, ]]

Pictographic proto-writing was used in Mesopotamia starting in c. 3300 BC. It is unclear what underlying language it encoded, if any. By c. 2800 BC, some tablets began using syllabic elements that clearly indicated a relation to the Sumerian language. Around 2600 BC, cuneiform symbols were developed using a wedge-shaped stylus to impress the shapes into wet clay. This cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") mode of writing co-existed with the proto-cuneiform archaic mode. Deimel (1922) lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (26th century). In the same period the large set of logographic signs had been simplified into a logosyllabic script comprising several hundred signs. Rosengarten (1967) lists 468 signs used in Sumerian (pre-Sargonian) Lagash.

The cuneiform script was adapted to Akkadian writing beginning in the mid-third millennium. Over the long period of bilingual overlap of active Sumerian and Akkadian usage the two languages influenced each other, as reflected in numerous loanwords and even word order changes.

Transliteration

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). Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri-spellings, after the logogram 𒋛𒀀 DIRI which is written with the signs 𒋛 SI and 𒀀 A. The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word dirig, not the separate component signs.

Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before publication of an important treatment of a text, scholars will often arrange to collate the published transliteration against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.

Knowledge of the readings of Sumerian signs is based, to a great extent, on lexical lists made for Akkadian speakers, where they are expressed by means of syllabic signs. The established readings were originally based on lexical lists from the Neo-Babylonian Period, which were found in the 19th century; in the 20th century, earlier lists from the Old Babylonian Period were published and some researchers in the 21st century have switched to using readings from them. There is also variation in the degree to which so-called "Auslauts" or "amissable consonants" (morpheme-final consonants that stopped being pronounced at one point or another in the history of Sumerian) are reflected in the transliterations. This article generally uses the versions with expressed Auslauts.

Historiography

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.)

In 1838 Henry Rawlinson, building on the 1802 work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, was able to decipher the Old Persian section of the Behistun inscriptions, using his knowledge of modern Persian. When he recovered the rest of the text in 1843, he and others were gradually able to translate the Elamite and Akkadian sections of it, starting with the 37 signs he had deciphered for the Old Persian. Meanwhile, many more cuneiform texts were coming to light from archaeological excavations, mostly in the Semitic Akkadian language, which were duly deciphered.

By 1850, however, Edward Hincks came to suspect a non-Semitic origin for cuneiform. Semitic languages are structured according to consonantal forms, whereas cuneiform, when functioning phonetically, was a syllabary, binding consonants to particular vowels. Furthermore, no Semitic words could be found to explain the syllabic values given to particular signs. Julius Oppert suggested that a non-Semitic language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that speakers of this language had developed the cuneiform script.

In 1855 Rawlinson announced the discovery of non-Semitic inscriptions at the southern Babylonian sites of Nippur, Larsa, and Uruk.

In 1856, Hincks argued that the untranslated language was agglutinative in character. The language was called "Scythic" by some, and, confusingly, "Akkadian" by others. In 1869, Oppert proposed the name "Sumerian", based on the known title "King of Sumer and Akkad", reasoning that if Akkad signified the Semitic portion of the kingdom, Sumer might describe the non-Semitic annex.

Credit for being first to scientifically treat a bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt, who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze (The Sumerian family laws) in 1879.

Ernest de Sarzec 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.

The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to a 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, Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halévy's arguments, not renouncing Halévy until 1897.

François Thureau-Dangin working at the Louvre in Paris also 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. Charles Fossey at the Collège de France in Paris was another prolific and reliable scholar. His pioneering Contribution au Dictionnaire sumérien–assyrien, Paris 1905–1907, turns out to provide the foundation for P. Anton Deimel's 1934 Sumerisch-Akkadisches Glossar (vol. III of Deimel's 4-volume Sumerisches Lexikon).

In 1908, Stephen Herbert 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, the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer provided a detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his Sumerian Mythology.

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. Another highly influential figure in Sumerology during much of the 20th century was Adam Falkenstein, who produced a grammar of the language of Gudea's inscriptions. 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. While there are various points in Sumerian grammar on which Thomsen's views are not shared by most Sumerologists today, Thomsen's grammar (often with express mention of the critiques put forward by Pascal Attinger in his 1993 Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du<sub>11</sub>/e/di 'dire) is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar.

More recent monograph-length grammars of Sumerian include Dietz Otto Edzard's 2003 Sumerian Grammar and Bram Jagersma's 2010 A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian. Piotr Michalowski's essay (entitled, simply, "Sumerian") in the 2004 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages has also been recognized as a good modern grammatical sketch.

There is relatively little consensus, even among reasonable Sumerologists, in comparison to the state of most modern or classical languages. Verbal morphology, in particular, is hotly disputed. In addition to the general grammars, there are many monographs and articles about particular areas of Sumerian grammar, without which a survey of the field could not be considered complete.

The primary institutional lexical effort in Sumerian is the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project, begun in 1974. In 2004, the PSD was released on the Web as the ePSD. The project is currently supervised by Steve Tinney. A new edition of the PSD was published online in 2017, and its most recent update was in 2024.

Phonology

Assumed phonological and morphological forms will be between slashes // and curly brackets {}, respectively, with plain text used for the standard Assyriological transcription of Sumerian. Most of the following examples are unattested. Note also that, not unlike most other pre-modern orthographies, Sumerian cuneiform spelling is highly variable, so the transcriptions and the cuneiform examples will generally show only one or at most a few common graphic forms out of many that may occur. Spelling practices have also changed significantly in the course of the history of Sumerian: the examples in the article will use the most phonetically explicit spellings attested, which usually means Old Babylonian or Ur III period spellings. except where an authentic example from another period is used.

Modern knowledge of Sumerian phonology is flawed and incomplete because of the lack of speakers, the transmission through the filter of Akkadian phonology and the difficulties posed by the cuneiform script. As I. M. Diakonoff observes, "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".

Consonants

Early Sumerian is conjectured to have had at least the consonants listed in the table below. The consonants in parentheses are reconstructed by some scholars based on indirect evidence; if they existed, they were lost around the Ur III period in the late 3rd millennium BC.

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"

|+ Sumerian consonant phonemes

! colspan="2" |

! Bilabial

! Alveolar

! Postalveolar

! Velar

!Glottal

! colspan="2" | Nasal

! rowspan="2" | Plosive

! plain

| ()

! aspirated

! rowspan="2" | Affricate

! plain

! aspirated

! colspan="2" | Fricative

| ()

! colspan="2" | Approximant

|()

! colspan="2" | Tap

a simple distribution of six stop consonants in three places of articulation, originally distinguished by aspiration. In the late 3rd millennium BC, the unaspirated stops are thought to have become voiced in most positions (although not word-finally), whereas the voiceless aspirated stops maintained their aspiration.