Language isolate · Cuneiform
Sumerian
𒅴𒂠 eme-gir₁₅, “native tongue”
- Spoken
- c. 2900–2000 BC
- Written
- until c. AD 75, as a learned language
- Where
- Southern Mesopotamia, today southern Iraq
Around 3200 BC, temple accountants in Uruk began pressing reed tips into wet clay to count sheep and barley. Within a few centuries those tally marks had become a full writing system, and the language they recorded was Sumerian. It has no known relatives, living or dead. It built words from building blocks, stacking little pieces onto a root. And it kept being copied by scribes for two thousand years after the last mother sang a lullaby in it.
Where and when
Sumerian was spoken in the flat, irrigated south of Mesopotamia, between the lower Tigris and Euphrates. Its speakers lived in walled city-states such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Nippur and Eridu, each with its own god, temple and ruler. Canals, barley and date palms made the region rich, and the paperwork of that wealth is why so much Sumerian survives.
The earliest tablets, from Uruk around 3200 BC, are mostly lists and receipts. By about 2600 BC scribes were writing royal inscriptions, laws, letters and, later, hymns, proverbs and the oldest versions of the Gilgamesh stories. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets have been dug up, and a large share are in Sumerian or quote it.
How it fell silent
Sumerian was not wiped out in a single blow. For centuries it lived side by side with Akkadian, a Semitic language spoken further north, and many people were bilingual. Sargon of Akkad's empire (around 2300 BC) gave Akkadian political weight, and over the following centuries families in the south gradually switched. Most scholars think Sumerian had stopped being anyone's first language somewhere between 2000 and 1700 BC.
Its afterlife was long. Babylonian schools treated Sumerian the way medieval Europe treated Latin: the language of gods, ritual and fine literature. Students copied it, translated it line by line and compiled bilingual dictionaries. The last cuneiform tablets, astronomical texts from around the first century AD, still use Sumerian word-signs. When cuneiform ended, Sumerian ended with it.
How it may have sounded
-
𒈗𒂊 𒂍 𒈬𒌦𒆕
lugal-e e₂ mu-un-du₃
Say it roughly LOO-gah-leh EH moon-DOO/luɡal.e e mu.un.du/
“The king built the house (temple).”
A classic grammar-book sentence; the sign readings come from ancient Babylonian sign lists, but the real vowels, stress and any tones are unknown.
-
𒀭
diĝir
Say it roughly DING-ir/diŋir/
“god”
The same star-shaped sign also reads an, 'sky'; the ng sound is inferred because Akkadian scribes spelled the word sometimes with g and sometimes with m or n.
Your name, set in stone
Cuneiform spells your name in syllables: signs for consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel-consonant (VC) pairs. E and i often share a sign, o becomes u, and a lone consonant gets an echo vowel or a VC sign, so 'Tom' comes out roughly as tu-um.
A playful transcription, not a scholarly one: the people who used this script never heard your name, and would have spelled it in more than one way.
Three things
- lugal, 'king', is literally 'big man': lu₂ 'person' plus gal 'big'.
- Sumerian had a second register, Emesal ('fine tongue'), used for the speech of goddesses and in lament songs.
- Scribes kept copying Sumerian for roughly two thousand years after it stopped being anyone's mother tongue.