Re: Sumerian Lexicon

>From: Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
>
>On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:00:12 -0600, Kevin Athey
><kevindeanathey@...> wrote:
>
> >>From: Rob Haden <magwich78@...>
> >>
> >>Well, based on a cursory view of it, I'm skeptical of the rather high
> >>number of words that consist of only one vowel.  IIRC, Sumerian is
> >>notorious for its apparent extreme homophony and/or homonymy, but I
>doubt
> >>that that was actually the case with the language.
> >
> >As well you should be.  This is the reason most Sumerian experts posit
> >tonality in the language.
>
>Either that, or the Sumerologists have been missing something in their
>transcriptions.
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.

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.)

Athey

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