15 Facts About Sumerian language

Archaic Sumerian language is the earliest stage of inscriptions with linguistic content, beginning with the Jemdet Nasr period from about the 31st to 30th centuries BC.

The term "Post-Sumerian" is meant to refer to the time when the language was already extinct and preserved by Babylonians and Assyrians only as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes.

However, that date is very approximate, as many scholars have contended that Sumerian was already dead or dying as early as around 2100 BC, by the beginning of the Ur III period, and others believe that Sumerian persisted, as a spoken language, in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia until as late as 1700 BC.

Records with unambiguously linguistic content, identifiably Sumerian language, are those found at Jemdet Nasr, dating to the 31st or 30th century BC.

Julius Oppert suggested that a non-Semitic Sumerian language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that speakers of this Sumerian language had developed the cuneiform script.

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The Sumerian language was called "Scythic" by some, and, confusingly, "Akkadian" by others.

In 1869, Oppert proposed the name "Sumerian language", based on the known title "King of Sumer and Akkad", reasoning that if Akkad signified the Semitic portion of the kingdom, Sumer might describe the non-Semitic annex.

Bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to a detour in understanding the language – a Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halevy, argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was not a natural language, but rather a secret code, and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue.

Primary institutional lexical effort in Sumerian language is the Pennsylvania Sumerian language Dictionary project, begun in 1974.

Sumerian language is conjectured to have at least the following consonants:.

Ever since its decipherment, research of Sumerian has been made difficult not only by the lack of any native speakers, but by the relative sparseness of linguistic data, the apparent lack of a closely related language, and the features of the writing system.

Typologically, as mentioned above, Sumerian is classified as an agglutinative, split ergative, and subject-object-verb language.

Sumerian language nouns are organized in two grammatical genders based on animacy: animate and inanimate.

Sumerian language noun is typically a one or two-syllable root, although there are some roots with three syllables like sakanka "market".

Sumerian language verb makes a binary distinction according to a category that some regard as tense, others as aspect, and that will be designated as TA in the following.