Re: Sumerian Lexicon

Sorry it took me so long to reply to this e-mail.

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 08:08:11 -0600, Kevin Athey
<kevindeanathey@...> wrote:

>Indeed.  Tonality is the most likely, except perhaps that there is really
>not a lot of history of tone in languages of that part of the world.  I
>once thought that unwritten segmental phonemic distinctions could be too
>blame, but those can't be consonants, since V words show just as
>much "homophony" as CV words.  Vowels are unlikely, too, if less so.
>There are an astonishing number of minimal pairs in some of the smaller
>words.  The numbers, incidently, look a lot like the number of homophones
>in Chinese, if you ignore tone.
Look here: http://www.sumerian.org/sumv.htm.

Many of the 'V-only' words actually have longer 'variants', which are
probably their true forms.  However, I find it unrealistic that a word of
the form /a/ can have such diverse meanings as 'water', 'tears',
and 'father'; and that a word of the form /u/ can have such diverse
meanings as 'sleep', 'cock', and 'plant'.  Even if such meanings were
distinguished by tone, I find it hard to believe that rather complex
concepts were expressed monophonemically in Sumerian.

>Of course, I think it's very likely there ARE segmental phonemes not
>represented in writing in Sumerian.  That would parallel almost all other
>writing systems from that span of history.  I suspect, though, that there
>is also a supersegmental phonological distinction or two that is not
>rendered in writing.  (At all.  The Akkadians' rendering of Sumerian
>probably isn't solely to blame.)
As I understand it, by the time Sumerian was represented syllabically, it
was no longer really a living tongue.  Also, there are inconsistencies in
its representation by various Akkadian scribes.  Finally, since Sumerian
and Akkadian (i.e. Semitic) were such different languages, it's definitely
likely that some (if not many) things were 'lost in translation'.

It is an interesting exercise to try to connect Sumerian with existing
language groups.  From what I understand, the Sumerians migrated to
southern Mesopotamia from the north, either from the Caucasus region or
from the Zagros Mountains south of the Caspian Sea.  Based on this,
Sumerian could have been related to the following language families:

1. North-West Caucasian
2. North-East Caucasian
3. North-Central Caucasian
4. Hattic
5. Hurro-Urartian
6. Elamo-Dravidian
7. Kartvelian

Of course, it could very well have no living relatives.

- Rob

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