used to co-ordinate verbs, as was another slightly later loan from Akkadian, /ma/. The
language does, however, have the occasional, as it were home-grown, subordinating
conjunction, one example being /tukumbi/ “if.”Content words
Two of the four classes traditionally associated with content words raise some analyt-
ical issues in Sumerian. The class of adjectives seems to be very small, focusing on
dimension (such as gal“big”), age (gibil“new”), value (zid“just”), color (babbar
“white”), and physical properties (kug“shining”). The class of manner adverbs may be
smaller still, many such instances possibly being better interpreted as frozen nominal
expressions. The identification of Sumerian nouns and verbs is, however, more
straightforward.
Sumerian nouns can be subcategorized into one of the language’s two gender classes,
human (such as dumu“child”) and non-human (such as gud“ox” and e 2 “house”).
While this grammatical distinction broadly matches the natural one, there are some
socially conditioned exceptions, sagˆ“slave,” for example, often being construed as a
non-human noun. The distinction is not marked on the noun, but is morphologically
apparent in most parts of the language’s third-person pronominal system. It is also
syntactically apparent in restrictions on how certain bound morphemes were used,
some case markers, for example, being restricted to human nouns and some to non-
human ones.
Sumerian verbs can be subcategorized in various ways, in particular in terms of their
semantics and their syntactic requirements. The basic semantic distinction is between
dynamic verbs, which describe an action or change (such as ˇums 2 “to give”), and stative
verbs, which describe a state or situation (zu“to know”), such verbs in many cases
performing the semantic function of adjectives in English. A verb’s syntactic
requirements relate to what are termed its complements: an intransitive verb needs only
a subject (usˇ 2 “to die”); an extended intransitive verb needs a subject and a non-direct
object (kur 9 “to enter” into a place); a transitive verb requires a subject and a direct
object (dim 2 “to fashion” something); and an extended transitive verb requires three
complements – a subject, direct object and non-direct object (gˆar“to put” something
on something).
However, these distinctions relate less to strict subclasses and more to usages. For
example, some stative verbs can also be used dynamically to express a change of state
(h
̆
ul 2 stative “to be happy,” dynamic “to make (someone) happy”). This change in
transitivity is expressed morphologically in the form of the Sumerian verb, English
preferring instead lexical substitution (“to gladden” someone) or what is referred to as
the periphrastic use of function words (such as makeor cause). Similarly, some dynamic
intransitive verbs are also used transitively (usˇ 2 “to make (someone) die,” that is “to kill”
them).
Each of the three principal types of content word – adjective, noun and verb – can
reduplicate their bases in order to express iconically what English again prefers to
express periphrastically: reduplication in the noun possibly indicates totality (digˆir-digˆir
“all the deities”); reduplication in the adjective may have a similar function (digˆir gal-
gal“all the great deities”), although in some cases the reduplicated form seems simply
to have displaced any unreduplicated one (babbar“white” < unattested /barbar/); and
–– Graham Cunningham ––