Sumérien

The sumérien such as he was spoken in the old empire sumérien is a language which disappeared and fell into the lapse of memory until the 19th century, being thus distinguished from the other spoken languages in the area, the such Hebrew , the Akkadien, the Babylonian , the Assyrian , all Semitic Langues.

The sumérien seems to be the first known written language. Its writing, the wedge-shaped one (what means “in the shape of nail”) was recovered later by the Akkadien, the Ougaritique, and the élamite. The wedge-shaped writing even was used by certain Indo-European Langues, the such hittite (which had in parallel a hieroglyphic writing ), the Cimmérien, and the Persian old, although the latter did not make use of the same instruments of engraving, moving away from the original C-W communication. Indeed, Persian employed only the form of the writing, while the pronunciation of the signs did not have anything any more to make with the original system.

Characteristics

The sumérien is a agglutinant Langue, which means that each word is made of multiples Morphème S associated the ones with the others; he is thus opposed to the insulating languages as the Chinese (where each word exists only in one fixed form) and with the inflected languages, where the words are declined in different forms formed by the use of Affixe S which cannot be separate root. One finds in sumérien an important use of made up words: thus for example the word lugal meaning “king” is formed by the joining of the words for “large” and “man”.

It is also a ergative language, which means that the Sujet of direct verb transitive is declined with the ergatif case, which is marked by the Postposition - E . The subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive verb concern the Absolutif, which in sumérien (as in the majority of the ergatives languages) is marked by the absence of Suffixe (or what is called “suffix zero”, as in lugal-e E driven-dù “the king builds a maison/un temple/un palate”; lugal Ba-gen “the king left”).

Grammar

Name

The name sumérien is made up typically of one or two syllables, seldom safer in the made up words. Examples: igi = eye, E = temple, nin = woman/lady . Many words bisyllabic are decomposable; example already quoted: lugal = king (read = man, Gall = large) . At the end of the word, a particle is added in order to specify the role of the word in the sentence like various methods. Other particles as the possessive ones are also grafted at the end of the mot. Exemple: lugal.ani = its king (ani being the mark of the 3rd person) . Two words can be followed in order to manufacture a Génitif, especially in the case of proper names. Example: ur. Namma = man of Namma (ur = man, Namma = local god) . If not, usually, one uses the marker .k for the genitive.

Example: nin.ani.r = for its lady (femme.possessif_3ème_personne.pour) nin.ani.k = of its lady (K = genitive) e.r = for (it) temple (temple.pour) e.k = of the temple (K = genitive) e.0 = the temple (0 = mark of the vacuum, ergatif)

Verb

The verb sumérien is like the name, of one or two syllables, and is subjected to two conjugations (transitive and intransitive) and to two aspects ( hamtu and maru as indicated in grammars akkadiennes of the sumérien).

The usual terminations are: 1st person of the singular, intransitive = 1st person of plural, intransitive = - of 2ère nobody of the singular, intransitive = - zè

However, the conjugation sumérienne is a little more complex than in good number of modern languages because the verb indicates not only its relations with the other sentence members but also its own relation with respect to itself.

Example: mu.na.n.du.0 = it builds driven = marker of the définitf or very probable Na = mark of the dative (to build for) N = agent 3rd person singular = to build 0 = ergatif

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