Sumerian Grammar Pdf

[Joke Grinman]

Inthe lessons below, you'll be introduced to aspects of Sumerian grammar in (hopefully) bite sized chunks. If any of the lessons are confusing, don't hesitate to edit them for style, or use the discussion boards for suggestions! That's the spirit of the wiki, after all.

In spite of its extinction, Sumerian exerted a significant impact on the languages of the area. The cuneiform script, originally used for Sumerian, was widely adopted by numerous regional languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, Eblaite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian and Urartian; it similarly inspired the Old Persian alphabet which was used to write the eponymous language. The impact was perhaps the greatest on Akkadian, whose grammar and vocabulary were significantly influenced by Sumerian.[8]

The Old Babylonian period, especially its early part,[10] has produced extremely numerous and varied Sumerian literary texts: myths, epics, hymns, prayers, wisdom literature and letters. In fact, nearly all preserved Sumerian religious and wisdom literature[24] and the overwhelming majority of surviving manuscripts of Sumerian literary texts in general[25][26][27] can be dated to that time, and it is often seen as the "classical age" of Sumerian literature.[28] 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.[29][30][26] However, it has sometimes been suggested that many or most of these "Old Babylonian Sumerian" texts may be copies of works that were originally composed in the preceding Ur III period or earlier, and some copies or fragments of known compositions or literary genres have indeed been found in tablets of Neo-Sumerian and Old Sumerian provenance.[31][26] In addition, some of the first bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists are preserved from that time (although the lists were still usually monolingual and Akkadian translations did not become common until the late Middle Babylonian period)[32] and there are also grammatical texts - essentially bilingual paradigms listing Sumerian grammatical forms and their postulated Akkadian equivalents.[33]

After the Old Babylonian period[12] or, according to some, as early as 1700 BC,[10] the active use of Sumerian declined. Scribes did continue to produce texts in Sumerian at a more modest scale, but generally with interlinear Akkadian translations[34] and only part of the literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied after its end around 1600 BC.[24] During the Middle Babylonian period, approximately from 1600 to 1000 BC, the Kassite rulers continued to use Sumerian in many of their inscriptions,[35][36] but Akkadian seems to have taken the place of Sumerian as the primary language of texts used for the training of scribes[37] and their Sumerian itself acquires an increasingly artificial and Akkadian-influenced form.[24][38][39] 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).[38] Nonetheless, the study of Sumerian and copying of Sumerian texts remained an integral part of scribal education and literary culture of Mesopotamia and surrounding societies influenced by it[35][36][40][41][b] 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.[24]

Sumerian is widely accepted to be a local language isolate.[43][44][45][46] Sumerian was at one time widely held to be an Indo-European language, but that view has been almost universally rejected.[47] Since its decipherment in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because Sumerian has prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity sometimes have a nationalistic flavour.[48] Attempts have been made to link Sumerian with a range of widely disparate groups such as the Austroasiatic languages,[49] Dravidian languages,[50] Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish,[51][52][53][54] Sino-Tibetan languages[55] and Turkic languages (the last being promoted by Turkish nationalists as part of the Sun language theory[56][57]). Additionally, long-range proposals have attempted to include Sumerian in broad macrofamilies.[58][59] Such proposals enjoy virtually no support among modern linguists, Sumerologists and Assyriologists and are typically seen as fringe theories.[48]

Pictographic proto-writing was used 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,[64][65] 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 bi-lingual overlap of active Sumerian and Akkadian usage the two languages influenced each other, as reflected in numerous loanwords and even word order changes.[66]

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.

Our 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.[67][c] 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.[68] This article generally used the versions with expressed Auslauts.

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-Franois 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.[71] 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 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.

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 Dcouvertes en Chalde with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884. The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888.

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.[74] Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable.

Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzge der sumerischen Grammatik, both appearing in 1914.[76] Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel, published a grammar with the same title, Grundzge 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.[77] 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 Elments de linguistique sumrienne: La construction de du11/e/di 'dire') is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar.

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