Talk:Sumerian/Grammar/Lesson One - The Plural Marker

I've got a couple of quibbles about this lesson. Since I'm new here, I thought I'd air them on the talk page before messing with the lesson itself.

1) This lesson uses the word "particle" in a way that is (at best) very nonstandard. In my experience "particle" always refers to a separate word, not an ending attached to another word, like both English "-s" and Sumerian "-ene".  These are correctly termed "affixes", not "particles".

2) I haven't looked ahead, but I don't see any suggestion in this lesson that Sumerian didn't make plurals out of non-person nouns. Whether this will come up in future lessons or not, it's fairly misleading to use "cats" as an example of a plural, when in fact Sumerian couldn't create an equivalent form.  Why not, e.g., "sisters" or "kings"?

3) The lesson says that the conjunction u was borrowed from Akkadian "only much later in the life of the language", but Thomsen (p. 83) says it is "found already in a text from Abu Salabikh ca. 2500 B.C." Since the majority of texts date from later than this, it's hard to see how it qualifies as "much later in the life" of the language.

Responses to queries from user "Enlil"
Hello Enlil! Glad you're finding the grammar interesting enough to keep reading :) To answer some of your questions:

1) The general usage of "particle" is actually quite flexible in linguistics, and changes sometimes pretty dramatically from language to language. In agglutinative languages, like Turkish or Sumerian, particles are regular affixed directly to the word chain, whereas in English or Japanese, particles are most often treated as separate words. So your intuition is correct - for most people interested in grammar, particles usually do mean separate words. In this particular case, though, Sumerologists have been using the term to mean affixes. Just a convention, and it doesn't really impact the grammar, just the way we talk about it. Thanks for pointing out the potential for confusion, though! [I have noticed that D Foxvog doesn't use the term quite as much as D O Edzard, so there may be a shift happening here - we can always change the verbiage if the Sumerologist community moves that way.]

2) Actually, there are quite a few ways to make plurals out of non-person nouns - reduplication jumps immediately to mind. I will have another lesson to address all this stuff, probably based loosely on D O Edzard's treatment of the topic, which I thought was really clear and informative. Plurality is a pretty complex topic in Sumerian, as I gather you're already aware!, so I thought I'd introduce it later. If you'd like to start a lesson, though, please don't even hesitate! That's what the spirit of a wiki is all about :) We can all contribute to your core content once it's in place, even if you leave large sections unstarted or very rough. Just having the outline there usually makes people more inclined to contribute, at least I find that that's how it works for me.

3) Remember, Sumerian had already been around for 1000 years by that time! Think how different Beowulf-style English was to current English :) That being said, to my understanding u didn't really get super popular until Ur III at least - maybe 2100 BCE. Now, my info is several years out of date on this issue - if you're more confident than I am about the timeframe here, please by all means make the edit! I would love for this grammar to be as complete and correct as possible, and with the rapid pace of changes and new discoveries in Sumerian, it will be utterly impossible for one person to keep up with every change as it comes.

Thanks very much for so carefully reading and commenting on the text here. I really love when people comment on stuff - it makes me want to write new lessons and fix up the old ones to clarify any issues that are raised. I'll look into making some of these particular issues more clear in the texts shortly. In the mean time, I added a lesson nine on cuneiform - the history of cuneiform isn't my strongest topic, so please feel free to change anything if I've made any blatant errors.

Glad you're part of the community, Enlil :)

Mike.the.kitty (talk) 15:29, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

to "Mike the kitty"
Thanks for the welcome. I've taken you up on the suggestion to make changes myself, though for now in this lesson I've only touched "cat" and "cats", turning them into "king" and "kings". You're absolutely right that there were ways of signaling plurality on non-person nouns, but .ene wasn't (to the best of my knowledge) one of them, and as these paragraphs make an implicit comparison between English -s and Sumerian .ene, I thought it might be best to stick to a word whose Sumerian equivalent would be likely to take .ene.

I'm not sure what to think about the word "particle". I checked my copy of Edzard's grammar, and he indeed uses that word for the various case affixes. I don't know why I didn't notice that before. So you may well be right that this term has a different usage when it comes to agglutinative languages. Still, I'm bothered by the disconnect between the statement that linguists call English -s a particle, and the link to a Wikipedia page that clearly states that a particle is a word. If you want to stick with the word "particle", then maybe there should be at least some sort of disclaimer that this is a specialized use of the word in the Sumerological community and not the practice of linguists in general.

Regarding "u", I'm happy to leave your statement alone. The question may be whether you're looking at the written language or the spoken language. The Abu Salabikh texts date from about the middle of the third millennium, is roughly halfway between the invention of writing and the death of the spoken language. Since all we have today are the texts, I think it's fair to say that "u" came in fairly early in the history of written Sumerian, especially if the vast majority of preserved texts date from after the borrowing. But it's also fair to say that it came in fairly late in the history of the spoken language.

Other ways to form plural and "Women's language"
On the wiki page about Sumerian language  other ways to form plural are reported:

• the adjective ḫi-a "various";

• the plural of the copula -meš;

• reduplication of the noun (kur-kur "all foreign lands") or of the following adjective (a gal-gal "all the great waters"), that signify totality;

• the plurality of the verb form, only possible for human nouns.

Moreover it is reported that no plural suffix is needed for non-human nouns.

I'am not confident enought to mess with the lesson page so I just report here.

Moreover a note about the distinction between eme-ĝir and eme-sal (women's language, mostly phonological features e.g. "m" is often used instead of "ĝ" but also words differ from the standard e.g. ga-ša-an vs nin). should be added, as it is a very characteristic feature.

Ennio Fabbro (discuss • contribs) 10:18, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Cuneiform not displayed
Why do I not see the cuneiform displayed on the pages? I have two appropriate TTF fonts installed. Both Internet Explorer and Chrome display tofu instead. Windows 8.1. Regitmail (discuss • contribs) 11:02, 19 April 2018 (UTC)

Pronunciation
This lesson states that much of Sumerian pronunciation is unknown, but according to this, the pronunciation is well established, fixing this would be most beneficial. Mušen-gig (discuss • contribs) 14:59, 19 April 2024 (UTC)