When the cuneiform script was deciphered in the early 19th century, three languages written in cuneiform were discovered: Akkadian, Persian and Elamite. Only after understanding the Akkadian texts better did scholars become aware of the existence of texts written in another different language.
The royal library in Nineveh provided many bilingual sources, mainly lexical lists and literary texts with Akkadian translations which contributed to the decipherment of the Sumerian script and language.
The first systematic attempt at the linguistic description of Sumerian was realised by Arno Poebel in his Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatikin 1923. His research was based on the written evidence available at the time. Adam Falkenstein’s two volume Grammatik der Sprache Gudeas von Lagash, published in 1949 and 1950, attempted to elaborate the grammar of a homogenous group of texts from the Lagash II period. In the following decades, the written evidence of Sumerian increased and so did the need of a Sumerian grammar considering the recently published material. In 1984 Marie-Louise Thomsen published The Sumerian Language, a textbook still in use nowadays. The third edition published in 2001 has only an appendix with the literature published after 1984, but the main text is the same.
A further important publication is Pascal Attinger’s Eléments de linguistique sumériennefrom 1993, a comprehensive study of the grammatical and semantic properties of a single verb, which however contains a long section describing the LESSON1
22
3 The morphemic glossing follows the conventions of “The Leipzig Glossing rules”
(http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php).
grammar of Sumerian (141–314). Joachim Krecher’s teaching material, Zur Sumerischen Grammatik(1998), became available online in 2015. Shorter grammars are Dietz Otto Edzard’s Sumerian Grammar(2003) and Daniel A. Foxvog’s online available Introduction to Sumerian Grammar (2016). Abraham H. Jagersma’s monumental PhD dissertation, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian(2010) is a detailed reference grammar of the language building on the scholarly debates of the past decades and summarising the present knowledge on the Sumerian language.
Shorter grammatical sketches of the language are Michalowski 2004, Rubio 2007, and Zólyomi 2007.
Unfortunately, no modern Sumerian dictionary is available, making the learning of Sumerian even more challenging. The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary (= PSD) project published only the letter A and B (Sjöberg et al. 1984–
1998). The online version of the PSD covers all letters but is basically only a glossary (= ePSD, http://psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd1). Daniel Foxvog’s Elementary Sumerian Glossary(2016b) is an extremely valuable reference work, and the glossary and sign list in Volk’s chrestomathy (Volk 2012) is also useful for beginners.
One may also consult the “Leipzig-Münchner Sumerischer Zettelkasten”
(http://www.assyriologie.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/
sumglossar/zettelkasten2006_09.pdf, last updated in 2006), “The Index to the Sumerian Secondary Literature” (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/issl), and Pascal Attinger’s “Lexique sumérien-français” (http://www.iaw.unibe.ch/
unibe/portal/fak_historisch/dga/iaw/content/e39448/e99428/e122665/e122821/
pane123080/e1 99038/Lexiquesumrien-franais.pdf), for information on the meaning of Sumerian words.
The most important sign lists are Borger 2003 and Mittermayer 2006.
Further readings and resources
A longer and more technical introduction to the study of Sumerian is Black and Zólyomi 2007 (an even longer version of this paper is available online at various places:
http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/pdf/diachronsum.pdf or
http://www.hebraisztika.hu/attachments/00000129.pdf). On Sumerians the most up-to-date summary is Cooper 2013 (available online at
http://krieger2.jhu.edu/neareast/pdf/jcooper/Sumer_Sumerisch_RLA_13_2012.pdf, which is in English in spite of its German title).
Introduction
An essential paper on the context of the eme-salsociolect of Sumerian is Cooper 2006.
Important contributions to the writing system used for recording Sumerian is Attinger 1993: 129–13, Cooper 2005, Jagersma 2010: 15–29, and Meyer-Laurin 2011. On various changes in the orthography at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE see Civil 2013.
On the history of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism the best paper to consult is Woods 2006. An important contribution is Sallaberger 2004, who discusses the death of Sumerian based on the distribution of Sumerian and Akkadian personal names. Sallaberger 2011 is a case-study based on the Ur III archive of Garshana, with many important observations on SumerianAkkadian bilingual -ism. Crisostomo 2015 is an investigation into the sociolinguistic parameters of Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism as reflected in writing practices.
Black 1991 remained to be the most important work to start with for the so called grammatical texts.
In addition to the printed and often not easily accessible publications of Sumerian texts, there exist now a growing number of online corpora produced by scholars of cuneiform. The best place to start with is the homepage of the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative project (= CDLI, http://cdli.ucla.edu/), which endeavours to register all cuneiform texts. It contains now almost 500.000 records, publishing copies and/or photos of inscribed objects and their transliterations. The other important project is The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (ORACC, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/). It “comprises a workspace and toolkit for the development of a complete corpus of cuneiform whose rich annotation and open licensing are designed to support the next generation of scholarly research and online dissemination of data and findings”
(Robson 2014: 143).
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literary Texts project (= ETCSL, http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/) contains more than 400 Sumerian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition.
The Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (= BDTNS, http://bdts.filol.csic.es) is a relational database of around 100.000 administrative cuneiform tablets from the end of the 3rd millennium BCE.
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (= ETCSRI, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/etcsri/) is one of the ORACC sites; it is an annotated, grammatically and morphologically analysed, transliterated, trilingual (Sumerian-English-Hungarian), parallel corpus of all Sumerian royal inscriptions.
LESSON1
24
The Official Inscriptions of the Middle East in Antiquity (= OIMEA, http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/oimea/) is an ORACC based umbrella project that aims to facilitate quick and easy access to a wide range of open-access editions of ancient Middle Eastern texts, including cuneiform texts in Sumerian.
A survey and assessment of all assyriological internet sites is provided by Charpin 2014.
For more details on the history of the linguistic study of the Sumerian language see now Marsal 2014 and 2015.
Introduction
L ESSON 2 P HONOLOGY
Sumerian is an extinct language without any known relatives. The reconstruc -tion of its sound system must therefore rely entirely on written sources which were recorded using a mixed logographic-phonographic writing system. The interpretation and transliteration of this writing system is eventually based on our understanding of Akkadian phonology. Additional evidence is provided, for example, by the behaviour of loanwords, by glosses in syllabaries and vocabu -laries, by spelling variants of the same word, by the ancient names of cuneiform signs, and by Greek spellings of Sumerian and Akkadian words from the Hellenistic period. Needless to say, the reconstruction of the Sumerian sound system will always involve a certain degree of conjecture.