Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners.

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Sumerian is the oldest language that we can read that has come to us from antiquity, with clay tablets surviving from as far back as roughly 3200 BCE. For anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Once you have made headway with Sumerian fundamentals, there are some more detailed grammars that will become indispensable. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Sumerian marks possession with an /ak/ after the word, and marks the subject of a transitive sentence with the suffix /e/.But this can be a challenge for someone trying to start out on their own, since as Konstantopoulos jokes, following Diakonoff, that “there are as many grammars of Sumerian as there are Sumerologists. Konstantopoulos remembers being attracted to the grammar of a particular line on Cylinder A—“Come on, come on! Exchanging Valentines can be an awkward process, especially when you consider “Vinegar Valentines” and other snarky sentiments - whatever your tastes, enjoy the sweet and sour cards alike in this gallery! This is my chapter (Chapter 11 "Sumerian Grammar for Babylonians") in ISACMP 1 "Back to School in Babylonia. He wrote his dissertation on the (unorthographic) Sumerian lamentational liturgies that were excavated from the Old Babylonian city of Kis.

The reader—a slim 110 pages—is packed with helpful resources for the elementary student: texts, transliterations, a sign list, phonological charts, and glossaries for vocabulary, divinities, persons, places, dates, buildings, and festivals.But for those committed to diving directly into Sumerian, Konstantopoulos notes the following resources.

I could speak about the controversies about Sumerian grammar, or the difficulties of the script, but in this post I will try to talk about the intersection of both. He wrote his dissertation on the lamentational liturgies of the city of Kiš, and specializes in the Sumerian language. It explains the functioning of Sumerian grammar in 16 lessons, illustrated with more than 500 fully glossed examples.Sumerian is written in cuneiform, a script composed of wedge-shaped signs formed by impressing moist clay tablets with the sharpened end of a reed stylus. When asked to recommend a dictionary for Sumerian students, Konstantopoulos hesitated, saying that there is not yet a complete, comprehensive work in the style of the The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago ( CAD) [Oriental Institute of Chicago; Ref 4 PJ3525 . The mastering especially of the diversified verbal morphology or the invariably Sumerian basic vocabulary is a clear sign of a high degree of language acquisition, and the phonographic spellings even hint at imitation of Sumerian phonemes. If you are in Chicago while it is open (September 21, 2023–March 24, 2024), please stop by the ISAC Museum to have a look! One advantage of the ePSD is that the site is keyed to other online Sumerian texts, such as UCLA’s Cuneiform Digital Library [available online] and Oxford’s Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature ( ETCSL) [available online].