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Sumerian (Sumerian: 𒅴𒂠, romanized: Emeg̃ir, lit. '' native language '') is the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 2900 BC. It is accepted to be a local language isolate and to have been spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq .
- Historical Development of The Language
- Writing
- Dialects?
- The Legacy of Sumerian
Little is known about when Sumerian-speaking people arrived in southern Mesopotamia, assuming they did not originate there. Either way, from a very early period a multilingual environment existed in southern Mesopotamia, which included languages like Sumerian, an early form of Akkadian, other Semitic languages, and Hurrian. Some scholars have posit...
Sumerian is written in the cuneiform script. In fact, it is the first language we know to be written using cuneiform and most likely cuneiform was developed for use by this language. The script was originally written using ideograms, symbols which express an idea rather than a word or sound, and thus can technically be understood in any language. A...
There was an interesting system of sign value variation which occurred only during the ED III period. This is commonly referred to as UGN or UD.GAL.NUN as the signs spell out. This manner of writing is characterized by atypical readings for certain signs. For example, the signs UD.GAL.NUN had the anomalous reading of diŋir.en.lil2 which would refer...
As stated above, the Sumerian language enjoyed a resurrection during the Old Babylonian period as a literary and liturgical language. The scribes in this period considered the language as essential for maintaining the traditions of a very old period, and wanted to recapture an archaic time of magic and legend. After this period ending c. 1595 BCE, ...
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Is Sumerian a Uralic language?
When was Sumerian first spoken?
Are there phonetical similarities between Sumerian and Hurrian?
Why is Sumerian considered a language isolate?
Sumerian language, language isolate and the oldest written language in existence. First attested about 3100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia, it flourished during the 3rd millennium BCE. About 2000 BCE, Sumerian was replaced as a spoken language by Semitic Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian).
The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (which alone accounts for approximately 60% of speakers), Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation.
- One of the world's primary language families
This etymological dictionary brings together the lexical evidence associating Sumerian with the Uralic family, along with comparative data from five other language families (Indo-European, Altaic, Kartvelian, Elamite-Dravidian and Afro-Asiatic).
Dec 3, 2014 · Introduction. §1.1. The Languages. §1.1.1. Sumerian is a language spoken in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Its earliest cuneiform attestations date from the late 4 th or early 3 rd millennium BC, and it functioned as a living language until the late 3 rd or early 2 nd millennium BC.
Data mining the Sumerian vocabulary reveals a dichotomy of the cognate associations of the Emeĝir and the Emesal dialects, with the former having mostly Dravidian and the later mostly Uralic cognates, indicating that Sumerian arose by the combination of two languages from those language families.
