CHAPTER FIVE

THE SUMERIAN LANGUAGE



Graham Cunningham

“W

hat kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?” was a dismis-
sive question posed some 4 , 000 years ago (Alster 1997 : 54 ), when knowledge
of the language was regarded as essential to an educated man. The high standing of
Sumerian continued for a further 2 , 000 years and extended throughout much of the
ancient Middle East. The speaker would be even less impressed by the current status
of this once great language. Despite a claim to be the first language written (the rival
being ancient Egyptian), and a subsequent written history extending for twice as long
as has been the case so far for English, Sumerian fell into oblivion and was only
rediscovered less than two centuries ago.
The original name of the language has not, however, been revived by modern
scholars. The other extinct language from the ancient Middle East for which we have
extensive records is Akkadian, first attested in names appended to Sumerian texts.
Being a Semitic language with modern counterparts, Akkadian is much better
understood than Sumerian. To a large degree our understanding of Sumerian is
refracted through our understanding of its neighbor, and it is Akkadian that is the
source of the term “Sumerian”: the expression used in what we call Sumerian was
instead Eme-gir 15 (“tongue” + “native” in the Sumerian sequence, that is “Native-
language”; the subscript numerals are a modern convention enabling scholars to specify
how a particular sound sequence is written).
The aim of this chapter is to introduce to a wider audience a language and a script
so markedly different from languages like English and scripts like the alphabetic one
now being read. The chapter begins by discussing how Sumerian can be classified, and
continues with brief accounts of its script and of the types of text that were written.
Then follows an account of the language: its sounds, its words, how those words
combine to form phrases, and how those phrases combine in turn as clauses.

CLASSIFYING SUMERIAN

A language can be classified in two independent ways: typologically in terms of its

grammatical features, and genetically in terms of the languages to which it is related.

The short classification of Sumerian is that it is typologically an agglutinative, ergative,

and verb-final language, genetically unrelated to any other.