The Sumerian script used in the second part of the 3rd millennium BCE is a mixed logographic-phonographic system. It includes two types of signs:
logograms, i.e., word signs representing a word on the level of meaning; and LESSON1
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phonograms representing a sequence of sounds.2Many signs may be used either as a logogram or a phonogram depending on the context.
If a logogram has more than one possible pronunciations, it may be accompanied by auxiliary signs. There are two types of such auxiliary signs. If the auxiliary sign functions as a logogram, it is called determinative, identifying the semantic class of the preceding or following sign. If it functions as a phonogram it is called phonetic complement, specifying the phonemic value of the preceding or following sign, repeating the word wholly or partially.
The development of the writing system just described was a long process.
In the 4th millennium BCE the Sumerian writing system was purely logographic, the signs being depictions of the represented object or abstract symbols, primarily stemming from administrative conventions. The use of the existing logograms could be extended in two ways:
i) semantic association: a logogram could get another pronunciation with a metaphorically or metonymically related meaning; or
ii) phonemic association: a logogram could get a different meaning, when a newly associated word was pronounced similarly to the original one.
These innovations prevented the Sumerian writing system from introducing a new sign for every single word. Logograms could also be combined to gain new word signs. In some of these composite signs only the meaning of the constituent logograms counts, however, in some cases the reading of the signs was used as a phonemic indicator disambiguating the reading of the new, yet logographic construct. With the help of these techniques the number of signs remained limited to around 600.
The phonograms developed from logograms. The technique had already been discovered earlier: the reading of a logogram may be used to specify the reading of a composite sign. As the demand to put abstract grammatical morphemes into writing arose, some logograms with the appropriate phonemic values were chosen to denote such abstract morphemes. Though these signs were the first phonograms, they might be better described with the term “grammograms” as signs with similar phonemic values were not applied freely, but rather, such functions were assigned to a limited set of signs. According to Jagersma, the choice of signs not only took their phonemic values of signs into consideration, but also additional features such as vowel length (Jagersma 2010: 24).
Introduction
2 This term is used by Jagersma (2010: 15) instead of the well-established term “syllabogram”.
He points out that this term is more appropriate, since the rendering of phoneme sequences is intended and not that of syllables.
The Sumerian writing system retained a highly logographic character even in the 2nd millennium BCE, making it difficult for us to detect any phonemic or morphological changes within a word stem. Another difficulty from the point of view linguistic description is the phenomenon that “grammograms”, i.e., graphemes used to write grammatical morphemes, tend not to reflect changes in the form of the morphemes. The negative particle /nu/, for example, may change to /la/, when followed by the syllable /ba/. Yet it is apparently up to the scribe to decide whether to write the word in question using the phonogram pronounced as /la/, or with the grammogram used commonly to denote the negative particle, the sign nu-, irrespective of its actual pronunciation, see Lesson 16, section 16.1 below.
The same happens to the terminative case-marker =/še/,which may be written with the sign ŠE₃ (with the readings -še₃or -eš₂) even when one is sure that after an open syllable ending with /a/, it was probably reduced to only /š/, and one would consequently expect it to be written with the phonographic sign -aš₂.
The Sumerian writing system in the 3rd millennium BCE is an imperfect tool for the phonemic rendering of texts for yet another reason: syllable-final consonants were often ignored in the spelling of grammatical morphemes. The writing system simply lacked the appropriate signs to record closed syllables.
The need to circumvent this inadequacy gave rise to two techniques. In Ebla, an important urban centre in the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE in Syria, a closed C1VC2syllable was spelled with an additional CV-sign, with the second sign repeating the vowel of the first one: C1V-C2V to be read as C1VC2. In Mesopotamia, a set of VC-signs came into use at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, mainly relying on CVC-signs originally starting with the phoneme /ʾ/, which was lost in almost all environments by the end of the millennium. Here a closed syllable was spelled as C1V-VC2, to be read as C1VC2. The use of this technique, however, remained optional, although it became increasingly regular in Sumerian texts until the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE.
Also at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE a new method emerged for the representation of vowel length: plene-writings, i.e., the adding of an additional V-sign, to indicate a long vowel or vocal contraction. Although plene-writings occur in some contexts frequently and consistently, the method never became a norm to indicate a long vowel in writing.
LESSON1
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