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](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Tableta_con_trillo.png)
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:
Wikibooks Sumerian: