Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

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Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Jul 17, 2021 4:31 am

I have valiantly staved off the temptation to study French and Japanese, because I'm studying Modern Standard Arabic and I don't want to get distracted. I have been trying to work on increasing my motivation to study Arabic, and after I mentioned in my log that I was interested the Islamic Golden Age, Xenops mentioned that if I sign up for a Boston Public Library card, I can watch a wonderful Great Courses series about it (I'm two episodes in and loving it so far!). But there was another series that caught my eye, about Ancient Mesopotamia, and I finally gave in to spending some time on a language that's been tempting me for years: Sumerian.

I'm allowing myself this wee dabble for two reasons:
1) I'm unlikely to spend a very long time on Sumerian before I get bored and return to Arabic. French and Japanese are much more dangerous with a promise of mountains of media so I'm avoiding them at all costs.
2) After the language of the Sumerians died out, their descendants would go on to adopt a series of Semitic languages: Akkadian, then Aramaic, and finally, a couple of millennia in the future, most of them would end up speaking an upstart language called Arabic, and most of the land of Mesopotamia would come to be known as Iraq. I think that any time I lose on Arabic will be made up for with a greater appreciation for the 7400 or so years of Iraqi culture.

FLC, to those not in the know, stands for "Free and Legal Challenge" and details can be found in the "Language Challenges" subforum. The standard challenge is nine months to reach A2 but I'm doing a condensed version to complete two short courses:
1) Digital Hammurabi's "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian" series, an amazing YouTube series that ran from 2018-2020. There's now an accompanying book that is available for purchase.
2) The Wikibooks Sumerian course https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sumerian

There is also a charming little series called "Conversational Sumerian" available on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/sumerianlanguage

Of these series, Digital Hammurabi is by far the most comprehensive. There are 11 lessons and I think I can reasonably go through a lesson every other day, to give time for me to enter in the vocabulary and associated cuneiform symbols into Anki and learn them, so that would make my timeline around 22 days. I have two decks:
1) My "Vocabulary" deck is bi-directional and has the cuneiform symbol and pronunciation(s) on one side, and the definition(s) on the other side.
2) My "Cuneiform" deck has the same information, but it only goes in one direction and I need to give the pronunciation(s) and definition(s) when given a symbol.

I have 25 cuneiform symbols in my decks so far. Most of them are from Digital Hammurabi. There were actually only six words given in the first lesson of the Wikibooks course, and half of them were redundant with DH. DH actually only gave a few cuneiform symbols, but I wanted to look up the symbols for all of the vocabulary. In addition, some words are made up of two symbols, and I wanted to also learn what the individual symbols meant separately.

I will try to keep Arabic going a bit while I'm working on Sumerian. I usually avoid keeping two logs active at once but since Sumerian is such a rare language to study I thought it might be useful for posterity to keep this separate. If I make enough progress with Arabic to update, I'll write about it in my Arabic log.

The only other log I could find that mentioned Sumerian was on the old site, and the log was mainly about Akkadian: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/fo ... PN=0&TPN=5

Other Resources

The author of the above HTLAL log heartily recommended the book A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts by John L. Hayes as the only book that is appropriate for self-study, but lamented that it was out of print and almost impossible to find. Well, fortunately a new edition was released in 2019 and is now available on Amazon! Here is another glowing review of it on Reddit's r/Assyriology community. I couldn't resist and my copy is coming tomorrow! But I won't start studying it until I've finished the free courses because I want to see how far they'll take me. When I'm done with the mini-FLC, I'm not sure whether I'll start studying the book or simply skim it a bit and get back to Arabic, but I guess I'll find out!

If I wanted to keep going there are a couple of great free books on Sumerian by Daniel Foxvog:
https://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlp/cdlp0002_20160104.pdf
https://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlp/cdlp0003_20160104.pdf

And here is a very thorough free Sumerian lexicon:
https://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm

Here is a Wikipedia page of a comprehensive sign list published in 1922, with a link to the original book as a PDF:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der ... iftzeichen

Background on Sumerian:

Sumerian is a language isolate, meaning that it is not known to be related to any other language. It is probably the first language that was ever written. The time depth involved is mind boggling, so I'll be using the HE calendar (Holocene, or Human, Era). It sets 1 AD to be 10,001 HE. This is convenient because breaking up years into BC(E) or AD/CE can be very disorienting. It's easy to mix up 3,000 BC with 3,000 years ago (which would be around 1,000 BC), for instance. Here is an informative video about the HE calendar:


Anyway, there is not a word to describe how far beyond ancient Sumerian is. Homeric Greek is ancient. Biblical Hebrew is ancient. By the time these ancient languages were spoken, Sumerian had been dead for centuries after over a millennium of dominance. The Kish tablet is possibly the oldest written document, written in proto-cuneiform (probably Sumerian but there were no phonetic elements so it can't be confirmed). Here's a picture of it:
Image
It was written in around 6,500 HE (the current year is 12,021 HE). As a point of comparison, the Song of the Sea, one of the most archaic sections of the Bible, was likely composed some time between 8,700 HE and 9,600 HE. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were likely composed around 9,300 HE. Julius Caesar was assassinated in 9,956 HE, and the US Declaration of Independence was signed in 11,776 HE. Going back in the other direction, the city of Eridu, the first major Mesopotamian city, was founded around 4,600 HE.

From what I've heard, students of Assyriology will typically learn Akkadian first and then Sumerian. Akkadian better understood and easier to learn since it is a Semitic language. But to me, it makes sense to learn Sumerian first because it had such a profound impact on Akkadian. When Sumerian symbols are used in Akkadian, they are typically transliterated using the Sumerian pronunciation, so to me it doesn't make sense to study Akkadian without a background in Sumerian. And with a decent level of Sumerian plus a decent level of another Semitic language, I'm guessing that Akkadian would actually be pretty easy. Other than Sumerian symbols, Akkadian is mostly written with a syllabary. Sumerian symbols are transliterated in all caps to distinguish them from phonetic Akkadian.

In terms of grammar, Sumerian does seem a bit imposing but not that bad. It actually seems to bear a superficial resemblance to Inuktitut, which I have previously dabbled in. Both languages are agglutinative with SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) syntax and a whole bunch of cases. They also both display split ergativity. I won't try to explain what that is myself, so here's a video about it:


That's around where the similarities end. Sumerian has a whole bunch of verb aspects and moods whose names I don't recognize, and unlike Inuktitut, it has a gender system. This gender system is described as animate vs. inanimate, but Wikibooks clarifies that it's actually rational vs. irrational because animals go in the "inanimate" gender. Well, that's just how English pronouns work in the singular, with "it" denoting the "irrational" gender and he/she/(singular)they or any other singular pronouns describing rational beings. So the Sumerian gender system should be pretty intuitive to me!

The writing system does seem quite complicated, though. The 870-symbol inventory doesn't sound too bad compared to the 2,136 characters required to reach minimum literacy in Japanese, and in fact I'll have already learned almost 3% of the Sumerian symbols after lesson 1! But like Japanese, each symbol can have many different readings depending on context, so it is more complicated than it seems. Here is a thorough overview of Cuneiform by Irving Finkle. Not only is he a leading expert on Cuneiform, he's hilarious and probably a wizard.


If you don't have time for a 40-minute erudite rant, here's a much shorter overview of the baggage that Sumerian left on Akkadian and Hittite:


Progress:
Digital Hammurabi: 1 / 11
Wikibooks Sumerian: 1 / 9
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Jul 19, 2021 6:31 pm

I'm a bit dismayed to learn that it seems almost impossible to find Sumerian literature in typeset cuneiform. Instead, the only options seem to be reading Latin-alphabet transliterations, or tracking down photographs of individual tablets from museums. I made a thread on Reddit's r/Assyriology community complaining about it and asking if anyone knows of anywhere that I can find what I'm looking for, but I think I may have to transcribe it back into cuneiform manually by copy-pasting from a sign list based on the transcription. There is a cuneiform conversion tool I found but it does have some inaccuracies because it converts to Akkadian symbols and sometimes the Sumerians would use a different symbol for the same word. So far I have the first eight lines of the story of Gilgamesh and Aga transcribed:
Gilgamesh and Aga.png

I the transliteration from the amazing Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Here are their transliteration and translation for that passage:
1. lu2-kiĝ2-gi4-a ag-ga dumu en-me-barag-ge4-si-ke4 (Cited in OB catalogue from Nibru, at Philadelphia, 0.2.01, line 12; OB catalogue from Urim (U2), 0.2.04, line 12)
2. kiški-ta dgilgameš2 unugki-še3 mu-un-ši-re7-eš
3. dgilgameš2 igi ab-ba iriki-na-še3
4. inim ba-an-ĝar inim i3-kiĝ2-kiĝ2-e
5. tul2 til-le-da tul2 kalam til-til-le-da
6. tul2 niĝ2 ban3-da kalam til-til-le-da
7. tul2 buru3-da eš2 la2 til-til-le-da
8. e2 kiški-še3 gu2 nam-ba-an-ĝa2-ĝa2-an-de3-en ngishtukul {nam-ba-an-sag3-ge-en-de3-en} {(2 mss. have instead:) ga-am3-ma-sag3-ge-en-de3-en}
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/e ... enc=gcirc#

1-8. Envoys of Aga, the son of En-me-barage-si, came from Kiš to Gilgameš in Unug. Gilgameš presented the issue before the elders of his city, carefully choosing his words: "There are wells to be finished, many wells of the Land yet to be finished; there are shallow wells of the Land yet to be finished, there are wells to deepen and hoisting gear to be completed. We should not submit to the house of Kiš! {Should we not smite it with weapons?} {(2 mss. have instead:) Let us smite it with weapons!}"
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/e ... t.1.8.1.1#

The letter š is pronounced as the English "sh" in "shoe". The letter ĝ (also spelled g̃, ǵ, and ŋ) is generally thought to be pronouned as the English "ng" in "sing". There is also the sound ḫ, which is pronounced as the "ch" in "loch". I had to rewrite the determinative "ĝiš" as "ngish" above because it doesn't seem that superscript special characters will work on this forum. A determinative is a silent symbol that is placed before or after a word to give a hint of which pronunciation to use, since a symbol can have many pronunciations depending on context. The determinatives used above are:
  • d: short for dig̃ir, meaning a god or other divine person.
  • ki: used for place names
  • g̃iš: used for trees and wooden items including tools.
The numbers are there because a given syllable can be represented by many different symbols depending on the meaning. Specifying a number allows the transliteration to indicate the exact symbol that is used.

My general impression of the Sumerian language is that the difficulty level is about equivalent to Japanese. The grammar is complex but it doesn't seem to be absolutely bonkers like Navajo or Ancient Greek. The writing system is fairly difficult but not unmanageable. It's figuring out how things fit together in context that's the trick.

I think I'm going to end up dropping the Wikibooks course. It actually isn't that good. It drops cuneiform after lesson 2 and I noticed a couple of errors:
  • They used the Akkadian symbols for the city of Uruk rather than the Sumerian symbols. In Sumerian it was pronounced "Unug" and was mentioned in the above story; "Uruk" was the Akkadian pronunciation. Sumerian didn't have a voiced voiceless distinction between p t k and b d g, but an aspirated-unaspirated distinction like in Icelandic and Mandarin.
  • They said that the word for "life" was pronounced "til", but it is actually pronounced "ti". I got confused when I was transcribing "til" in the passage above and saw an unfamiliar symbol, so then I looked up the symbol that the Wikibooks course gave and discovered their error.
I found a very cool article called "Getting Started With... Sumerian". It has a lot of information for Sumerian learners and links to a lot of resources.

I still need to go back to the Digital Hammurabi course and rewatch the first lesson so that I can do the exercises now that I have memorized the vocabulary. As it turns out there were a couple of grammatical quirks that were mentioned in passing during the lesson and although they were not listed as part of the vocabulary list, they showed up in the exercises so I'll need to go through the whole lesson again. I have been making some more progress in learning cuneiform signs and now I'm up to 41 signs, which is close to 5% of the 870 signs of the Liste der archaischen Keilschriftzeichen.
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby dedalus66 » Wed Jul 21, 2021 3:22 am

Impressive! Good luck with this chellenge. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh a few years ago and was awe struck by the rich heritage which was bequathed to us.
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Jul 22, 2021 3:05 pm

dedalus66 wrote:Impressive! Good luck with this chellenge. I read the Epic of Gilgamesh a few years ago and was awe struck by the rich heritage which was bequathed to us.

Thanks! That gives me a good segue into something I've been meaning to write about.

Here is a clip I've seen on YouTube of Peter Pringle singing the beginning of one of the Sumerian Gilgamesh stories:


The story is about Gilgamesh's journey to the nether world, and it begins like this:
In those days, in those distant days, in those nights, in those remote nights, in those years, in those distant years; in days of yore, when the necessary things had been brought into manifest existence, in days of yore, when the necessary things had been for the first time properly cared for, when bread had been tasted for the first time in the shrines of the Land...
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/e ... t.1.8.1.4#

A lot of people in the comments of the video were blown away by the fact that this is basically the oldest literature we have and even then, they were talking about times that were ancient even to them, in the days before the invention of bread, an event which could have conceivably passed down to them through oral tradition from the Natufian culture of 15,000-11,500 years ago (-3,000 to 500 HE). Those times would have been at least as ancient to the Sumerians as the Sumerians are to us, but it's said that Australian aboriginal oral tradition was able to identify 34,000 to 40,000 year old volcanic eruptions, so it isn't that crazy. The Natufian culture hit the resource jackpot and was surrounded by domesticable species including plants that they could simply harvest without having to plant, so if the invention of bread was passed down through oral tradition, it's conceivable that this pre-agricultural time of plenty could have inspired the paradise legends of the Mesopotamians and other peoples of the ancient near east such as the Hebrews.

Sadly the song's haunting beauty is disrupted by a very jarring pronunciation error due to an unfortunate orthographical decision in the ASCII version of the ETCSL. They apparently didn't want to display the ĝ and š characters as digraphs like the more intuitive "ng" and "sh", so instead they used "j" and "c" respectively. The singer seemed to have missed the instruction that "j" is pronounced like the "ng" in sing, so instead he pronounces it like the "j" in "jump". Picture a time 5,000 years in the future when a spacefaring human wants to reconstruct a beautiful song in Ancient English, but they didn't read the pronunciation notes so they sing it as "jesterdaj, all my troubles seemed so far awaj..." :?
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby cjareck » Sat Jul 24, 2021 9:32 am

Deinonysus wrote: they sing it as "jesterdaj, all my troubles seemed so far awaj..." :?

Actually, in Polish, you read "j" just as English "y," so there is a small chance that it would sound correct ;)
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jul 25, 2021 7:39 pm

@cjareck Fair enough!

Til confusion

Earlier I said that the Wikibooks Sumerian course made an error and said that the word for "life" was "til" when it is actually "ti", based on Wiktionary. But that just compounded my confusion, because it seems that Wiktionary was wrong too. I will not be using Wiktionary anymore either. The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary is a thorough scholarly source and is free to use online.

So, this is the "ti" symbol:
ti.png

It looks like an arrow, because "ti" is the Sumerian word for "arrow". But it also happens to sound like "til", the Sumerian word for "live", which is why this symbol can also mean "live". But the arrow symbol is not the "til" symbol, it is the "til3" symbol. Each different symbol that can be pronounced a certain way gets a new index number. So their decision to leave out the index numbers was the first part of my confusion. But a second part was, according the the PSD, it does not mean "life", it means "live", the verb, and I don't see "ti" as an alternate pronunciation, although Sumerian often drops the final consonant of a syllable unless it's followed by a vowel, as with French. Anyway, the word

There is another source, the Sumerian Lexicon, that does say that the arrow symbol can mean "life" as well as "live", and that "ti" is an alternate pronunciation, if I'm understanding correctly. So that is a difference. This source doesn't seem quite as academic as PSD, though.

Remembering the Cuneiform

I'm not sure that the figure of 870 archaic cuneiform signs is the right target for me, since archaic cuneiform isn't what I'm most interested in. Reading really old tablets about grain and stuff is cool but I'm mostly after literary cuneiform, and the Old Babylonian era cuneiform symbols are the most appropriate for that. C. Mittermayer’s Altbabylonische Zeichenliste der sumerisch-literarischen Texte lists only 480 signs, so I was actually approaching a fairly significant fraction of that sign list with my Anki list. Then the thought occurred to me that it would be the most efficient to completely learn the writing system first, and only then learn some grammar and flesh out my vocabulary knowledge.

This method was inspired by James Heisig's book Remembering the Kanji. Heisig decided that the quickest way to learn the Kanji isn't to memorize them by frequency, but to start with the most basic "primatives" that compose other signs. That way, when you see a 30-stroke monstrosity you won't be scared, because you'll see that it's made up of a few primatives that you already know. Part 1 of this series teaches 2200 Kanji (the 2,136 Jōyō Kanji that the Japanese government has mandated are necessary for basic literacy plus a few extras), but only how to draw and recognize them plus a "keyword" to give a general idea of the range of meanings for each character. Learning the possible pronunciations is saved for book 2.

As luck would have it, each the PSD has one or several "keywords" for each pronunciation that is a word (with significantly different meanings getting different keywords). Purely phonetic readings do not get keywords. Unfortunately, keywords are reused for different symbols with the same meaning, so I can't use the keywords to give me one single word for each cuneiform sign. So instead I am going to learn various pronunciations for each sign, plus the most common keyword for each sign (using two if there's a near-tie).

I decided to use the ETCSP (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature) sign list as my base, since literary texts are what I'm most interested in. There are 777 total signs, which is quite a lot. However, I was able to break them down into smaller categories:
  • 119 "simple primitives" which I broke down into smaller categories based on shape.
  • 38 "complex primitives" that didn't seem to fit into any of the previous categories.
  • 98 "derived signs" that seemed to be modified versions of "simple primitives".
  • 157 "formulaic signs" whose names indicate that they are derived from other primitives in a certain formulaic way.
  • 365 "compound signs" that are made up of multiple primitives.

Here are my "simple primitive" categories, followed by the complex and derived signs:
simple primitives 1.png

simple primitives 2.png

complex primitives.png

derived primitives.png

Knowing the pictographic origins of signs will surely help me to memorize them, although I haven't been able to find a comprehensive list of what all of them looked like at their very earliest stages:

Image
(from Wikipedia)

Image
(from Omniglot)

The "early Babylonian" stage in the first picture and the "1800 BC" stage in the second picture are what the default Unicode font generally looks like. Assyriologists-in-training will typically learn the much more abstract Neo-Assyrian versions first (the last column in each of the above pictures), but IMO these look very samey and are harder to read. Fortunately number of signs in use went down dramatically as the signs grew more abstract.

So far I am working on learning the very smallest categories in Anki: Vertical, Horizontal, Diagonal, and Winkelhake(n). In my first deck I need to provide all of the readings (plus a keyword for each reading with a meaning) when given a sign. It's a bit frustrating since each of the signs can have a fairly long list of readings including subscripts, but it will be worth it and I'm convinced that this is the most painless and straightforward way to learn Cuneiform. I will also be working on a second deck where I need to think of the general shape of the sign and also provide a meaning (if there is one) when given a pronunciation and subscript.
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Querneus » Sun Jul 25, 2021 10:02 pm

These are some really amusing and interesting entries, Deinonysus!

I wonder, is there any chance you could get around editing and fixing the various mistakes you've noticed in the Wikimedia resources? I know it's volunteer work, but if you found yourself using those resources, I doubt you're the only one doing so...
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jul 25, 2021 11:32 pm

Querneus wrote:These are some really amusing and interesting entries, Deinonysus!

I wonder, is there any chance you could get around editing and fixing the various mistakes you've noticed in the Wikimedia resources? I know it's volunteer work, but if you found yourself using those resources, I doubt you're the only one doing so...
As a beginner with a very limited understanding, I'd be concerned about doing more harm than good. I think the best thing I can do is direct people away from poor quality materials and towards the many high quality free materials that are created and curated by professional Assyriologists, including ECTSP, the PSD, and the Digital Hammurabi channel.
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Jul 27, 2021 7:00 pm

Cuneiform

I noticed a couple more "primitives" that actually seemed to be derived, so my list of primitives is down to 117 simple primitives + 38 complex primitives, for a total of 155 primitives. I'm reasonably secure on my initial set of 17 primitives (comprising my subcategories of Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal, and Winkelhaken), which actually puts me at around 11% of all of the primitives learned! And around 2% of the total 777 signs. Not too shabby for a couple of days' work! I was going to add three more categories of simple primitives (Criss-Cross, Sectioned, and Semi-Open), but a lot of the sectioned primitives have a massive amount of readings so it was too much to add at once. I ended up just adding the five Criss-Cross signs to my deck, and I haven't yet added them to my reverse deck where I am given a reading (such as du4) and have to visualize the sign and also come up with the definition if it isn't a phonetic sign.

I'm seeing this project as a dry run for learning the Kanji when I start studying Japanese. My confidence is increasing quickly that it shouldn't take me more than a couple of months to memorize the 2200 Heisig Kanji. It's a highly anticipated project for me, but it will require a substantial time commitment and will probably have to wait until I've "finished" Arabic, Hebrew, French, and German. I'm starting to get a bit antsy about taking too much time off of Arabic, but I think that Sumerian culture had such a massive impact on the future cultures of the Middle East (including the Arabs and the Hebrews) that I think it will be a net positive to have a better understanding of it.

Aš nazg durbatulûk

Sumerian numbers are a bit confusing. The word aš (pronounced "ash") can mean either "one" or "six"! There is no confusion in writing, as the number 6 is written with the symbol aš3, with six vertical strokes, where as aš with no subscript is written with one horizontal stroke. There is also another word for one, diš, which is written with one vertical stroke, so that would have been one way to avoid confusion in the spoken language. However, the large number of homophones in Sumerian is probably explained by a number of phonemic distinctions that we aren't aware of, either extra phonemic vowels or consonants or even a tone system.

I couldn't help but notice that the word for "one" in Tolkein's Black Speech is also "ash". Given that another prominent Black Speech word is Uruk, which was one of the most famous Sumerian cities (although that is the Akkadian pronunciation; in Sumerian it was Unug), I don't think it's a coincidence and I think he may have deliberately been trying to evoke Mesopotamia. I haven't found any other Black Speech words that seem to have a Sumerian origin, though. Maybe there could be some Akkadian influence that I'm not aware of.

While doing a search to see if anyone else had noticed a Mesopotamian connection, I saw on Wikipedia that a historian had proposed a link to Hurrian, a language isolate of ancient Northern Mesopotamia. Here is the source article. I'm very skeptical, as all of the proposed vocabulary links are quite a stretch and the historian is confidently incorrect about basic linguistics terminology. Here is a quote that summarizes the basis of the argument:

The historian Alexandre Nemirovsky, who specializes in the history of the Hittites and the Hurrians that lived in the Late Bronze Age, believes Tolkien's Black Speech may be inspired by the languages of these ancient peoples. As we know, some of Tolkien's invented languages were definitely influenced by pre-existing tongues; it is well known that Quenya and Sindarin were originally inspired by Finnish and Welsh, respectively. The following is a slightly edited version of the argument Nemirovsky sent me; he has kindly granted me permission to use it here:

1. On the morpheme ûk. As it is suffix, not a word (Tolkien writes all words separately in his transliteration), it can hardly express "all". This is because "all", being a pronoun, would remain, I think, a separate word. I propose to identify this ûk as a verbal suffix with the meaning of full accomplishment of the action expressed by the verbal root, so that literally it would be translated "completely, fully", which would correspond well to the translation "all", because "to rule them fully" and "to rule them all" mean the same in this context.

2. Main traits of grammar: cases are expressed by postlogs (ishi); only the Nominative case has a zero ending (nazg); the most important feature to my mind is that the personal pronoun naming the object of a transitive action is included in the verbal form only. It does not remain a separate word. Moreover, some verbal suffixes can even come after it in such a case (root + ul "them" + ûk "completely, to the very end"). In other words, we see an agglutinative ergative language - i.e. a language of non-Indo-European type, really alien to almost all others, and of a very archaic type.

3. Now my main hypothesis is that this Black Speech was designed by Tolkien after some acquaintance with Hurrian-Urartian language(s). On the possibility of such an acquaintance see Note 4 below. For now I want to emphasize that Hurrian really is an agglutinative ergative language, where personal pronouns are included in the verbal forms; by the way, jussive forms in Hurrian never include the pronoun expressing the agent/subject of a transitive action, but often include the pronoun, expressing its object. Cf. the presence of a "them"-formant, but absence of any formant expressing the agent, in the verbal forms of the Ring inscription. In Hurrian all cases except the Nominative are expressed with various flexions; Nominative is expressed with zero flexion - again just as in the Black Speech.

In point one, I don't buy that "all" can't be a suffix. What do y'all think?

In point two, expressing the object of a verb as a suffix without a separate pronoun isn't what ergativity is and it certainly alien to Indo-European languages. Spanish does this! "Quiero comprarlo"; I want to buy it. Semitic languages can also mark the objects of verbs as a suffix. I don't think anyone has accused Spanish or Hebrew of being agglutinative or ergative! Ergativity is when you don't mark the object of a transative verb, but instead you mark the subject; the object of a transitive verb and the subject of a transitive verb are both unmarked.
  • Nominative-accusative: He jumps. He sees her. (The object of the transitive verb is marked with a different form; both objects are unchanged)
  • Ergative-absolutive. He jumps. Hex sees she. (The subject of the transitive verb is marked with a different form; the subject of the intransitive verb and the object of the transitive verb are unchanged).
Furthermore, Tolkien was such a devoted conlanger that he wrote one of the 20th century's great literary masterpieces just so he could show off his languages. There's no way he would be so lazy as to slip barely modified word-for-word Hurrian in as one of the most memorable lines from his books.
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/daɪ.nə.ˈnaɪ.səs/

guyome
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Re: Emeg̃ir (Sumerian) mini-FLC

Postby guyome » Wed Jul 28, 2021 8:49 am

Interesting, thanks :) Tolkien actually mentions Erech/Uruk in one of his letters (Letter 297), I quote parts of it below.

I'm not buying the Black Speech/Hurrian connection. First, it reminds me too much of the Altaic language family/Sprachbund controversy, where you compare vaguely similar roots having some vague degree of semantic closeness and claim they are proof of an "Altaic" substrate. And if none is to be found, you can 1) enhance the formal similarity by positing any sound change you wish or 2) enhance the semantic side of things by letting your imagination roam free (the entries for burz/wur- or krimp/ker-imbu seem especially guilty of that to me).

Taking the following (and that's already supposing the data used here for Hurrian is accurate),
gimb- "to find" / -ki(b) "to take, to gather"

thrak- "to bring" / s/thar-(ik)- "to ask, to demand to send something to someone", so meaning "to ask for/to cause bringing of something to someone" is implied.

agh "and" / Urartian aye, the same as "mit" and "bei" in German

burz- "dark" / wur- "to see" in fact, but the root is present in wurikk- "to be blind" and really would express something opposite to "see, seeable" with any negative particle, while there is a particle z in Hurrian with the possible meaning "to be at the very limit of, up to the end of, complete". So wur + z could really give the meaning "where the seeing is near/at its limits" - of course not Hurrian as such, but a quite possible "play" of any linguist with the Hurrian material.

krimp- "to tie" / ker-imbu- "to make longer fully/completely/irreversibly", if it respects to a rope, e.g., it nicely fits the concept of "tie tightly"

I could as easily propose that Black Speech was inspired by French (even supporting this theory by the well-known fact that Tolkien disliked French, making it a perfect candidate for inspiring the Black Speech!):
gimb- "to find" / Middle French gib- "to move your legs and arms" (cf. Modern French "regimber"). Moving your arms and legs is the kind of movement you'll have to make in order to "find" something. Note that there is a variety of words based on this root (regipe, dzip, ardzip, regipeau...) which refer to a kind of "snare", something you catch animals with, showing even more clearly how the root gib- is linked to the idea of "finding".

thrak- "to bring" / Fr. "traquer" ("to track down"). If you "track down" something, the goal is to "bring" it somewhere afterwards, the semantic connection is therefore obvious.

agh "and" / Fr. "avec" ("with"). Although it may be that Tolkien had in mind the Latin ac here.

burz- "dark" / Fr. "bourse" ("purse"). A purse, being a small bag whose main function is to remain closed most of the time, is obviously a "dark" place.

krimp- "to tie" / Fr. "gripper"/"grimper" ("to seize, to stop"/"to climb to a tree", from a Germanic root, cf. greifen). All these actions suppose that you "tie" your hands/legs around the object or the tree you're climbing to.

Source: Französiches Etymologisches Wörterbuch

Second (and much more interesting), knowing a bit about how much pleasure Tolkien derived from creating his languages and how much thought he put in them, I find it ludicrous to think that Tolkien would have surrendered his creative genius in this matter and have the words of one of his languages simply be a copy of an existing language (in both form and meaning, no less).
Fortunately, you don't have to take my word for it because Tolkien himself wrote a long letter about this very topic (and it conveniently covers the origin of Black Speech nazg "ring"). To summarise it: he might sometimes, knowingly or not, have found the inspiration for the sounds of his creations in words already existing in other languages, but there is no link to be found as far as meaning is concerned.
Tolkien, Letter 297, wrote:I am honoured by the interest that many readers have taken in the nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings (...) But I remain puzzled, and indeed sometimes irritated, by many of the guesses at the 'sources' of the nomenclature, and the theories and fancies concerning hidden meanings. (...) The 'source', if any, provided solely the sound-sequence (or suggestions for its stimulus) and its purport in the source is totally irrelevant except in case of Earendil (...)

To take a frequent case: there is no linguistic connexion, and therefore no connexion in significance, between Sauron a contemporary form of an older *θaurond- derivative of an adjectival *θaurā (from a base √THAW) 'detestable', and the Greek σαύρα 'a lizard'.
Investigators, indeed, seem mostly confused in mind between (a) the meaning of names within, and appropriate to, my story and belonging to a fictional 'historic' construction, and (b) the origins or sources in my mind, exterior to the story, of the forms of these names. (...)

I may mention two cases where I was not, at the time of making use of them, aware of 'borrowing', but where it is probable, but by no means certain, that the names were nonetheless 'echoes'. Erech, the place where Isildur set the covenant-stone. This of course fits the style of the predominantly Sindarin nomenclature of Gondor (or it would not have been used), as it would do historically, even if it was, as it is now convenient to suppose, actually a pre-Númenórean name of long-forgotten meaning. Since naturally, as one interested in antiquity and notably in the history of languages and 'writing', I knew and had read a good deal about Mesopotamia, I must have known Erech the name of that most ancient city. Nonetheless at the time of the writing L.R. Book V chs. II and IX (originally a continuous narrative, but divided for obvious constructional reasons) and devising a legend to provide to provide for the separation of Aragorn from Gandalf, and his disappearance and unexpected return, I was probably more influenced by the important element ER (in Elvish) = 'one, single, alone'. In any case the fact that Erech is a famous name is of no importance to The L.R. and no connexions in my mind or intention between Mesopotamia and the Númenóreans or their predecessors can be deduced.

nazg: the word for 'ring' in the Black Speech. This was devised to be a vocable as distinct in style and phonetic content from words of the same meaning in Elvish, or in other real languages that are most familiar: English, Latin, Greek, etc. Though actual congruences (of form + sense) occur in unrelated real languages, and it is impossible in constructing imaginary languages from a limited number of component sounds to avoid such resemblance (if one tries too - I do not), it remains remarkable that nasc is the word for 'ring ' in Gaelic (Irish: in Scottish usually written nasg). It also fits well in meaning, since it also means, and prob. originally meant, a bond, and can be used for an 'obligation'. Nonetheless I only became aware, or again aware, of its existence recently in looking for something in a Gaelic dictionary. I have no liking at all for Gaelic from Old Irish downwards, as a language, but it is of course of great historical and philologicam interest, and I have at various times studied it. ( With alas! very little success.) It is thus probable that nazg is actually derived from it, and this short, hard and clear vocable, sticking out from what seems to me (an unloving alien) a mushy language, became lodged in some corner of my linguistic memory. (...)

I relate these things because I hope they may interest you, and at the same time reveal how closely linked is linguistic invention and legendary growth and construction. And also possibly convince you that looking around for more or less similar words is not in fact very useful even as a source of sounds, and not at all as an explanation of inner meanings and significances. The borrowing, when it occurs (not often) is simply of sounds that are integrated in a new construction; (...)
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