Re: Sumerian Lexicon

From:    Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
[In Sumerian]
> 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.
Why? Many languages don't lexically distinguish 'water' and 'tears',
and thus it is not surprising if they look segmentally the same.
And it's quite easy, if languages allow monophonemic free morphemes
at all, for there to be a number of homophonous forms.  Just look
at English /o/, with a number of verb entries every bit as different
as 'water' and 'tears' (to be in debt, have a characteristic, to
be attributable to) and others completely unrelated, like the
archaic vocative particle, the exclamation, the name of a letter of
the alphabet, or any number of metaphors for roundness, such as
Shakespeare's "wooden O" [=the Globe Theater]. Why is any of this
surprising?

Above and beyond this, it's entirely unclear to me why these concepts
are complex, nor why there should be any relationship between simplex
words and complex concepts.

> 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'.
These are all true, but nonetheless, I think a certain amount of
positivism is necessary with these texts, if not taken to extremes,
since that's all we have to go on.  Tones? Yes, probably.  Extra
segments which just get left off? Well, maybe, but to make this
more than whimsy you need to provide concrete evidence.  There are
just too many languages where the phenomena you discuss here are
present.

> 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.
There is no real evidence linking Sumerian to any of these languages.
Northwest Caucasian languages are ergative, yes, but that alone hardly
suffices.  Starostin and Diakonoff have argued for a relationship between
H-U and NEC, but there's great controversy about this, and even
they don't suggest a link to Sumerian.   "Northcentral Caucasian"
doesn't exist as such, except as a name for a subfamily of Northeast
Caucasian, the Nakh languages.  According to one Elamitist here at the
UoC, there's no evidence suggesting a genetic link between Sumerian and
Elamo-Dravidian (and even the latter family is debatable).  I can attest
that Kartvelian is so radically different, and AFAIK has so few ancient
cognates with Sumerian, that there is no link.  I know too little about
Hattic, but I seem to recall that it's linked to Northwest Caucasian,
which is superficially plausible based on what I've read.  (I own an
unpublished 1000-page grammar of the language, a printout of a PDF, but
it's in German and I've only read 75-100 pages or so of it, and
haven't had the time to wade through the rest.  Really, the number
of people qualified to answer the question could fit around a small
table comfortably, and I wouldn't be among them.) The best answer right
now, with known data, is in all likelihood that it's not related to any
known language family.


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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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