contrast in the interrogative pronouns between non-human /n/ and human /b/ is the
reverse of what occurs elsewhere in the language; for example, in its personal and
reflexive pronouns. Before specifying the form of these words, the concepts of
grammatical person and number need first to be introduced.
This traditional structure privileges a narrator, the first person (/gˆe/ “I” being the
personal pronoun), to whom the second person (/ze/ “you”) listens, and who discusses
the third person (/ane/ “she/he,” later with vowel assimilation /ene/). With human
reference only, these singular “persons” also occur in the plural (/menden/ “we,”
/menzen/ “you” and /anene/ “they,” later /enene/). As first and second person refer-
ences are necessarily human, the gender distinction is restricted to the third person, the
Sumerian third person non-human reflexive pronoun being /nibi/ (/ni/ + /bi/ = “self ”
- “its/their,” i.e. “itself ” or “themselves,” no distinction in number being made with
non-human reference), while the singular human reflexive pronoun is /niteni/ (/ni/ +
/ni/ = “self ” + “her/his,” i.e. “herself ” or “himself ” – the intervening /te/ seems to have
only a phonological function). Sumerian has no non-human personal pronoun but the
third person human personal pronouns likewise contain /n/.
To conclude this selective discussion of the language’s pronouns mention should be
made of the two independent demonstratives: /ne(n)/ (“this”) and /ur/ (“that”).
Sumerian also has a wider range of demonstratives that function as determiners
qualifying a noun. These never occur in sequence in discourse context so evaluating
precisely how they differ semantically remains difficult: /bi/, /e(n)/, /ne(n)/ (again),
/re(n)/ and /sˇe/. Demonstratives are celebrated in linguistics as the source of many
other morphemes, one example being Latin ille(“that”) which yielded French il(“he”).
This principle also applies in Sumerian, one of the clearest instances occurring in the
set of what are termed possessive determiners (first person singular /gˆu/ “my” etc.),
third person non-human /bi/ “its/their” originating in demonstrative /bi/. Most of the
language’s other determiners are words that also occur as pronouns, as is the case in
English. However, Sumerian has no equivalent to the two most common English
determiners, theand a.
Sumerian numbers can be viewed as behaving like determiners when they qualify a
noun and like pronouns when they substitute for a noun. They match other function
words in that their internal structure is restricted, but differ in that this structure can
be complex. The remaining types of function word, interjections and conjunctions,
tend to have instead a simpler morphology.
In Sumerian the class of interjections includes expressives (like /ua/ “oh”), directives
(like /gana/ “come on”), and mimetics, that is words imitating the sounds made by
animals and birds (like /tikutikumae/). The class of conjunctions is traditionally
divided into only two types: ones that co-ordinate (such as and) and ones that
subordinate (after). The former can link nouns (kings and queens) and verbs (he ran and
fell); the latter can link only verbs (he fell after he had run). Sumerian has very few of
either subcategory, most noun sequences simply being juxtaposed (a conjunction being
supplied in translation): an ki“heaven (and) earth.” Occasionally, however, /bida/
“and” occurs after the last noun in a sequence (as Latin quecan do), representing a
reanalysis of /bi/ “its/their” and /da/ “together with” as a single morpheme; /da/ is
another of the Sumerian case markers, referred to as the comitative, reanalysis of such
morphemes to express co-ordination being common in other languages. Sumerian’s
only other noun co-ordinator is /u/ “and,” a loanword from Akkadian which was also
–– The Sumerian language ––