Re: Sumerian Lexicon

Skrivet gant Roger Mills:

>This appeared in another list:
>http://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm
>
>Quite interesting. But I'm more curious about:
>
>--Does anyone know anything about the author? (he says he was a student at
>UCSB at some point)
>
>--It seems to be legit scholarship, but is it actually? i.e. not wacked-out
>ravings
>
>Comments?
>
>
>
Well, his page about "the proto-sumerian invention process" is certainly
not legit scholarship; Our guy seems to think that because Sumerian is
the first recorded language it offers us insight upon the birth of
language itself, while language was probably more than 40.000 years old
when Sumerian wrote their first pictograms.
Now Sumerian (unlike, say, Etruscan) is a relatively well known tongue,
so the lexicon is reliable.
One should know, however, that our understanding of Sumerian is not perfect.
- The phonectics is uncertain, due to the nature of the script and to
the fact the pronounciation is mostly known through Akkadian wordlist
written after the death of the language. It may have been tonal, for
instance.
- The meaning of a few verbal prefixes is unknown (mu- for instance).
There are as many theories about ther nature as there are grammar writers.
- The nature of Eme-Sal (a dialect used in some texts) is uncertain. I
think it was a "gender dialect", but that's only my opinion