by V. Kumar

Created on: October 12, 2009

Sumerian civilization can be argued as the oldest historically documented human civilization. It is believed to have prospered between 5300 B.C. and 1940 B.C. Much about this civilization has come to be known from the various tablets and other articles containing written text in the Sumerian language. Some of these are available in a bilingual form, along with a later 'Akkadian' language, a member of the Afro-Asiatic languages, thereby helping to decipher the script and language of Sumer.

Sumerian language has many unique characteristics, as one would expect in the oldest human civilization. The first is that it is a 'language isolate' it does not belong to any known family of languages. There have been various arguments and hypothesis that it belonged to a group in common with Dravidian language of Indus valley civilization, with which Sumerian people had extensive contacts, as evidenced by the many seals containing Indus valley inscriptions. Similarly, others have pointed to the possibility of it being a precursor of other linguistic groups, but till date the consensus among experts is that it is a language isolate.

Another peculiarity about Sumerian language is that it is an 'agglutinative' language, where the words can be constructed by joining many meaningful 'affixes' and 'morphemes' together to convey a complex message. It differentiates between animate and inanimate , like gender, but it does not differentiate between male and female pronouns. It has two tenses, which are referred to as 'aspects' instead of tenses, and are equitable with the past and present future tense. Another of its peculiarity is the presence of a large number of 'homophones', words which sound the same but convey different meanings.

Sumerian had a Cunieform script, with evidence available for its gradual evolution from an archaic script of purely logographic signals to a more sophisticated archaic cuneiform, where the logographic symbols were generalized using a wedge shaped stylus. By the 2600 B.C., the logographic signs were simplified and assimilated in to a logographic script that is usually referred to as the classical Sumerian script. Later on, it was adapted to Akkadian writings, which is the form in which it is mostly observed and in which it was deciphered.

The Sumerian script was first discovered by Rawlinson in 1855 in Southern Mesopotamian sites, who suggested that it was a non-semitic language. Its agglutinative character was first shown by Hincks in 1856. Paul Hopt was the first to decipher it from a Akkadian-Sumerian bilingual text in 1879. The large number of signs in Sumerian also lead to the argument that Sumerian was not a language but a secret code, and actually this concept prevailed for a long time, before it was rejected, and since then a lot of translation and transliteration has been attempted and added to our understanding of this language, which marks a major milestone in the history of development of languages by mankind.

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