Re: Basque Gender Marking (was Re: Further language development Q's)

On 28 Sep 2004 "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@UCH...> wrote:

> The same cannot be said of Sumerian:  especially early on, it was
> often the case that *no* grammatical elements were written down,
> just (some of the) verbal and nominal roots deemed important to
> remember the oral text, since Sumeria was still an *oral* culture.
  I this case I wonder whoever could have ornamented later those
roots with particles resembling now case endings, modd markers etc.
 If they were Sumerians, did they really think that these particles
should be inserted into the oldish root-only texts in an artificial
way differring as much as possible from the real spoken language?
Or were they Accadians and did they invent a conlang from the root-
only Sumerian texts differing as much as possible from Semitic
structure?

  The theory you cite could descibe the source of _all_ scripts
including also very early logographic Chinese, Egyptian.  Every pre-
writing culture was oral.  If we deny that Sumerian cultural-regal
centres could invent (gradually) a "high-fidelity" writing system
despite their ordinary oral culture, we must deny the same in case
of every other nation.

  However if Thomsen is true than Sumerian was much more
polysynthetic that it could be deduced from its written form.
Because Thomsen's thesis "more and more grammatical elements and
phonetic complements were gradually added" says that the written
form was less complex, i.e. more analytical, more "isolating".  In
this case it is still worth to present this system that is so
complex even in its torso.  (The Sumerian noun phrases are much
more interesting to know that they could be more
complex, more surprising in fact :))