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

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a b c d e Prince, J. Dyneley (1919). "Phonetic Relations in Sumerian" (PDF). Journal of the American Oriental Society. 39: 265–279. doi: 10.2307/592740. JSTOR 592740. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-05-09 . Retrieved 2023-05-09.

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)

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THUREAU-DANGIN, F. (1911). "Notes Assyriologiques". Revue d'Assyriologie et d'archéologie orientale. 8 (3): 138–141. ISSN 0373-6032. JSTOR 23284567. The embedded structure of the noun phrase can be further illustrated with the phrase sipad udu siki-ak-ak-ene ("the shepherds of woolly sheep"), where the first genitive morpheme ( -a(k)) subordinates siki "wool" to udu "sheep", and the second subordinates udu siki-a(k) "sheep of wool" (or "woolly sheep") to sipad "shepherd". [60] Pronouns [ edit ] Kausen, Ernst. 2006. Sumerische Sprache. p.9". Archived from the original on 2009-09-27 . Retrieved 2006-02-06.

In 1944, the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer provided a detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his Sumerian Mythology. [40] Subscript is used by modern scholars to indicate differences between sounds that may once have been distinct, but had later become almost identical. (Cf., in the Roman age, ancient Greek had several signs to describe the i, even though e, ê, ei and i had once indicated distinct sounds.) In Babylonian and Assyrian, there are several u-like sounds, indicated like u, u 2, u 3, u 4 (or, often, like u, ú, ù, u 4). Although these signs indicate almost identical vowels, they are employed in specific contexts. Only u and ù can be used to describe our word "and"; ú is only used to lengthen verbs; u 4 is the only sign to spell ud, "day". DIAKONOFF, Igor M. (1997). "External Connections of the Sumerian Language". Mother Tongue. 3: 54–63.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). Examples for TA and pronominal agreement: ( ḫamṭu is rendered with past tense, marû with present): /i-gub-en/ ("I stood" or "I stand"), /i-n-gub-en/ ("he placed me" or "I place him"); /i-sug-enden/ ("we stood/stand"); /i-n-dim-enden/ ("he created us" or "we create him"); /mu-e?-dim-enden/ ("we created [someone or something]"); i 3-gub-be 2 = /i-gub-ed/ ("he will/must stand"); ib 2-gub-be 2 = /i-b-gub-e/ ("he places it"); /i-b-dim-ene/ ("they create it"), /i-n-dim-eš/ ("they created [someone or something]" or "he created them"), /i-sug-eš/ ("they stood" or "they stand"). 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. 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 much of Thomsen's understanding of Sumerian grammar would later be rejected by most or all Sumerologists, 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 11/e/di 'dire ') is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar. Chapter VI of Magie chez les Chaldéens et les origines accadiennes (1874) by François Lenormant: the state of the art in the dawn of Sumerology, by the author of the first ever [6] grammar of "Akkadian" 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.

Prince, John D. (1908). Materials for a Sumerian lexicon with a grammatical introduction. Assyriologische Bibliothek, 19. Hinrichs. OCLC 474982763. There is some evidence for vowel harmony according to vowel height or advanced tongue root in the prefix i 3/e- in inscriptions from pre- Sargonic Lagash, [49] and perhaps even more than one vowel harmony rule. [52] [50] There also appear to be many cases of partial or complete assimilation of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable, albeit not absolute, tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables. [53] These patterns, too, are interpreted as evidence for a richer vowel inventory by some researchers. [49] [50] What appears to be vowel contraction in hiatus (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a, */ae/ > a, */ue/ > u, etc.) is also very common. 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).

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a b "CDLI-Found Texts". cdli.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on 2018-03-13 . Retrieved 2018-03-12. When I heard that Gina Konstantopoulos, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki and former ISAW Visiting Assistant Professor, was teaching a directed reading on Sumerian this semester, my interest was piqued. How would someone curious about the language get started, and what do we have on hand at the library to help them? I sat down recently with Konstantopoulos, who earned her doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, to discuss learning Sumerian. Here are her recommendations, from grammars to lexica, from texts to translations, and where you can find them while at ISAW.

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. Dewart, Leslie (1989). Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. p.260. g̃ (frequently printed ĝ due to typesetting constraints, increasingly transcribed as ŋ) /ŋ/ (likely a velar nasal, as in si ng, it has also been argued to be a labiovelar nasal [ŋʷ] or a nasalized labiovelar [43]). The A.K. Grayson, Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, ed. Arthur Cotterell, Penguin Books Ltd. 1980. p. 92

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Prince, J. Dyneley, "The Vocabulary of Sumerian", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 25, pp. 49–67, 1904 A newer interpretation is that the last syllable in such examples is to be read -ne, i.e. 3rd person possessive -ni plus directive -e. In contrast, in the 1st and 2nd persons, we find this apparent -ni attached to 1st and 2nd person pronouns ( zig-a-g̃u-ni 'as I rose'), which leads Jagersma to interpret it as an otherwise obsolete locative ending: lit. 'at my rising' (Jagersma 2009: 672–674). An additional exception from the system is the prefix -ni- which corresponds to a noun phrase in the locative – in which case it doesn't seem to be preceded by a pronominal prefix – and, according to Gábor Zólyomi and others, to an animate one in the directive – in the latter case it is analyzed as pronominal /-n-/ + directive /-i-/. Zólyomi and others also believe that special meanings can be expressed by combinations of non-identical noun case and verb prefix. [78] Also according to some researchers [79] /-ni-/ and /bi-/ acquire the forms /-n-/ and /-b-/ (coinciding with the absolutive–ergative pronominal prefixes) before the stem if there isn't already an absolutive–ergative pronominal prefix in pre-stem position: mu-un-kur 9 = /mu-ni-kur/ "he went in there" (as opposed to mu-ni-kur 9 = mu-ni-in-kur 9 = /mu-ni-n-kur/ "he brought in – caused [something or someone] to go in – there". Left: Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform syllabary, used by early Akkadian rulers. [34] Right: Seal of Akkadian Empire ruler Naram-Sin (reversed for readability), c. 2250BC. The name of Naram-Sin ( Akkadian: 𒀭𒈾𒊏𒄠𒀭𒂗𒍪: DNa-ra-am D Sîn, Sîn being written 𒂗𒍪 EN.ZU), appears vertically in the right column. [35] British Museum.