CHAPTER FIVE

THE SUMERIAN LANGUAGE

Graham Cunningham

“What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?” was a dismissive question posed some 4,000 years ago (Alster 1997: 54), when knowledge of the language was regarded as essential to an educated man. The high standing of

Sumerian continued for a further 2,000 years and extended throughout much of the ancient Middle East. The speaker would be even less impressed by the current status of this once great language. Despite a claim to be the first language written (the rival being ancient Egyptian), and a subsequent written history extending for twice as long as has been the case so far for English, Sumerian fell into oblivion and was only rediscovered less than two centuries ago.

The original name of the language has not, however, been revived by modern scholars. The other extinct language from the ancient Middle East for which we have extensive records is Akkadian, first attested in names appended to Sumerian texts. Being a Semitic language with modern counterparts, Akkadian is much better understood than Sumerian. To a large degree our understanding of Sumerian is refracted through our understanding of its neighbor, and it is Akkadian that is the source of the term “Sumerian”: the expression used in what we call Sumerian was instead Eme-gir15 (“tongue” + “native” in the Sumerian sequence, that is “Nativelanguage”; the subscript numerals are a modern convention enabling scholars to specify how a particular sound sequence is written).

The aim of this chapter is to introduce to a wider audience a language and a script so markedly different from languages like English and scripts like the alphabetic one now being read. The chapter begins by discussing how Sumerian can be classified, and continues with brief accounts of its script and of the types of text that were written. Then follows an account of the language: its sounds, its words, how those words combine to form phrases, and how those phrases combine in turn as clauses.

CLASSIFYING SUMERIAN

A language can be classified in two independent ways: typologically in terms of its grammatical features, and genetically in terms of the languages to which it is related. The short classification of Sumerian is that it is typologically an agglutinative, ergative, and verb-final language, genetically unrelated to any other.

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Typological classification

Agglutination is one of the terms used in the analysis of word structure (morphology). Words can be described as consisting of at least one morpheme (minimal grammatical unit), which is called a free morpheme or base and can itself function as a word (such as the verb run). Words can also include one or more bound morphemes (such as the s in runs). Most languages use a combination of different morphological strategies but favor one more than others. Sumerian favors agglutination: typically it forms complex words by “gluing” a sequence of single-function, easily identifiable morphemes to an unchanging, generally monosyllabic base. The immediate contrast is with fusional morphology, as in languages such as Latin that favor instead base-alterations and multifunctional bound morphemes with boundaries that are less easy to identify.

One use of bound morphemes is to distinguish between the subject and object of a verb. English tends to rely on word order instead, but its pronouns preserve the remnants of what is termed a nominative–accusative system, as in the clause he failed him, in which he is the subject (nominative) and him the object (accusative) of the verb failed. In such a system the subject of a transitive verb (a verb that takes a direct object), as in the previous example, is marked in the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb (a verb that does not take such an object), as in he failed. However, many languages, among them Sumerian, use instead what is termed an ergative–absolutive system. In this the subject of an intransitive verb is marked in the same way as the object of a transitive verb, that is, in the absolutive, while the subject of a transitive verb is marked differently, that is, in the ergative. An ergative–absolutive system reflects what are often the semantics of the verbal event: him in she failed him and he in he failed potentially refer to the same person. In contrast, marking both subjects in the same way places more emphasis on their role in performing the action of the verb. In this context it should be noted that Sumerian is not entirely an ergative language. Where the language emphasizes the role of the subject as performer, for example, in its personal pronouns, Sumerian uses instead a nominative–accusative system.

The final typological classification relates to word order, Sumerian being a subject–object–verb language, also termed a verb-final language. The verb is the head or governing element in the clause, and verb-final languages tend to be head-final elsewhere in their grammar. This is generally the case for Sumerian: the language’s functional equivalent to the English subordinator that comes at the end of the clause it subordinates; rather than prepositions such as to, Sumerian has postpositional morphemes; and its possessive morphemes (such as my) are at the end of the phrase rather than at its beginning. However, there is one major exception: modification of the noun in Sumerian is head-initial, the language’s adjectives, for example, typically following the noun. Similarly, in the compound noun Eme-gir15 (“Native-language”), the modifier gir15 (“native”) follows the noun eme (“tongue”). There is, though, some tentative evidence that noun modification too was once more head-final, the subsequent syntactic shift then being attributable to the influence of Akkadian.

Genetic classification

While the typological classification of Sumerian is fairly straightforward, its genetic relationship to other languages is disputed. Many scholars regard it as unrelated to any other. Recently, however, attempts have been made to find Sumerian a home, within

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either a language family or a superfamily, a larger, and much more contentious, theoretical construct. For example, different contributors to the 1997 issue of an academic journal on language origins, Mother Tongue, agreed that Sumerian did have relatives, but disagreed as to which. One contributor, the American linguist Allan Bomhard, allocated Sumerian to the Nostratic superfamily, distributed throughout parts of Europe, Asia, and north Africa and said to include, as well as Sumerian in isolation, the Indo-European family of languages, such as English; the Semitic languages, such as Akkadian; and the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, now spoken mainly in northern and eastern Europe (Bomhard 1997).

The same scholar has recently discussed the members of the Nostratic superfamily in more detail, locating the Uralic homeland between the Ob and Volga rivers and dating that ancestral language to approximately 4000 BC (Bomhard 2008: 230). He has, however, become less confident about Sumerian’s affiliations, suggesting that it “is not a Nostratic daughter language at all” (Bomhard 2008: 272). Other scholars, though, have fewer doubts – the Finnish Assyriologist Simo Parpola, for example, arguing recently that Sumerian should indeed be grouped within the Uralic language family (Parpola 2010).

The disagreement between those who would isolate Sumerian and those who would integrate is, to a certain extent, one that arises in any attempt at classification, some scholars being splitters and some bundlers. The methodological problems in the genetic classification of languages are, however, considerable. For example, arguments often rely too much on sound-and-meaning correspondences rather than on grammatical similarities, and any similarities convincingly identified may be due as much to contact as to a genetic relationship. Given such problems, exacerbated by the highly approximate nature of our reconstructions of Sumerian phonology, it is the isolationist position that remains the more persuasive.

WRITING SUMERIAN

Writing in Mesopotamia had its late fourth millennium origins within a repertoire of clay-based, language-independent administrative procedures, such as clay tokens keeping inventories, and clay strips used to seal off different types of container (storage rooms as well as vessels). The plentiful local supplies of damp clay were put to further use as tablets upon which signs were drawn. Many of the early signs were pictorial in character and there is no reason to associate them with any particular language. Over time the signs were reduced to more abstract forms composed of wedge-like indentations impressed on the clay with a stylus made from reed, the goddess of which became the patron of scribes. We call this script cuneiform, from cuneus, the Latin for wedge. The layout of the tablets also changed, from vertical columns written from right to left across the tablet, to the cuneiform equivalent to the line that you see before you. This rotation 90 degrees counter-clockwise further abstracted the signs, because they too were reoriented in the process, being turned upon their backs.

More significantly, the nature of the script also changed, from what is termed a logographic system, that is, one whose signs represent words, to a mixed system, partly logographic and partly phonographic, the logographic signs then corresponding more to the base of a word while a limited number of signs were also used phonographically to represent sound sequences (syllables and parts of syllables). This enabled a wider

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range of morphemes to be written and the phonological form of words to be specified more precisely, which in turn enables us to recognize that the language being written was Sumerian. Why Sumerian should be the first Middle Eastern language that we can confidently recognize in writing remains uncertain. The regional term “Sumer”, again an adoption from Akkadian, identifies the language with the area where cuneiform writing was invented, although the correlation is less straightforward in Sumerian itself, in which the regional term is Ki-en-gi, tentatively “Native-language-land,” with gi as a variant of gir15 (“native”) and en a reduction of eme (“language”). However, this area was at least to some degree bilingual on the basis of the extensive interplay between Sumerian and Akkadian, if not multilingual on the basis of ethnographic parallels. The decision early in the third millennium to start specifying a Sumerian pronunciation may reflect such factors as status, scale of use or increasing state control, but it may also indicate that the language was already in retreat.

The introduction of phonographic writing was again a process of abstraction, the one-to-one correspondence between sign and meaning in logographic writing being supplemented by the writing of a sound sequence that could include more than one morpheme or only part of a morpheme. It was also a slow process: isolated phonographic writings of bound morphemes are first attested about 2800 BC (all dates are highly approximate) but remained limited in use until about 2600 BC. Words were written more fully from that date onward, but writing conventions were never standardized and reconstructing a word’s exact phonological form remains difficult, the relationship between script and pronunciation being complex and ambiguous. In particular, syllable-final consonants were often underspecified: until about 2400 BC many consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) sequences were written CV and it was only in the eighteenth century that full writings, typically in the form CV–VC, became the norm. In consequence transliteration (alphabetic representation) of Sumerian cuneiform rarely reconstructs words, but instead simply links with hyphens those signs thought to constitute a word.

A further characteristic of Sumerian cuneiform is that many of its signs have multiple values, because the same sign was used to represent words similar in meaning or in sound, thus reducing the number of signs that were needed. So, for example, the sign we refer to as KA, in origin a profile of the head with hatching at the point of the mouth, was used to represent the semantically related dug4 “to speak,” inim

KA. Some scholars use acute and grave diacritics rather than the numerals 2 and 3 in

subscript.) Semantic and phonological principles likewise enabled expansion of the sign repertoire based on already existing signs. So, for example, the sign KA combined with the semantically appropriate sign a (“water”) represented nagˆ “to drink” (ˆg corresponds roughly to ng in sing), and combined with the phonologically appropriate sign me (“to be”), eme “tongue.”

In addition, a few signs were also used as unspoken determinatives, written either before or after a noun, to specify the semantic set to which the noun belonged. For example, the names of deities were preceded by a sign indicating their divine status. The sign in question depicts a star and represents the Sumerian for deity, digˆir; when

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it is used as a determinative it is abbreviated in transliteration to d and typeset in superscript.

THE WRITTEN RECORD

Writing began as bureaucratic record-keeping on clay tablets and administration remained its principal function, starting with the approximately 5,000 documents recovered from the city of Uruk (to use its Akkadian name, Sumerian Unug), and peaking in the more than 60,000 documents relating to the late third millennium empire whose capital was Ur (Urim). While these disposable economic accounts dominate the textual record, even their distribution across space and time is highly erratic. This is partly due to accidents of modern recovery and partly to accidents of ancient survival, some tablets being recycled once they had served their function. Others, however, were discarded after use, and it is these discards that archaeologists have recovered, supplemented by tablets suspended in use when their surroundings were destroyed or abandoned.

From the origins of writing onward, a wider range of genres was chosen for textualization, written on a wider range of both materials and artifacts. This series of changes, from administrative book-keeping to writing as a medium for expressing religious intensity and literary inspiration, is often presented as a haltingly slow but nonetheless goal-directed process culminating in a type of writing familiar to us. However, one of the challenges facing modern scholars is a more nuanced analysis of these developments, doing greater justice to the many dimensions of writing in the period.

The second attested use of writing, also found among the early tablets from Uruk, was for recording lexical lists, sometimes organized like a dictionary in terms of how the words were written, but more often thematically structured like a thesaurus, some lists focusing on aspects of the social world (such as lists of professions) and others on the natural world (such as lists of trees). These lists, whose lexicon provides a poor match to the words found in the administrative tablets, were compiled by scholars for use in the education of trainee scribes, and presumably therefore originated in an educational context, as opposed to the administrative contexts in which trained scribes practiced their trade. A further contrast is that oral transmission enabled their content to be repeated (or adapted) across time and space, the lists consequently being attested in multiple exemplars. This early institutionalization of textual culture – its selection, dissemination and preservation (or sometimes adaptation or rejection) – has intellectual as well as social and political implications, not simply mirroring an external reality but to some degree authoring it, and then re-authoring it in a constant process of change. In addition, these lists have been as helpful to modern as to ancient students of Sumerian, examples from the early second millennium onward specifying a word’s Akkadian translation as well as its pronunciation in Sumerian.

The next attested type of writing marks a further major change, both content and the bearer of that content being intended for transmission across time. Many different types of object were introduced as the bearers of writing, all fashioned from more durable materials intended to provide longevity; in addition, there was a change in the message as well as the medium. This new type of writing, referred to as display inscriptions, is attested from approximately 2800 BC onward (here it should be stressed

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that it is difficult not only to date these developments but even to place them in sequence), and it is possible that this set of changes – to content, material, and object

– correlates with the increased use of the script as a tool for representing language. Typically these artifacts were deposited in temples, the inscribed object sometimes being displayed for divine eyes only. The earliest inscriptions record land sales, focusing on named individuals and suggesting a greater social emphasis on personalized wealth. Such transactions were later recorded on clay tablets. However, personalization of status also characterizes the much more widely distributed inscriptions, attested from approximately 2700 BC onward, which were used instead to commemorate the deeds of rulers.

Two sites in particular document an expansion in textualization on clay toward the end of the first half of the third millennium: modern Fara (Shuruppag), upriver from Uruk, and Abu Salabikh (ancient name uncertain), upriver from Nippur (Sumerian Nibru). These sites show that the administrative repertoire had expanded to include legal documents and the scribal curriculum to include hymns, narratives and didactic compositions, as well as other literary texts whose meaning remains less certain. Also attested for the first time is a type of text that appears to be less associated with the curriculum, namely incantations, that is, ritual formulae designed to produce a particular effect. All these changes were permanent innovations. In contrast, a further group of literary texts is written according to a short-lived set of conventions in which the signs have atypical values. Modern scholars call this UD.GAL.NUN writing because it uses these three signs to write the name of Nippur’s patron deity Enlil (normally den-lil2).

Slightly later texts from northern Mesopotamia – for example, at Tell Mardikh (ancient Ebla) in what is now Syria – demonstrate the scale of Sumerian’s diffusion as a language of learning. In the south, developments in the second half of the third millennium include the first letters, somewhat to the discomfiture of those anthropologists who regard writing as paramountly a means of long-distance communication, and a marked increase in the complexity and sophistication of some of the royal inscriptions.

The last Sumerian administrative documents date to the eighteenth century, although these may simply be preserving a tradition rather than reflecting a spoken reality: what was to some degree a bilingual society may have already shifted its allegiance to Akkadian and ceased speaking Sumerian, leaving the latter to live on as a high-status, heritage language throughout much of the ancient Middle East – a kind of lingua sacra to Akkadian’s lingua franca. The eighteenth-century textual record also shows that the literary part of the school curriculum had expanded considerably, now being dominated by poetry in praise of rulers or petitioning deities on their behalf. This type of poetry is little attested later. Instead it is compositions to the greater glory of a deity or kingship in general that were chosen for transmission, recast in bilingual versions along with the lexical lists and incantations. A different Sumerian genre is also more widely attested from this period on, cultic laments written in a variety of the language referred to as Eme-sal (“tongue” + “thin,” that is “Thin-language”). These texts were written much more phonographically than usual, a type of writing that was also applied very occasionally to Emegir Sumerian.

Emesal and Emegir differ occasionally in their lexicon and morphology but more often in the distribution of their consonants, the former having /z/, for example, where

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the latter has /d/ (backslashes contain an approximation of what was said; italics indicate instead how something was written). In addition to the cultic laments, Emesal is particularly attested in the speech of the female protagonist in songs of love and marriage. These genre associations, and the fact that the sign used to write sal depicts the pubic triangle (its other values include munus “woman” and gal4 “vulva”), have encouraged many scholars to suggest a correlation between Emesal and female speech. However, establishing such a correlation, or indeed one between Emesal and any spoken variety of the language, remains difficult. The textual history of these two genres differs widely. The love songs were incorporated in the school curriculum and in consequence had a fairly stable textual history. The laments were textualized independently of the curriculum and had a more fluid tradition. In addition, the laments long outlived the love songs, constituting one of the major text groups to survive into the first millennium.

PHONOLOGY

Unsurprisingly our reconstruction of Sumerian phonology reflects an Akkadian influence and what emerges is to a large degree a subset of that language’s sound system (as well as of the English sound system, which is convenient but again indicates that these reconstructions need to be regarded very much as conventions).

Vowels

Sumerian is thought to have had at least eight vowel sounds, long and short /a/, /e/, /i/ and /u/, although the difference in vowel length is not indicated in transliteration. The language probably also had an /o/ sound, partly suggested by the high incidence of /u/ in transliterations, but the absence of this vowel from Akkadian makes its distribution in Sumerian difficult to recover. In complex words, vowels in successive syllables tended to assimilate. Such assimilation probably occurred more frequently than transliterations indicate, generally because writing tends to be conservative, and more specifically because logographic writings obscure phonological change.

Consonants

Fourteen consonants are usually recognized in transliterating the language, some being represented by a consonant plus a diacritic, although when writing English the convention is to use digraphs (two letters): /b/, /d/, /g/, /h/ (as in loch), /k/, /l/, /m/,

˘

/n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /sˇ/ (as in ship), /t/ and /z/. Sumerian is also thought to have had various weak consonants, /h/, /y/ and /’/ (a glottal stop, like the sound sometimes substituted for /t/ in bottle), although none is specified in transliteration. In addition, the language had at least two other consonants that were absent from Akkadian. The identity of one remains uncertain and in consequence it does not appear in transliterations; at some time during the third millennium it appears to have merged in particular with /d/ in some contexts and /r/ in others, and transliteration uses those sounds instead. The other consonant appears to have corresponded roughly to /gˆ/ (as in sing), on the basis of loanwords from Sumerian to Akkadian in which it occurs as sounds like /g/ and /n/. While this consonant is recognized in some transliterations, including those given here,

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the conventions for specifying it vary. Sumerian consonants are unequal in their distribution, some being more restricted than they are in English (e.g. /p/ and /t/ do not occur at the end of a word), others being less so (e.g. /gˆ/ can occur at the beginning of a word).

WORD CLASSES

Words can be divided into two broad categories, referred to as content and function. Content words – that is nouns, verbs, adjectives and manner adverbs – have a highly identifiable meaning, can be morphologically complex, and dominate dictionaries; function words are fewer in number, have a more grammatical role, tend to be short and simple, and discussion of their usage dominates grammars. Function words can also be divided into various classes, in particular pronouns (words that substitute for a noun, like, for example, this in read this rather than read the chapter), determiners (words that qualify a noun and often have a similar pronominal form, like this in read this chapter), numbers, conjunctions, interjections, and those types of adverb not concerned with manner. A further contrast between function and content words is more specific to Sumerian and reflects cuneiform’s origin in listing items rather than representing the complexities of language: Sumerian function words are written phonographically, while the bases of its content words are typically written logographically.

Function words

Sumerian has various types of pronoun: personal and reflexive pronouns, as well as demonstratives, interrogatives, indefinites and a nominal relative. There is considerable overlap between the last three because one of the interrogative pronouns (/ana/ “what?”) plays a central role in forming other words. As in English, the nominal relative (whose function is best explained by an example: read what you want) is formed simply by conversion from the interrogative. However, in the indefinites /ana/ (reduced to /na/) combines with forms of the verb me (“to be”): /name/ (< /na/ + /me/ = “what” + “is,” i.e. “any”) and /nigˆnam/ (< /nigˆ/ + /na/ + /m/ = “thing” + “what” + “is,” i.e. “anything”). Such interrogative-based indefinites are common in other languages, one example being the French expression quoi que ce soit (“whatever that might be,” i.e. “anything”).

Interrogative /ana/ also combines with a particular set of bound morphemes (termed case markers, functional equivalents to English prepositions) to form interrogative adverbs, such as /anasˇ/ (/ana/ + /sˇ/ = “what?” + “to,” i.e. “why?”). The other types of function adverb in Sumerian include modals (like /igen/ “truly”), conjunctives (/ganam/ “moreover”) and temporals (/adal/ “now”).

In its interrogative pronouns, and elsewhere in its grammar, Sumerian distinguishes gender, /ana/ being “what?” and /aba/ “who?” The contours of this grammatical distinction broadly follow those of the (super)natural world, contrasting inanimates and animals with other types of animate (people and deities). This distinction is common in other languages but no satisfactory terms have yet been agreed to express it, proposals including neutral versus common (i.e. feminine and masculine), impersonal versus personal, and non-human versus human (adopted here). Surprisingly the

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contrast in the interrogative pronouns between non-human /n/ and human /b/ is the reverse of what occurs elsewhere in the language; for example, in its personal and reflexive pronouns. Before specifying the form of these words, the concepts of grammatical person and number need first to be introduced.

This traditional structure privileges a narrator, the first person (/gˆe/ “I” being the personal pronoun), to whom the second person (/ze/ “you”) listens, and who discusses the third person (/ane/ “she/he,” later with vowel assimilation /ene/). With human reference only, these singular “persons” also occur in the plural (/menden/ “we,” /menzen/ “you” and /anene/ “they,” later /enene/). As first and second person references are necessarily human, the gender distinction is restricted to the third person, the Sumerian third person non-human reflexive pronoun being /nibi/ (/ni/ + /bi/ = “self” + “its/their,” i.e. “itself” or “themselves,” no distinction in number being made with non-human reference), while the singular human reflexive pronoun is /niteni/ (/ni/ + /ni/ = “self” + “her/his,” i.e. “herself” or “himself” – the intervening /te/ seems to have only a phonological function). Sumerian has no non-human personal pronoun but the third person human personal pronouns likewise contain /n/.

To conclude this selective discussion of the language’s pronouns mention should be made of the two independent demonstratives: /ne(n)/ (“this”) and /ur/ (“that”). Sumerian also has a wider range of demonstratives that function as determiners qualifying a noun. These never occur in sequence in discourse context so evaluating precisely how they differ semantically remains difficult: /bi/, /e(n)/, /ne(n)/ (again), /re(n)/ and /sˇe/. Demonstratives are celebrated in linguistics as the source of many other morphemes, one example being Latin ille (“that”) which yielded French il (“he”). This principle also applies in Sumerian, one of the clearest instances occurring in the set of what are termed possessive determiners (first person singular /gˆu/ “my” etc.), third person non-human /bi/ “its/their” originating in demonstrative /bi/. Most of the language’s other determiners are words that also occur as pronouns, as is the case in English. However, Sumerian has no equivalent to the two most common English determiners, the and a.

Sumerian numbers can be viewed as behaving like determiners when they qualify a noun and like pronouns when they substitute for a noun. They match other function words in that their internal structure is restricted, but differ in that this structure can be complex. The remaining types of function word, interjections and conjunctions, tend to have instead a simpler morphology.

In Sumerian the class of interjections includes expressives (like /ua/ “oh”), directives (like /gana/ “come on”), and mimetics, that is words imitating the sounds made by animals and birds (like /tikutikumae/). The class of conjunctions is traditionally divided into only two types: ones that co-ordinate (such as and) and ones that subordinate (after). The former can link nouns (kings and queens) and verbs (he ran and fell); the latter can link only verbs (he fell after he had run). Sumerian has very few of either subcategory, most noun sequences simply being juxtaposed (a conjunction being supplied in translation): an ki “heaven (and) earth.” Occasionally, however, /bida/ “and” occurs after the last noun in a sequence (as Latin que can do), representing a reanalysis of /bi/ “its/their” and /da/ “together with” as a single morpheme; /da/ is another of the Sumerian case markers, referred to as the comitative, reanalysis of such morphemes to express co-ordination being common in other languages. Sumerian’s only other noun co-ordinator is /u/ “and,” a loanword from Akkadian which was also

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used to co-ordinate verbs, as was another slightly later loan from Akkadian, /ma/. The language does, however, have the occasional, as it were home-grown, subordinating conjunction, one example being /tukumbi/ “if.”

Content words

Two of the four classes traditionally associated with content words raise some analytical issues in Sumerian. The class of adjectives seems to be very small, focusing on dimension (such as gal “big”), age (gibil “new”), value (zid “just”), color (babbar “white”), and physical properties (kug “shining”). The class of manner adverbs may be smaller still, many such instances possibly being better interpreted as frozen nominal expressions. The identification of Sumerian nouns and verbs is, however, more straightforward.

Sumerian nouns can be subcategorized into one of the language’s two gender classes, human (such as dumu “child”) and non-human (such as gud “ox” and e2 “house”). While this grammatical distinction broadly matches the natural one, there are some socially conditioned exceptions, sagˆ “slave,” for example, often being construed as a non-human noun. The distinction is not marked on the noun, but is morphologically apparent in most parts of the language’s third-person pronominal system. It is also syntactically apparent in restrictions on how certain bound morphemes were used, some case markers, for example, being restricted to human nouns and some to nonhuman ones.

Sumerian verbs can be subcategorized in various ways, in particular in terms of their semantics and their syntactic requirements. The basic semantic distinction is between dynamic verbs, which describe an action or change (such as ˇums2 “to give”), and stative verbs, which describe a state or situation (zu “to know”), such verbs in many cases performing the semantic function of adjectives in English. A verb’s syntactic requirements relate to what are termed its complements: an intransitive verb needs only a subject (usˇ2 “to die”); an extended intransitive verb needs a subject and a non-direct object (kur9 “to enter” into a place); a transitive verb requires a subject and a direct object (dim2 “to fashion” something); and an extended transitive verb requires three complements – a subject, direct object and non-direct object (ˆarg “to put” something on something).

However, these distinctions relate less to strict subclasses and more to usages. For example, some stative verbs can also be used dynamically to express a change of state

(hul stative “to be happy,” dynamic “to make (someone) happy”). This change in

˘ 2

transitivity is expressed morphologically in the form of the Sumerian verb, English preferring instead lexical substitution (“to gladden” someone) or what is referred to as the periphrastic use of function words (such as make or cause). Similarly, some dynamic intransitive verbs are also used transitively (usˇ2 “to make (someone) die,” that is “to kill” them).

Each of the three principal types of content word – adjective, noun and verb – can reduplicate their bases in order to express iconically what English again prefers to express periphrastically: reduplication in the noun possibly indicates totality (digˆir-digˆir “all the deities”); reduplication in the adjective may have a similar function (digˆir galgal “all the great deities”), although in some cases the reduplicated form seems simply to have displaced any unreduplicated one (babbar “white” < unattested /barbar/); and

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reduplication in stative verbs expresses intensity (“very”) but in dynamic verbs repetition (“again and again”) or continuation (“continuously”).

LEXICAL EXPANSION

The distinction between function and content words corresponds broadly to one made between closed and open word classes, that is, between word classes which rarely admit new members and classes which are more generous in terms of lexical expansion. General discrepancies in this correspondence involve interjections, often willing to adopt new onomatopoeic forms, and numbers, extending in principle to infinity, both therefore often being open classes of function words. A discrepancy more specific to Sumerian is that its adverbs and adjectives appear to be closed classes of content words, and that even its verb class is to some degree limited in terms of lexical expansion. Its nouns are, however, more typical, being an open class of content words.

Multiword verbs

Although Sumerian does have many more verbs than other types of word, nouns aside, the language also favors a strategy of expressing new verbal meanings by combining nouns with verbs in what are termed multiword constructions. The nouns often refer to a part of the body, but are semantically bleached of their physical associations, and they occur in particular with the verbs ak and dug4, both of which have a meaning such as “to do” (the semantic range of dug4 includes “to say,” probably the verb’s original meaning given that it is written with the sign KA which also represents other words associated with speech). As in English (to lend a hand, that is to help), “hand” (ˇus) occurs often in such constructions, examples being ˇus dug4 “to tend,” ˇus dagˆal dug4 “to provide generously” (dagˆal being the adjective “broad”), and ˇus pel-la2 dug4 “to desecrate” (pel-la2 being the verbal adjective “defiled”). As these examples suggest (“to do the hand” to something rather than “to tend” something), one consequence of such multiword constructions is a high incidence of non-direct objects in Sumerian.

Other verbs also occur in multiword constructions, the semantic load then being distributed more equally between the noun and the verb. Some such cases may be idiomatic usages, for example si (“horn”) sa2 (“to equalize”) translates less literally as “to bring order.” However, some verbs again have a semantically appropriate body-part noun as their direct object – for example, ˆirig3 (“foot”) is used in relation to movement (ˆirig3 gub “to step out,” literally “to place the foot”); igi (“eye”) in relation to sight (igi

equivalent to one verb in Akkadian and occasionally in the literary manuscripts from eighteenth-century schools there are instances of the multiword noun being incorporated with the verb to create a compound base that corresponds to the single Akkadian word (si-sa2 “to horn-equalize,” Akkadian esˇe¯ru).

Compound nouns

It is compounding that dominates the formation of new nouns in Sumerian. Most of these compounds are structured like the language’s noun phrase, that is, the compound’s head begins the compound and is followed by its modifiers. This can

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make it difficult to distinguish a sequence of independent words from an instance of compounding; in practice, much reliance is placed on instances borrowed into Akkadian as single words. Such head-initial compounds include ones in which the modifier is a noun: e2–masˇ “(animal) pen” (“house” + “goat”); a verbal noun: ki-tusˇ “dwelling” (“place” + “living”); a verbal adjective: di-til-la “verdict” (“decision” + “finished”); or an adjective: lugal “king” (“person” + “great”). This last example is written as a ligature in the reverse sequence (gal + lu2), lending some support to the suggestion that the Sumerian noun phrase was once more head-final. Another, no longer productive type of compound provides further support for this possibility, being itself head-final, as in an-edin “high plains” (“heaven” + “plains”).

As these compounds are typically written logographically, it is difficult to specify any phonological changes that accompanied their formation. However, the limited evidence (such as e2–masˇ also being written amasˇ and phonographic writings of ki-tusˇ as ku-tu-usˇ) suggests that vowel assimilation as a result of compounding was much more extensive than our transliterations indicate.

THE NOUN PHRASE

Verbs aside, the basic building blocks of a Sumerian clause are noun phrases, consisting of as little as a noun (or pronoun), serving as the head of the phrase, and a case marker, indicating the end of the phrase. These two elements can, however, be separated by sequences consisting of the noun’s modifiers, a determiner and a plural marker. To put this more bluntly: the Sumerian sequence corresponding to of my great kings would be king great my PLURAL of.

Before looking in more detail at these phrases, the earlier discussion of bound morphemes needs to be revisited, distinguishing between affixes that are restricted in terms of their host and clitics that are less so. Briefly, possessive ’s in English can be described as a genitive case marker, genitive being the grammatical case primarily concerned with possession, which can also be indicated by the preposition of, English prepositions often corresponding to case marking in other languages. A typical genitive affix occurs bound to the noun that is the possessor (as in Latin regis “of the king” from rex “king”). In contrast, ’s is a clitic that occurs bound to whatever is the last word in the noun phrase describing the possessor: the king’s brother, the king of England’s brother, the king who was fat’s brother, and so on.

A Sumerian noun phrase can end with as many as three different clitics: a determiner and plural marker as well as a case marker. Not all the determiners are, however, bound. In fact this description can be applied to only some of the possessives, although the convention in transliteration is to apply it to all of them, as well as to the demonstrative determiners. The evidence that at least some of the possessives, those which are vowel-initial in their fullest forms (such as /ani/ “her/his”), were phonologically dependent comes from writings that resume a preceding consonant (such as shag4–ga-ni “her/his heart”) and reductions after a vowel (such as dumu-ni “her/his child”). The same analysis can be applied to the plural marker, the next possible constituent in the noun phrase, whose fullest form is /ene/ and which is restricted to phrases that have a human noun as their head.

Two broad uses of case marking can be identified: to specify the syntactic relationship between a noun phrase and a verb, and to specify syntactic relationships within a

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higher-level noun phrase. Various types of relationship to the verb are possible, a basic distinction being between phrases that are essential to the verb’s syntax (its complements) and those which are less so (its adjuncts). In Sumerian, two case markers occur only with adjuncts: the similative (/gin/ with a basic meaning such as “like”) and the adverbiative (/esˇ/ “in the manner of”). Other cases, termed relational, mark what can be a complement or an adjunct depending on the verb with which they occur, an example being the dative (/ra/ “for,” reducing to /r/ after a vowel), again restricted to phrases with a human head (ama-zu-ur2, /amazur/, ama + /zu/ + /r/, “mother” + “your” + DAT, “for your mother”). The other relational cases are the comitative (/d(a)/ “with”), ablative (/t(a)/ “from”), allative (/sˇ(e)/ “to”), directive (/e/ “toward”), and locative (/’a/ “in,” the glottal stop indicating here, as elsewhere, that typically it does not contract with a preceding vowel).

A few core cases mark complements only: the absolutive (a zero marking) specifies a phrase with a noun at its head as the subject of an intransitive verb or the direct object of a transitive verb, while a noun-initial phrase that is the subject of a transitive verb is marked by the ergative (/e/, which appears to contract with any preceding vowel, the resulting long vowel sometimes being indicated by writings like ama-a, /ama¯/, “mother”). However, if a subject phrase has instead a personal pronoun as its head the analysis differs. These phrases are zero-marked: as this system marks the intransitive and transitive subject in the same way it can be regarded as following nominative–accusative principles.

The expression of syntactic relationships within a noun phrase is dominated in Sumerian by the genitive case marker (/ak/ “of,” in a very basic representation of its morphology). Such possessor noun phrases are typically embedded within a higherlevel phrase that itself ends in a case marker indicating its syntactic relation to the verb: dumu lugal-la-ra (“child” [“king” + GEN] + DAT, “for the child of the king”). Occasionally, however, they are displaced to the left, into a syntactically isolated but more emphatic position, their original slot being marked by a possessive determiner: lugal-la dumu-ni-ir ([“king” + GEN] “child” + “his” + DAT).

VERBAL MORPHOLOGY

One feature of Sumerian verbs is their use of the other type of bound morpheme – affixes (prefixes coming before a base, suffixes following it and circumfixes surrounding it), their finite forms being much more morphologically complex than their non-finite ones. This morphology serves partly to make distinctions of tense (locating a situation in time) and/or aspect (expressing a situation’s temporal quality). Aspect labels are adopted here, to a degree simplifying the complexity of these grammatical categories.

The principal distinction made is between completive and incompletive aspects, that is, between verbal forms specifying an event as finished or as ongoing. Just as stative verbs are excluded from continuous aspect in English (I am knowing being unacceptable), so too stative verbs are excluded from incompletive aspect in Sumerian. The following discussion focuses on affixation; in addition, the language’s few irregular verbs have a different base in incompletive aspect.

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Non-finite verbal forms

Non-finite verbal forms are more nuanced in relation to aspect than finite ones, suffixes distinguishing between three different types: completive /’a/, habitual /0/ (that is no marking) and incompletive /ed/. The only other affix non-finite verbal forms can have is a prefix /nu/ turning affirmation into negation (the grammatical category referred to as polarity).

As in English, the same non-finite form can function like an adjective (running men) as well as like a noun (running hurts). Sumerian adjectival roles occur in completive and habitual aspects. In the former, intransitive stative verbs express an inherent state, munus sag9–ga “beautiful (sag9) woman (munus),” while dynamic verbs express a state that is the result of a completed action, iri gul-la “destroyed (gul) cities (iri).” Transitive stative verbs tend to occur instead in habitual aspect: lu2 mu tuku “person (lu2) having (tuku) a name (mu),” that is, “famous person.”

However, non-finite forms can also function like a verb in that they can have, for example, a direct object: lugal iri gul “a king (lugal) (habitually) destroying (gul) cities (iri).” A reason for analyzing these zero-marked forms as habitual is that they also occur in professional titles, like dub-sar “scribe,” a compound noun with an implicit head, literally “(someone habitually) writing (sar) tablets (dub).”

Finite verbal forms

The morphology of Sumerian finite verbal forms is particularly rich – with multiple affixes expressing lexical and grammatical meanings, in the latter case signaling changes in mood and voice as well as polarity and aspect – and only an outline of that complexity is possible here.

As in non-finite verbal forms, a change to negative polarity is expressed with wordinitial /nu/. However, in finite forms a wider range of morphemes is possible in this position, including precative /ha/ and vetitive /bara/. Again as in non-finite forms a change to incompletive aspect is signaled in intransitive finite forms by suffixing /ed/, the verb’s subject being specified in both completive and incompletive aspects by the same set of pronominal suffixes. However, in transitive forms /ed/ rarely occurs, the aspect distinction being expressed instead by contrasting sets of pronominal subject affixes: singular prefixes and plural circumfixes in completive aspect but suffixes in incompletive aspect. In addition, some transitive verbal forms also include direct object affixes in a reverse pattern: suffixes in completive aspect and prefixes in incompletive aspect.

When a corresponding noun phrase occurs in the same clause, these pronominal affixes are not translated, but in the absence of such a phrase they are. To cite a transitive example in incompletive aspect: lugal-e kalam ib2–gen6–ne2 “the king (ergative) makes the land (absolutive) firm,” but without noun phrases, ib2–gen6–ne2 “he makes it firm,” the verbal form comprising /i/ (whose function here may simply be to ease pronunciation) + /b/ (“it/them,” a non-human prefix whose human equivalent is /n/) + gen6 (“firm”) + /e/ (“he,” a suffix that makes no gender distinction, therefore being translatable in other contexts as “she” or “it/they”).

The core pronominal prefixes can be preceded by a series of relational morphemes, corresponding broadly to the relational case markers, the first of which can have its

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own pronominal morpheme. In some cases, these sequences again correspond to a noun phrase or constitute one (/bsˇi/ = /b/ + allative = “to it/them”); in others, a relational prefix modifies a verb’s meaning (de2 “to pour” means “to pour out” with a locative prefix not corresponding to a noun phrase).

Four more prefix slots exist in this template. The first, following any marker of polarity or modality, can be occupied by a vocalic prefix (/a/, /i/ or /u/). The functions of /a/ and /i/ are complex and to some degree unclear; /u/, however, connects clauses and is often translatable as ‘after.’ Another clause-connection morpheme (/nga/ “and also”) can follow. The next possible morpheme is cislocative /m/, indicating an orientation toward the verb’s subject, and thus modifying the verb’s meaning (ˆeng “to go” becomes “to come”). The morpheme that may follow (/ba/) indicates instead that the verb’s subject is affected by the action of the verb, thus resulting in reflexive, middle and passive translations in English.

Finally, at the other end of the verb a suffix (/’a/) can be added which turns a main clause into a subordinate clause, the Sumerian morpheme thus being functionally equivalent to the English subordinator that.

CONCLUSION

For many years scholars have been lamenting the ever-increasing rate at which languages are dying. This loss in linguistic diversity reduces human knowledge and our intellectual heritage: when a language dies, it is not simply a linguistic structure that is lost but the centuries of thinking about the world embodied in that language, the different ways that particular language had of dividing the world up and defining it.

The modern response to endangered languages is to document them and where possible revive them. Sumerian long since ceased being endangered when it became the first written language to die. However, the task of documenting the language also began long ago, ancient scholars originating a process that their modern counterparts have revived, many useful online and print resources, listed in the bibliography, now being available for the study of the language. This chapter began with a dismissive question from one of those ancient scholars: “What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?” While one answer remains “A modern scribe,” we are slowly becoming less deserving of this disdain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Attinger, P. 1993. Eléments de linguistique sumérienne. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

Black, J. 2007. Sumerian. In J. N. Postgate (ed.), Languages of Iraq, Ancient and Modern. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq, pp. 4–30.

Black, J. and Zólyomi, G. (eds), 2005. Acta Sumerologica, 22.

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—— 2008. Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic: comparative phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. vol. 1. Leiden: Brill.

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Edzard, D.-O. 2003. A Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill.

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Halloran, J. A. 2006. Sumerian Lexicon: a dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language. Los Angeles: Logogram Publishing.

Jagersma, A. H. 2010. A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian. Available at: https://openaccess. leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/16107 (accessed 6 July 2011).

Kogan, L. (ed.) 2010. Language in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 53e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, vol. 1. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

Michalowski, P. 2004. Sumerian. In R. D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–59.

Parpola, S. 2010. Sumerian: a Uralic language. In L. Kogan (ed.), Part 1, pp. 181–209.

Rubio, G. 2007. Sumerian morphology. In A. S. Kaye (ed.), Morphologies of Asia and Africa, vol. 2. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, pp. 1311–1364.

Thomsen, M.-L. 2001. The Sumerian Language: an introduction to its history and grammatical structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.

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