the latter has /d/ (backslashes contain an approximation of what was said; italics
indicate instead how something was written). In addition to the cultic laments, Emesal
is particularly attested in the speech of the female protagonist in songs of love and
marriage. These genre associations, and the fact that the sign used to write saldepicts
the pubic triangle (its other values include munus“woman” and gal 4 “vulva”), have
encouraged many scholars to suggest a correlation between Emesal and female speech.
However, establishing such a correlation, or indeed one between Emesal and any
spoken variety of the language, remains difficult. The textual history of these two
genres differs widely. The love songs were incorporated in the school curriculum and
in consequence had a fairly stable textual history. The laments were textualized
independently of the curriculum and had a more fluid tradition. In addition, the
laments long outlived the love songs, constituting one of the major text groups to
survive into the first millennium.
PHONOLOGY
Unsurprisingly our reconstruction of Sumerian phonology reflects an Akkadian
influence and what emerges is to a large degree a subset of that language’s sound system
(as well as of the English sound system, which is convenient but again indicates that
these reconstructions need to be regarded very much as conventions).Vowels
Sumerian is thought to have had at least eight vowel sounds, long and short /a/, /e/,
/i/ and /u/, although the difference in vowel length is not indicated in transliteration.
The language probably also had an /o/ sound, partly suggested by the high incidence
of /u/ in transliterations, but the absence of this vowel from Akkadian makes its
distribution in Sumerian difficult to recover. In complex words, vowels in successive
syllables tended to assimilate. Such assimilation probably occurred more frequently
than transliterations indicate, generally because writing tends to be conservative, and
more specifically because logographic writings obscure phonological change.Consonants
Fourteen consonants are usually recognized in transliterating the language, some being
represented by a consonant plus a diacritic, although when writing English the
convention is to use digraphs (two letters): /b/, /d/, /g/, /h
̆/ (as in loch), /k/, /l/, /m/,
/n/, /p/, /r/, /s/, /sˇ/ (as in ship), /t/ and /z/. Sumerian is also thought to have had various
weak consonants, /h/, /y/ and /’/ (a glottal stop, like the sound sometimes substituted
for /t/ in bottle), although none is specified in transliteration. In addition, the language
had at least two other consonants that were absent from Akkadian. The identity of one
remains uncertain and in consequence it does not appear in transliterations; at some
time during the third millennium it appears to have merged in particular with /d/ in
some contexts and /r/ in others, and transliteration uses those sounds instead. The
other consonant appears to have corresponded roughly to /gˆ/ (as in sing), on the basis
of loanwords from Sumerian to Akkadian in which it occurs as sounds like /g/ and /n/.
While this consonant is recognized in some transliterations, including those given here,
–– The Sumerian language ––