Sumerian language. Sumerians were using writing to transmit every imaginable piece of information from history religious hymns and royal decrees to personal letters and recipes. Of course pictograms were not enough to transcribe complicated phenomena so the writing followed the rebus principle so for example for the word ghee to return they used the pictogram for reed pronounced also as ghee.
So in some sort it became a celebrity and in other languages which adopted Sumerian uniform like Acadian hittite ancient Persian elemites and other it was used as a celebrity only as i already mentioned starting from the second million BC Sumerian was no longer a spoken language but it was actively studied by the Acadian scholars.
Because the pronunciation of Sumerian was not always obvious from writing Acadian composed dictionaries where they indicating the pronunciation of Sumerian words with Acadian cuneiform they use these dictionaries in their schools to teach young students the Sumerian language today for us these dictionaries are an invaluable source on Sumerian phonology.
Of course we reconstructed through the double prison of first Acadians and then modern scholars reconstructing Acadian so obviously it can have terrible imprecisions considering especially the Sumerian and Acadian were extremely different languages and the cadence scholars might not have indicated sounds that weren’t present in acadian there is less this is what we have for now first of all vowels we know of four vowels.
However that’s not a very symmetric system so quite unlikely from the linguistic point of view and also some earlier Acadian dictionaries distinguish between u and o but not the later ones also it is hypothetized that Sumerian might have been a tonal language because it has a very high amount of homophones meaning words that sound the same but have a different meaning from the consonants.
These were the ones that were reconstructed we don’t see any particularly crazy sounds here the most unusual sound can be this but again it’s very likely that this phonology is incomplete or even incorrect we know very well how the Sumerian language was structured it was an sov language. It was an exclusive language so meanings were attached to roots with prefixes and suffixes like in this example the verb has four prefixes and three suffixes Sumerian also had the ergative case the same as what we saw in Basque language for example and yes Sumerian was compared to musk and no not related the ergative case is similar to the passive voice. So let’s compare a phrase where the king is in nominative logal the king entered the temple and here the king is an ergative.
The temple was built by the king we see an ending appearing to indicate a case and in Sumerian there are actually nine cases the nouns are split in two genders conscious beings humans and gods and unconscious beings animals, plants, objects etc. Similar system to Tamil by the way and yes Sumerian was compared to Tamil and no not really it did also plural tense was used only for the conscious beings and it was formed by reduplication like Lulu person becomes Lulu people also when there is an adjective with the noun in the plural it is the adjective that is reduplicated like in logal gal gal great kings with numerals there is an interesting story.
Sumerian has a decimal system with traces of a system based on five like six is five plus one seven five plus two et cetera there are also traces of a vegetable system 40 is 20 times 2 and it also incorporates a sexagesimal system where the count is based on 60s like that 240 is 60 times 4 600 is 1060s and 3600 is a separate word shah we still use the same system to this day our division of time 24 hours a day 60 minutes is an hour.
All that was invented by Sumerians and all comes from those far away times there is still so much we don’t know about Sumerian but i hope i could at least make this mysterious language just one percent less mysterious Sumerian has been compared to probably every single language and language family out there but no connection was proven also it’s important to mention that Sumerian presented and the one known the best to researchers is the official version of Acadian schools when the language was already dead.
But of course the language used to be alive it evolved it had varieties and dialects actually we know of one such variety if the standard version is called emegir or native tongue there is also the msal refined language which appears in literally text spoken exclusively by female characters in emotional moments or also used by the gala priests in some particular incantations the differences with emigir are mostly in pronunciation she instead of hazy or ezza instead of udu etc etc there should have been so many more other varieties that we know nothing about but i hope we continue discovering more and more about this language as it is the main key to the origins of human civilization.
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