either a language family or a superfamily, a larger, and much more contentious,
theoretical construct. For example, different contributors to the 1997 issue of an
academic journal on language origins, Mother Tongue, agreed that Sumerian did have
relatives, but disagreed as to which. One contributor, the American linguist Allan
Bomhard, allocated Sumerian to the Nostratic superfamily, distributed throughout
parts of Europe, Asia, and north Africa and said to include, as well as Sumerian in
isolation, the Indo-European family of languages, such as English; the Semitic
languages, such as Akkadian; and the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, now spoken
mainly in northern and eastern Europe (Bomhard 1997 ).
The same scholar has recently discussed the members of the Nostratic superfamily
in more detail, locating the Uralic homeland between the Ob and Volga rivers and
dating that ancestral language to approximately 4000 BC(Bomhard 2008 : 230 ). He has,
however, become less confident about Sumerian’s affiliations, suggesting that it “is not
a Nostratic daughter language at all” (Bomhard 2008 : 272 ). Other scholars, though,
have fewer doubts – the Finnish Assyriologist Simo Parpola, for example, arguing
recently that Sumerian should indeed be grouped within the Uralic language family
(Parpola 2010 ).
The disagreement between those who would isolate Sumerian and those who would
integrate is, to a certain extent, one that arises in any attempt at classification, some
scholars being splitters and some bundlers. The methodological problems in the
genetic classification of languages are, however, considerable. For example, arguments
often rely too much on sound-and-meaning correspondences rather than on gram-
matical similarities, and any similarities convincingly identified may be due as much
to contact as to a genetic relationship. Given such problems, exacerbated by the highly
approximate nature of our reconstructions of Sumerian phonology, it is the isolationist
position that remains the more persuasive.
WRITING SUMERIAN
Writing in Mesopotamia had its late fourth millennium origins within a repertoire of
clay-based, language-independent administrative procedures, such as clay tokens
keeping inventories, and clay strips used to seal off different types of container (storage
rooms as well as vessels). The plentiful local supplies of damp clay were put to further
use as tablets upon which signs were drawn. Many of the early signs were pictorial in
character and there is no reason to associate them with any particular language. Over
time the signs were reduced to more abstract forms composed of wedge-like inden-
tations impressed on the clay with a stylus made from reed, the goddess of which
became the patron of scribes. We call this script cuneiform, from cuneus, the Latin for
wedge. The layout of the tablets also changed, from vertical columns written from right
to left across the tablet, to the cuneiform equivalent to the line that you see before you.
This rotation 90 degrees counter-clockwise further abstracted the signs, because they
too were reoriented in the process, being turned upon their backs.
More significantly, the nature of the script also changed, from what is termed a
logographic system, that is, one whose signs represent words, to a mixed system, partly
logographic and partly phonographic, the logographic signs then corresponding more
to the base of a word while a limited number of signs were also used phonographically
to represent sound sequences (syllables and parts of syllables). This enabled a wider–– The Sumerian language ––