Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.
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Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.
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Diakonoff, I. M. (1976). "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written Language: Pitfalls and Peculiarities in the Study of Sumerian" (PDF). Assyriological Studies. 20 (Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jakobsen): 99–121. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-03 . Retrieved 2018-09-23.
To make things worse, Babylonian cuneiform is based on an older system, Sumerian. One part of the inheritance is the use of Sumerian signs to indicate well-known words. For example, the word for king could be written with two signs, shar-ru, but in Sumerian cuneiform, only one sign is needed to write lugal. This is easier to write, and not incomparable to English abbreviations (e.g., AD, PS, NB) which we hardly recognize as renderings of Latin words. In a critical edition, sumerograms are indicated by CAPITALS. Each of the 11 chapters introduce and explain important grammatical features, building upon previous chapters to provide and in-depth understanding of the language without being overwhelming. Every chapter includes a list of vocabulary and cuneiform signs for the student to master, as well as exercises to help solidify the reader's understanding of grammatical concepts. Exercises written in cuneiform mean that you start reading authentic Sumerian right from the start, building up to translating ancient cuneiform inscriptions from drawings and photographs! CDLI: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative a large corpus of Sumerian texts in transliteration, largely from the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods, accessible with images. Foxvog, Daniel A. Introduction to Sumerian grammar (PDF). pp.16–17, 20–21. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 3, 2017 (about phonemes g̃ and ř and their representation using cuneiform signs). Cone of Enmetena, king of Lagash". 2020. Archived from the original on 2020-02-27 . Retrieved 2020-02-27.However, I personally found the style irritatingly far too “chatty” and the author really over-labours most points. It came across as if he has simply transcribed his you-tube channel lectures (which are also extremely good) into the book. But that is just me. From the point of view of the authors I can see it must be difficult to know at what level to pitch such a book. If you pitch it too high you will drives one group of people away. If pitch it too low then you will irritate a different group of people. You will never please everyone. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( May 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) When I heard that Gina Konstantopoulos, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki and former ISAW Visiting Assistant Professor, was teaching a directed reading on Sumerian this semester, my interest was piqued. How would someone curious about the language get started, and what do we have on hand at the library to help them? I sat down recently with Konstantopoulos, who earned her doctorate in Ancient Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, to discuss learning Sumerian. Here are her recommendations, from grammars to lexica, from texts to translations, and where you can find them while at ISAW. The A.K. Grayson, Penguin Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations, ed. Arthur Cotterell, Penguin Books Ltd. 1980. p. 92
Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8. (Well-organized with over 800 translated text excerpts.) Konstantopoulos started Sumerian as a graduate student at Michigan, learning the language alongside Akkadian. Her interest stemmed originally from ancient religion, but she was soon drawn to the inner workings of the language itself all the more so because of its status as a language isolate. She recalls being drawn in particular to the Cylinders of Gudea at the Louvre—the longest continuous piece of extant Sumerian text. Konstantopoulos remembers being attracted to the grammar of a particular line on Cylinder A—“Come on, come on! We should go and tell her!”—and how in the scribe’s initial repetition she heard a human voice that remained with us across millennia. Konstantopoulos studied the language with an instructor at Michigan through direct reading of primary texts supplemented with a range of grammars. But this can be a challenge for someone trying to start out on their own, since as Konstantopoulos jokes, following Diakonoff, that “there are as many grammars of Sumerian as there are Sumerologists.” The signs for each chapter are not listed with their meanings at the end of each chapter. But this is likely because of the larger problem of a sign meaning more than 1 thing. All the various meanings of a sign are not listed. Transliteration of signs are listed with their meanings for each chapter but the sign for each transliteration is not shown side-by-side. Subscript is used by modern scholars to indicate differences between sounds that may once have been distinct, but had later become almost identical. (Cf., in the Roman age, ancient Greek had several signs to describe the i, even though e, ê, ei and i had once indicated distinct sounds.) In Babylonian and Assyrian, there are several u-like sounds, indicated like u, u 2, u 3, u 4 (or, often, like u, ú, ù, u 4). Although these signs indicate almost identical vowels, they are employed in specific contexts. Only u and ù can be used to describe our word "and"; ú is only used to lengthen verbs; u 4 is the only sign to spell ud, "day". There is relatively little consensus, even among reasonable Sumerologists, in comparison to the state of most modern or classical languages. Verbal morphology, in particular, is hotly disputed. In addition to the general grammars, there are many monographs and articles about particular areas of Sumerian grammar, without which a survey of the field could not be considered complete.nu-/ and /la-/, /li-/ ( negative; /la/ and /li/ are used before the conjugation prefixes ba- and bi 2-),
More endings are recognised by some researchers; e.g. Bram Jagersma notes a separate adverbiative case in /-eš/ and a second locative used mostly with infinite verb forms. [59]
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Jagersma, Bram (January 2000). "Sound change in Sumerian: the so-called /dr/-phoneme". Acta Sumerologica 22: 81–87. Archived from the original on 2023-03-19 . Retrieved 2015-11-23.
The standard variety of Sumerian was Emegir ( 𒅴𒂠 eme-gir₁₅). A notable variety or sociolect was Emesal ( 𒅴𒊩 eme-sal), possibly to be interpreted as "fine tongue" or "high-pitched voice". [84] Other terms for dialects or registers were eme-galam "high tongue", eme-si-sa "straight tongue", eme-te-na "oblique[?] tongue", etc. [85] It is one of my pet hates, which this book also does, when the vocab/sign lists of a chapters do not match up with those needed to do the exercises. This book is not unique is that. But this is not an insurmountable obstacle. Kramer, Samuel Noah (1961) [1944]. Sumerian Mythology. Archived from the original on 2005-05-25 . Retrieved 2005-09-23. Note also that more than one pairing of a pronominal prefix and a dimensional prefix may occur within the verb chain.The difference is that cuneiform writing is not alphabetical but a mixture of ideograms (one sign is one word) and syllabic. If a tablet is only slightly damaged, complete words are illegible, and a surprisingly large part of modern scholarly literature is devoted to simple questions as "what is this or that sign?" (The advantage of the system is that small tablets can contain large texts.) Simo Parpola (July 23, 2007). "Sumerian: A Uralic language". Language in the Ancient Near East. Compte rendu de la 53 e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Moscow. (work in process) The study of a language cannot be divorced from its historical and cultural context. H. E. W. Crawford’s edited volume The Sumerian World [Routledge; NYU DS72 .S864 2013; ebook available] contains over thirty chapters on material remains, systems of government, daily life, and neighboring societies among other topics. A cursory sense of Sumerian’s place relative to other Mesopotamian languages can be found in I. Finkel and J. Taylor’s Cuneiform [British Museum; NYU DS69.5 .F55 2015], which in addition to its efficient overview to the script is also beautifully illustrated by photographs of the British Museum’s collection. Additional context on the materiality of Sumerian and its art historical context can be found from the early chapters in Z. Bahrani’s Art of Mesopotamia [Thames & Hudson; NYU N5370 .B16 2017]. But perhaps the best introduction at this point to the tablets themselves through the CDLI which places artifact images and their associated text together in an open-access platform. The authors of this book also have an exhaustive video series on YouTube that I would suggest as a companion to the book. The channel is Digital Hammurabi.
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