About the Sumerian language

hi everyone my name is julie and today we're exploring maybe the most mysterious language out there the language of the people who created the first civilization and the first writing system salim and welcome to the sumerian language [Music] sumerian was the language of an ancient and lost civilization forgotten for 2000 years and rediscovered only in the 19th century sumerian was spoken in southern mesopotamia between 5th and 2nd millennium bc around the second millennium bc the spoken language was completely replaced by acadian a semitic language from northern mesopotamia but sumerian was preserved as a scholarly language for some time it functioned similarly to latin in middle aged europe it was studied in schools and was used for various types of texts from official documents to religious hymns the last examples of sumerian writings are dated from 100 bc who were the sumerians that's a hard question as sumerians themselves were apparently not very interested in who they were and where they came from so they didn't really write anything about it sumerians never even call themselves like that this term comes from the acadian word shumero and this is how the acadians call the area of southern mesopotamia sumerians used to call this land kenger and it's still a big question in linguistics as to how kenger became as a transition from kurt is very unusual sumerians actually called themselves sangeer which literally translates as blackhead and there are many hypotheses on what that could actually mean the first intuition is that sumerians were literally black-headed like africans or dravidians the latter inhabited ancient and modern hindustan and possibly even ancient iran so not too far away however on their own images sumerians don't look particularly dark and their features don't seem much different from the neighboring semitic people though of course these images are very standardized but still if they had dark skin maybe they would have shown it maybe but the second hypothesis is that the sumerians come from somewhere where people surrounding them had a considerably lighter skin color so they were black-headed compared to them and the third hypothesis claims that the name blackhead it doesn't refer to skin color but to the status it was a way to describe civilized people as opposed to barbarians interestingly similar opposition exists among the asino tibetans where people call themselves black-headed as opposed to the red-faced those who did not know king rulership it could be that the sumerian name had a similar connotation but wait are then sumerians and sino-tibetans the ancestors of modern tibetans and chinese related actually for some time sumerian language was included into the sino-caucasian hypothesis which links several language families into a microfamily it has a connection older than 10 000 years but recently sumerian was excluded from this hypothesis as there was no linguistic proof to back it so maybe some proto-sumerians were in contact with proto-cine tibetans and that's why they have some things in common another curious similarity is the sumerian word for god and sky dingir which is very similar suspiciously similar to the word for sky of some central asian tribes tengir and the chinese word for sky chan sumerians themselves mention only two places outside mesopotamia firstly is dilmoon a land where according to them all the people all the humanity came from and which is now identified as the island of bahrain and we do find sumerian artifacts from the 4th millennium bc there so maybe sumerians colonize southern mesopotamia from the sea and also got bahrain in the process the second location is arata a land somewhere to the east where they had the same sumerian names and prayed to the same gods and which was known as the land of skilled artisans of course we have no clue as to where exactly this arata was situated could have been iran could have been india linking sumerians to the mysterious in this river civilization in reality the only thing that we can almost confidently say about sumerian origins is that they were not probably native to mesopotamia what's more and now it's really shocking information that it's even possible that sumerians didn't create the first civilization the first agricultural society in this area is called the ubait culture these were also the people who established the famous sumerian cities there or rukh lagash many others it is highly probable that these obeyed people weren't sumerians as these city names don't seem to have a sumerian etymology right now researchers have identified at least two possible pre-sumerian languages in this area one of them was nicknamed the banana language as the known words from this language have the same syllable structure as the word banana zababa kubaba inanna aruru these are names of some sumerian gods sumerian on the other hand was predominantly a monosyllabic language what could be even a bigger perspective shift is that the first writing system the thing that sumerians are most famous for maybe was not even invented by them but again by the obeyed people needless to say that no one has a clue who these hypothetical obedience could have been the earliest writing system also known as cuneiform was actually pictograms or simplified images of a war this time of writing appeared in the 4th millennium bc in the ancient city of uruk the writings on the clay tablets from that time are purely utilitarian and administrative like how many sheep were given to the king and so on even the word order was not transmitted as in the spoken language as their writing was only needed to say who did what or gave what to who with time though sumerian civilization developed and so did their writing system sumerians were using writing to transmit every imaginable piece of information from history religious hymns and royal decrees to personal letters and recipes of course pictograms were not enough to transcribe complicated phenomena so the writing followed the rebus principle so for example for the word ghee to return they used the pictogram for reed pronounced also as ghee so in some sort it became a celebrity and in other languages which adopted sumerian uniform like acadian hittite ancient persian elemites and other it was used as a celebrity only as i already mentioned starting from the second million abc sumerian was no longer a spoken language but it was actively studied by the acadian scholars because the pronunciation of sumerian was not always obvious from writing acadian composed dictionaries where they indicating the pronunciation of sumerian words with acadian cuneiform they use these dictionaries in their schools to teach young students the sumerian language today for us these dictionaries are an invaluable source on sumerian phonology of course we reconstructed through the double prison of first acadians and then modern scholars reconstructing acadian so obviously it can have terrible imprecisions considering especially the sumerian and acadian were extremely different languages and the cadence scholars might not have indicated sounds that weren't present in acadian there is less this is what we have for now first of all vowels we know of four vowels however that's not a very symmetric system so quite unlikely from the linguistic point of view and also some earlier arcadian dictionaries distinguish between u and o but not the later ones also it is hypothetized that sumerian might have been a tonal language because it has a very high amount of homophones meaning words that sound the same but have a different meaning from the consonants these were the ones that were reconstructed we don't see any particularly crazy sounds here the most unusual sound can be this but again it's very likely that this phonology is incomplete or even incorrect we know very well how the sumerian language was structured it was an sov language it was an exclusive language so meanings were attached to roots with prefixes and suffixes like in this example the verb has four prefixes and three suffixes sumerian also had the ergative case the same as what we saw in basque language for example and yes sumerian was compared to musk and no not related the ergative case is similar to the passive voice so let's compare a phrase where the king is in nominative logal the king entered the temple and here the king is an ergative the temple was built by the king we see an ending appearing to indicate a case and in sumerian there are actually nine cases the nouns are split in two genders conscious beings humans and gods and unconscious beings animals plants objects etc similar system to tamil by the way and yes sumerian was compared to tamil and no not really it did also plural tense was used only for the conscious beings and it was formed by reduplication like lu person becomes lulu people also when there is an adjective with the noun in the plural it is the adjective that is reduplicated like in logal gal gal great kings with numerals there is an interesting story sumerian has a decimal system with traces of a system based on five like six is five plus one seven five plus two et cetera there are also traces of a vegetable system 40 is 20 times 2 and it also incorporates a sexagesimal system where the count is based on 60s like that 240 is 60 times 4 600 is 1060s and 3600 is a separate word shah we still use the same system to this day our division of time 24 hours a day 60 minutes in an hour all that was invented by sumerians and all comes from those far away times there is still so much we don't know about sumerian but i hope i could at least make this mysterious language just one percent less mysterious sumerian has been compared to probably every single language and language family out there but no connection was proven also it's important to mention that sumerian presented in this video and the one known the best to researchers is the official version of acadian schools when the language was already dead but of course the language used to be alive it evolved it had varieties and dialects actually we know of one such variety if the standard version is called emegir or native tongue there is also the msal refined language which appears in literally text spoken exclusively by female characters in emotional moments or also used by the gala priests in some particular incantations the differences with emigir are mostly in pronunciation she instead of hazy or ezza instead of udu etc etc there should have been so many more other varieties that we know nothing about but i hope we continue discovering more and more about this language as it is the main key to the origins of human civilization i hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe for more and check out my patreon where my top tier patrons hear their names vote on the next language and you can vote too he is back oh hail the great logan gabi thank you so much for watching and see you in our next exploration [Music] [Music]

Channel: JuLingo

Views: 929,874

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Id: EUXIPElqJZ4

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022