RyanSmallwood wrote:Blue Saka wrote:Out of curiosity...
I have been debating taking on the... apparent migraine... that is Sumerian. This wouldn't be for a while. I think it would be fun, and because I have always been fascinated with their culture. Would any of you recommend sites or books on the language? I'm not period-specific with this one, at least not right now.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand you'd probably have to learn Akkadian as well, as I believe there's overall much more literature and materials and cultural overlap and I think stuff in Sumerian is more fragmentary and not as well preserved. I know This website has audio recordings from academics and parallel texts, which is very helpful although they're fragmentary. Doesn't say which language for each but I guess they're in Sumerian and Akkadian, but I could be mistaken.
Just an overall caution, even the really popular classical languages that have more materials available, are still fairly limited in terms of selection and could use a lot more audio recordings and learning tools to make them more manageable. With something like Sumerian, you're going to have far fewer materials and also won't have many modern language options to leverage learning some core vocab. I don't want to discourage you from trying, and I'll probably try dabbling out of curiosity some day, but I'm not sure how feasible it is to get to comfortable reading level unless you're a scholar dedicating your whole life and work to it. (Again I could be wrong if there's more materials I don't realize, but just based on how tricky it can be to learn classical languages with much better materials, I wouldn't be too optimistic).
Thank you for your response, and for those explanations.
I understand.