“Living Sumerian?”

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This thread shall introduce my idea for a Living Sumerian Society, to be called the Namemeĝirtilar, the “Way for the Life of the Sumerian Language” (or NEĜTAR, for short.) Similar to the Living Latin Movement, the goal of this society is to make Sumerian more widely taught, known, used and appreciated, both in speech and in writing. I did not know where else to put it, so I put it in PPR.

There are several reasons for this: Sumerian is, along with Egyptian, the world's oldest recorded language but unlike Egyptian, and Akkadian, Sumerian is unrelated to any known language and unlike Latin, Hebrew, Nahuatl, Sanskrit, Arabic or Chinese, Sumerian is not associated with any living culture. Also, Sumerian has a relatively large corpus of texts, about 9 myriad in total, comparable to that which survives from Classical Greece; this is substantially larger than the Classical Hebrew corpus.

Sumerian presents several challenges that need to be overcome before it may become as widely studied as the Western classical languages, but I have a solution to each issue: Its phonology is somewhat ambiguous known due to the nature of Sumerian Cuneiform, but this can be dealt with by being conservative with regards to the phonology beyond the cuneiform script and standardizing it as it is reasonably thought to be pronounced; for example, pronouncing the consonant transliterated as <Ĝ> as the velar nasal, as is more or less agreed upon, and keeping with the 4-vowel system as recorded in the script that is standard in transliterations of the script and transcriptions of the language. The script itself is rather problematic in that it is ambiguous, rather defective and difficult to write on paper; this can be dealt with by adopting a new script with much of the same structure but that is easier to learn, write and is simpler: Thus, I propose a writing system where noun and verb roots are written as logograms that can be expanded upon via conflation and adding phonetic complements, much like in the original script, and determinatives precede the root, as in most cases in the original script, but that affixes and phonetic complements are written in a new, alphasyllabic script, similarly to Ge'ez, Thai and many other scripts, with a morphophonemic spelling, much like Korean or German.

Well, that is it for now. What does everyone think?

We had a resident Linguististics professor who called himself "Philogos"(sp?) who used to frequent this forum, but he announced one day that he was feed up with forum and left. It would be up his alley.

Thats great that your that interested and that expert in Sumerian.

Never heard of the "living latin" thing, but if they can do it with Latin why not Sumerian? Well sumerian would be a bit harder, but why not try?

Thanks for the praise! Too bad Philogos is no longer around, I am sure I would have enjoyed talking with him.

Sumerian is actually easier than Latin in many ways: It is very regular in that there are no irregular nouns (even pronouns are basically regular), and noun declination, though far more complex than Latin, is arguably more straightforward, and very few irregular verbs, most of which are of the same type; the genders (animate and inanimate, for sapient beings and everything else, respectively) are semantic, like English, and only apply to verb conjugation, possessive suffixes and pronouns but are not marked on nouns. For example, lu means "person", uru means "city" and both are unmarked for the animate and inanimate genders, respectively; however, in saying lue uru munĝin "the person has gone to the city", the verb is marked for the gender of the subject, uru, "city", by a null suffix while the gender of the object, lue, person (objective) is marked by the prefix -n-, for animate objects.

Here are some links to help those who are interested in understanding my jargon, without which my first post would probably be about two pages long :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_l ... #Cuneiform
http://sumerian.org/
http://home.comcast.net/~foxvog/Grammar.pdf

Hopefully, these are not to technical.

It sounds like a great idea. I don't speak any Sumerian but I'm interested in it from a historical and linguistic point of view. I think a good non-technical introduction to the language is the chapter on Sumerian in "The ancient languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum" by Roger Woodard. It gives an overview of the history of the language, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon.

By the way, in your example why is "person" the object and "city" the subject? Is it something to do with it being ergative?

I have John L. Hayes's "An Introduction to Sumerian Grammar and Texts" as my main learning tool, though I also have Penn State Museum's cuneiform dictionary when I have other questions. I personally find Hayes's textbook very nice due to its clarity and detail.Indeed, Sumerian is split-ergative: It is ergative-absolutive in perfective, typically known in Sumerology by the Akkadian term ḫamṭu, verbs and in nouns and nominative-accusative in imperfective, or marû, verbs.

To give an example of a marû clause: Lue a mubduene "the people build the canal" vs. lue a mundudue "the people have built the canal."

Ok, thanks for explaining that. So does the -n- in mubduene mark an animate subject?

Not quite: The suffix -(e)ne indicates that the ergative (agentive) argument is the third person plural, animate. Please allow me to gloss the verb for you: Mu- is generally agreed to be the ventive (prefixes like mu-, al-, ba- &c. are called "conjugation prefixes" in Sumerology and are mandatory in the language), -b- indicates the absolutive (patientive) inanimate 3rd person singular, -du- is the root, meaning "to have built" or "to have made", the suffix -e makes the root marû and we just saw the meaning of -ene.

I've read that Sumerian is most similar to modern Hungarian among living languages. Sumerian, as well as Akkadian/mesopotamian, culture and religion fascinate me.

I am glad we have something unusual in common .

Sumerian is effectively polysynthetic and highly agglutinative, like Hungarian. My textbook compares Sumerian to Turkish but I see, in its numerous cases and its mildly polysynthetic nature in addition to its agglutination, it to be even more like Quechua, which I studied a bit a few years ago.

Indeed, I am particularly interested in the redistribution economy and the quite high status of women in the Sumerian civilization. The Mesopotamians seem to have been very respectful of other people's civilizations, as it appears to me from reading the Amarna Letters (in translation) at least, where Hittites, Egyptians and Assyrians all treated each other's heads of states more or less as equals, referring to each other as "brother" and "King"; quite a contrast to the Chinese, with their Tianxia doctrine, or the Europeans, with their colonialism!

Namsargibila, New Writing, is what I have come up with for Living Sumerian. For the reasons stated in the introduction, such as polyvalence, defectiveness and irregularity, the original Sumerian Cuneiform Script for a contemporary Sumerian movement, much like Linear B for contemporary Greek or the Maya Script for contemporary Mayan Languages, is unsuitable.

Namsargibila is to take the path of morphophonemic transcription of Sumerian, not a transliteration of the cuneiform script nor a phonemic transcription of the language as it is thought to have been pronounced.

Unlike other morphophonemic orthographies, like Korean or German, Namsargibila shall not be purely alphabetic but, in preserving much of the original cuneiform script's structure, logoalphasyllabic: Thus, verb and noun roots are to be written logogrammically while affixes are to be written alphasyllabically. The logoalphasyllabic nature of the script is very compact and is a good compromise between keeping the logosyllabic nature of Sumerian Cuneiform and making the script more consistent with contemporary linguistic knowledge.

Namsargibila is to be written left to right in horizontal rows going top to bottom, just like Sumerian Cuneiform and most scripts in contemporary use. It is to be cursive, much like Egyptian Hieratic, so as to speed up the writing process, but it is not to have separate forms of glyphs for position, e.g. as in Arabic, but rather what I term “connection points” where the writer starts and leaves the glyph (I will explain these more when I can get scans in, hopefully soon.)
The Namsargibila alphasyllabary is to be based on rotation, much like the Cree and Inuktitut orthographies, where the akṣara for the initial consonant in a syllable, or a zero consonant akṣara for that matter, rotates to indicate which vowel follows. This fits Sumerian's 4-vowel system very well. Syllable final consonants are to be indicated with diacritics on said akṣara when they occur.

Namsargibila logograms are to be based on about 130 or so core semantic glyphs that function as logograms or determinatives alone or can be used to create new logograms for other verb and noun roots via combination with other semantic glyphs or by being given phonetic complements using the alphasyllabary. Determinatives are to be these core semantic glyphs when placed directly before every stem; this is very similar to the workings of Sumerian Cuneiform determinatives. Like the alphasyllabic portion of Namsargibila, the logogrammic portion is cursive.

What does everyone think about this specific plan?

So are all verb roots inherently perfective, unless an imperfective morpheme is added? Is this unique to Sumerian or do other languages have this?


Would it possible to give an example of how it would work?

How does one make Sumarian Chicken Soup? First steal two chickens.....

ruveyn

On the inherent aspect of Sumerian verbs: Well, from what I have read, all Mixtec verbs are inherently in the future tense and all Quechua verbs are inherently in the habitual aspect, so I do not find it that odd.

On the example for Namsargibila: Certainly; I do not have an actual scan yet, but I have the plans and can give you an idea of how a simple sentence would work in Namsargibila (transliterated): DU3-ŠAR2-zu-ra EN-LU2-GAL-e SAR-DUB i-na-n-SAR-SAR-e-en="You, the king, wrote a tablet for thy general of 3,600 soldiers." Now, please permit me to brake down each graphical element, separated by a hyphen, in the first chain, the nominal chain for "for thy general of 3,600 soldiers."

DU3-ŠAR2-zu-ra=DU3 is the determinative, placed directly before the stem, as always in Namsargibila, that indicates "professions, labor, work." DU3 by itself means "to do/make/build", by the way; Sumerian has many homophones, and thus, in both conventional transliterations and my novel transliteration into the Latin Alphabet, subscript numbers are placed after homophones. ŠAR2 carries a sense of totality and innumerableness and it is a root morpheme, thus written logogrammically; however, lacking a core semantic glyph in Namsargibila, it would have to have one created from some combination of core semantic glyphs, phonetic complements or a combination of both. "zu-ra" are to syllables, representing the 2nd person singular possessive suffix and the dative, respectively; being affixes, they are written alphasyllabically.

Note that semantic glyphs, logograms and determinatives, are written in majescules while phonetic (alphasyllabic) glyphs are written in miniscules.

Also note that my transliteration system is for Namsargibila, not Sumerian Cuneiform: Thus, I have made several, major, modifications.

If you want more explanation, please do not hesitate to ask. I hope to get scans in within a few days once enough of the script is figured out.

Here is a scan at last:

[img][800:850]http://sites.google.com/site/mbinhgany/_/rsrc/1322540675515/home/disclaimer/Namsargibila2.jpg[/img]

I'm not so sure of this. Some of Enheduanna's writing strikes me very similar to Gloria Steinem in her feminism and seeming reaction to patriarchy and oppression. Maybe it's the translation I have that gives me that impression.