Mark Ronan's website
Sumerian
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The
Sumerian language was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, and seems to have been
the first language written in the cuneiform script. The slight uncertainty
about this is that the first texts contained no grammatical elements such as
suffixes on nouns and prefixes on verbs, but as soon as these began to
appear, in about 2600 BC, it is clear that the language is Sumerian. As
a spoken language it died out in about 2000 BC, though it continued in
use as a written language, rather like Latin in Renaissance Europe. No
languages related to Sumerian, living or dead, are known—distant
relationships have been suggested but never widely accepted. The antecedents
of the Sumerians are unknown, but it is plausible that they came from further
east in Asia. The
pronunciation of Sumerian is somewhat problematic because there are many
monosyllabic words having the same vowels and consonants, but quite different
meanings. They may simply be homonyms (same sound, different meaning), or
they could have had different tonal qualities, as in Chinese. Our knowledge
of the various consonants and vowels is mainly through Akkadian, using lists of words showing the pronunciation
and translation into Akkadian. Sumerian
is a language of the agglutinative type, meaning that words are built up from
a sequence of units each expressing a well-defined grammatical meaning. For
example case markers (more than one) may be attached to a noun, and various
grammatical markers are attached to a verb. The verb comes at the end of the
clause. A modern example of an agglutinative language is Turkish, but it is
completely unrelated to Sumerian. Sumerian
is also an 'ergative' language, meaning that the subject of an intransitive
verb is in the same case as the direct object of a transitive verb—the
so-called the 'absolute' case. The subject of a transitive verb is said to be
in the 'ergative' case. See the separate page on ergativity
for an example. For more details on the
Sumerian language, see the Wikipedia website. |
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