Thursday, November 25, 2021

Sumerian Language Isolate tells us......

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:9
 
--Sounds like there were 2 major Linguistic groups who stayed around Babel----the Sumerian and Semetic Akkadian groups.
--Sumerian would be a LANGUAGE ISOLATE because it didn't disperse and morph through dialects as fast a Akkadian. 
Likely there were more Akkadian speakers and spread out and multiplied faster and farther with the result of it's dialects morphing into Semetic sub-branches.
--Another observation is that since Sumer is considered the first organized civilization with first written language (likely because those who stayed behind at Babel had the cultural structure to build upon immediately) it would sense it was used later as a nostalgic language of a "old period".


"The Sumerian language was spoken in southern Mesopotamia and
was the first language to be written in the cuneiform script. 
It is an isolate language meaning we know of no other languages that relate to it ancestrally.
The language was spoken in a region where Semitic languages were also spoken, particularly Akkadian, and it eventually fell out of use in favor of those languages.
 
Little is known about when Sumerian-speaking people arrived in southern Mesopotamia, assuming they did not originate there. Either way, from a very early period a multilingual environment existed in southern Mesopotamia, which included languages like Sumerian, an early form of Akkadian, other Semitic languages, and Hurrian
Some scholars have posited the possibility of an otherwise unknown substrate, or influencing language of the area, due to the presence of words of unknown origin in Sumerian writings
 
Even though these texts are difficult to read, we can ascertain literary themes like 
--the formation of the world, 
--divine temple building, 
--and other divine activities, sometimes of an adult nature. 
 
In these texts, we also encounter a large number of names of scribes
and functions which are Akkadian in origin, suggesting that the two languages were very intermixed, as stated above. This was the time of the Sumerian's greatest worldly influence, as evidenced by texts outside the Mesopotamian realm from Mari, Ebla, Tell Beydar, and Tell Brak which utilized the cuneiform script for Sumerian as well as their local Semitic languages.
 
The writing system of Sumerian has the principles of polyphony and homophony
Polyphony means that some signs have multiple syllabic values, for instance the DU sign could be read either 'du', 'ra2', 'ša4', etc., each having different but often related meanings. 
Homophony means that there are multiple signs having the same syllabic value. You may have noticed the use of subscripts (2) in the sign values. This is because syllables like 'ra' had multiple sign renderings like RA , the aforementioned DU, and others. Incredibly, some syllables had more than 10 different signs representing them. This principle of homophony and the fact that one syllable in Sumerian often comprises the entire word have led some scholars to believe that Sumerian contained a tonal system.
 
Eme-sal is commonly referred to as a dialect of Sumerian as opposed to eme-gir15 or the “main dialect” of Sumerian. The writing of eme-sal is limited to ritual texts, particularly the lamentation texts for gala-priests, and the words spoken by certain goddesses, although in other places these goddesses speak eme-gir15
Because the sign SAL can have a reading as munus meaning “woman”, scholars have posited that eme-sal is a genderlect or special dialect for speech by women. However, the sign SAL also has the reading sal which means “thin” or “soft” and could simply refer to a special variant for the goddesses or ritual-performing priests as stated before. Another suggestion put forth is that the gala-priests were eunuchs, but there is no evidence for castration in ancient southern Mesopotamian culture.
 
Sumerian language enjoyed a resurrection during the Old Babylonian period as a literary and liturgical language. The scribes in this period considered the language as essential for maintaining the traditions of a very old period, and wanted to recapture an archaic time of magic and legend. After this period ending c. 1595 BC, the scribal usage of Sumerian decreased significantly. The repertoire of texts was reduced, particularly the royal/divine hymns of the Ur III period, and even the ones that continued were written only in bilingual renditions with Akkadian and other languages. 
However, Sumerian was still being studied in scribal schools and even chanted in liturgy through the Persian and Hellenistic periods. There even exist student exercise tablets with cuneiform on one side and Greek on the other. 
The last known cuneiform tablet was an astronomical work dating to 75 AD from Babylon, but it is possible that the script finally fell out of use later than this." WHE