A Short Introduction to Sumerian Morphology
 
Fred Hamori
updated March 15, 2006

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Introduction

Sumerian is generally believed today to be an isolate language without known close relatives, even though most will say it is the closest to the FinnUgor and Altaic language. Even the well known Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer has hinted at the probability at times about the FinnUgor and Altaic links to Sumerian. Many others mention it also but then try to play it down and minimize the true extent of the links. Quite a few of the early pioneers of the study of Sumerian however didn't ignore or play this link down, but supported the idea that the language was related to Finn-Ugor and Altaic language groups. Such early pioneers as Jules Oppert (France), Archibald.H Sayce (England), A.H. Layard (England), Francis Lenormant (France), Delitzs (Germany), Coloman-Gabriel Gostony (France) and many others who are less known today such as Hungarian Sumerologists Dr Zsigmond Varga, a student of Delitz, and his student Dr Ida Bobula. Unfortunately the detailed work and sound correspondences needed by modern "historic" linguist, were only started by them, but never continued and refined by anyone, before it became a semi "taboo" topic to compare Sumerian to other language families.  A late attempt by Sándor Csöke to explain the sound rules, in my oppinion is not adequete nor correctly done. The job is quite difficult requiring a lot of time, people and where computer tools are very helpful. He had no help or such tools.  

The Sumerian comparisons to other languages seemed to become a tabu following the very long drawn out and bitter attacks on these early associations by a very long lived Jewish scholar, Halevy, from Eastern Europe, who basically tried to force Sumerian into the category of an "invented secret language of the Semitic priesthood", since Sumerian was used by the prieshood, long after its demise. Even though this idea was in time totally disproved, it totally disrupted the early initiatives for a long time to prove a link and must have resulted in a consensus to keep the language isolated, so that these attacks can cease and research can get on with the important basic work at hand. Further mention of this has for the most part has been discouraged by academics ever since, and linguistics is by far, one of the most conservative of all the sciences, which at times can be very discouraging to innovative individuals who work in it. Since this time, the more Sumerians became known the more amateurs have tried to compare it to just about every language in the world. Their methodology however has usually been more on the plane of "folk etymology", that usually twists the meanings and pronunciations and drops and leaves things off to force fit something that at best is a mrginally similar at all. They never attempt to work out the rules of change and stick to meanings that are closely tied together. Those who don't want people to ever find a solution, meanwhile claim that everyone who tries is an amateur, even if they have a Phd in Linguistics, and there has to be a racist conspiracy to make themselves and their group feel important.  Such generalizations and vilification may fit a small number of people, whose claims are obviously very weakly prooven, but it is unreasonable to label all people by such negative stereotypes without even considering their proofs, methodology or credentials.

In Sumerian and the other agglutinative languages also, the Case Markers are used in place of prepositions and are appended to the root word to indicate a range of locations, directions, conditions along with suffixed pronouns, Modal Prefixes and conditions. The agglutinative phrase is very rigidly constructed with little change in order. As such its very compact and represents not a long "word" but a short phrase. Both verbs and nouns have their own agglutinative clusters. The pronouns in Sumerian are gender indifferent just like in Uralic and Altaic and are also affixed to the morpheme and become part of the agglutinated phrase. Besides these there are many more very important features Sumerian shares with other such languages.  The most important key similarity however is the shared vocabulary of Sumerian and early Finn-Ugor (Uralic) languages.  A certain percentage of these words are also common with the Altaic language family. Of my FinnUgor dictionary roughly 10% have Altaic links also. The proof of systematic sound rules of change from the derived FinnUgor protolanguage as it probably looked like some 8,000 years ago to the later Sumerian vocabulary is the main subject of this article and will be shown in detail with many examples. First however we must mention the problems and limitations.  Naturally due to the archaic pictographic-cuneiform writing system of Sumerian and its dialects did cause problems and lack of precision, however even so, there are for the most part quite a lot of predictable word forms, derivable from the Finn-Ugor protolanguage. It is this derived protolanguage primarily which I used as my reference to comparing Sumerian rather than the many modern daughter languages, which had all changed considerably from their archaic forms over such a very long time. The protolanguage however was much closer in time to Sumerian and is also very similar to Sumerian words. Another source of problems is that Sumerian and especially its later forms often truncated many words by deleting leading sounds especially sibilants and trailing vowels and consonants especially L, J. Sounds like W and J were usually deleted or replaced (W>B), ( J>G) which disguised a lot of the similarities. One of the key arguments agains all comparisons of Sumerian is the lack of precision of the sound of cuneiform-hierogliphic like language makes it too imprecise. I think that it does cause problems in certain cases, but because it was converted to an alphabetic form by the later Semitic scribes, there seems to be plenty of consistency, even though its pronunciation was biased toward Semitic. The types of changes arent as important to historic linguistics as they are to someone who wants the true perfect sound for conversation.  A sound rule change works and thats all that what matters. Our current lack of detailed dialectical and locational variations is another problem, which causes certain notations to vary so much. That plus the fact that our references dont have information about the period in Sumerian history for some words. Words, pronunciations and definitions change over time. The dialects also have their unique pronunciations, which the standard written language used in all its variations. When confronted with such variations this is normally how I explain the difference that forms of the word with s, z, š  all existed side by side or in different times. Yet they are all very closely tied phonemes.

Sumerian became surrounded by Semitic languages and the now dead Elamite language and so it naturally picked up a lot of Semitic and Elamite features, which caused it to change throughout its history becaming more and more changed from its original root forms, to which we are trying to compare it here. Long before the Sumerians settled in Messopotamia they had already come into contacts with many other languages which also inevitably left their marks. Like all isolated languages it started adapting some of the aerial features of grammar like the so called "ergative" transitive-subject "-e" marker instead of the accusative-object marker found in Finn-Ugor. This ergative form was in common with it's early Mesopotamian neighboring language, Elamite. Otherwise most of it's case markers and pronouns are also found in Finn-Ugor languages. Needless to say, the modern languages have evolved even further away from this ancient forms and created a lot more unique cases than are found in this ancient tongue, which separated from its northern neighbors a very long time ago, sometimes after 5,000 to 4000 BC. Naturally after several thousand years of independent evolution no one should expect that some local innovations and local loans would not become part of this language. We tried to ignore these newer foreign loans here and concentrated on the basic words which are also used to create the more complex ones!

The Sumerian verbal conjugation phrase is illustrated below, and compared to another language that does much the same thing in a slightly different manner: