It makes me believes that the mysterious wisdom of the ancients about language. It all started out with pictures, which became ever more abstract and slowly developed into logograms, as I explain here. Today's word of the day is "igi", which means "eye". It does not, and you can find the full line of known transmission here and here. In keeping with the importance that was accorded to learning Sumerian in scribal education, some of these comments allow us a glimpse into ancient language teaching methods. 0000012612 00000 n

73.Gilgamesh - meaning "the ancestor is a hero". Indeed necessity is the mother of invention and without that need, would writing as we know of today allow us the joy of books and texts and learning, where writing is ubiquitous. Today, this kind of language mixing is relatively rare in writing, particularly formal writing such as legal texts. The processes are very amazing and wonderful.

Because these groups were bilingual, there was no need for interpretation between Sumerian and Akkadian. Mixing languages make writings have different meanings, but the languages and writings all from the life and our society.

Agree that monolingualism is the much more unusual condition that requires explanation and only emerges under very specific circumstances . 0000012089 00000 n (Shulgi, 2000, pp. 43.Saghaza meaning "to attach securely". This blog got us to dig deeper into the histories of writing and inscriptions. 130. Dragoman first appeared in English around 1300. 0000010247 00000 n Do you notice that there is a vague similarity between targummanu and dragoman?

40.Nirgal meaning "noble". Michalowski, P. (2020). 104.Shesa meaning "roasting barley corns". Sal meaning "reproduction".

68.Dumuzi - Dumu, meaning "child" and zid, meaning "loyal". Amah meaning "flooding of the river". Thank you, Ingrid!

118. In H. Crawford (Ed.

tolma Dolmetscher und seiner trkischen Quelle. Ancient kings are well known for their boasts inscribed in stone, and Shulgi, King of Sumer and Akkad, King of the Four Corners of the Universe, whose reign lasted from around 2,094 to 2,046 BCE, had this to say about his prodigious language capabilities: By origin I am a son of Sumer; I am a warrior, a warrior of Sumer.

It is the name of the Sumerian heaven on earth. Edzard, D. O. Thanks for sharing one of the earliest inventions of writing, Sumerians of Mesopotamia. 83-105).

21.Henbur meaning "reed shoots, stalks". 71.Enli l- where En, meaning "lord" and lil means "world".

Thus, reading the blog makes me get much more valuable knowledge. Sumerian mythology was also very rich and the little information we have of them have helped us gather many names.

25.Kishar meaning "horizon". 81.Ninhursag - meaning "lady of the mountain". 46.Shabra, Shapra (Sanskrit Origin), meaning "temple administrator". He should be brought here (quoted from (Crisostomo, 2020, p. 410). The need of our production and life promotes diversity in writing.

Zhong, Yurou. 0000009594 00000 n trailer << /Size 545 /Info 475 0 R /Root 510 0 R /Prev 510905 /ID[] >> startxref 0 %%EOF 510 0 obj << /Pages 508 0 R /Type /Catalog /OpenAction 511 0 R >> endobj 511 0 obj << /S /GoTo /D [ 512 0 R /FitBH -32768 ] >> endobj 543 0 obj << /S 772 /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 544 0 R >> stream ), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Therefore, they had to receive formal training in that language as part of their scribal training (Michalowski, 2006). Sharra, Shara meaning "dry river". Needs of recording, translation and interpreting help later generators to know, study and discover historical values or heritage of ancestors.

Multilingualism and Diglossia in the Ancient Near East. A praise poem of Shulgi (Shulgi B). Given what we know about the ubiquity of linguistic and cultural contact in the ancient world, as today I am inclined to think that mutual inspiration is much more likely than independent invention. Today's Sumerian word is "nin", which means "lady, mistress, queen". 120. ), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. On the other hand, language is not that limited as what I assumed, it is more about using loanwords, mixing with the other(s) to create a new writing system. 58.Urda meaning "to be mindful, to care". An example comes from the Manishtushu Obelisk, which dates from between 2,277 and 2,250 BCE. 0000006225 00000 n Pittman, H. (2013). In modern days, people are advantageous in multimodalities, technology advancement and ubiquitous information, but we have limited abilities in interpretation and translation with a narrow focus on language mastery rather than values of cultures and social relationships. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Sumer may have been an ancient civilization, even earlier than Egypt, but their exotic names are still loved by people across the world. It is very interesting to learn the history of writing, and how almost all languages around the world are the breeds of Sumerian multilanguage.

Without writing, people will not know about the history, which they could learn from. Oh, sorry! Of the at least three inventors of writing, evolving from images and pictograms, it is wondrous to know that the Chinese script is the only one that has an unbroken living tradition. They are even older than Egyptians. Administrators and scholars: The first scribes.

London: Routledge. 24.Kirashi (Japanese origin), meaning "emmer wheat used for making beer". A female nymph is known by this name. And here the flow of my thoughts leads me to warmly recommend to fellow readers the linguistics discipline as expounded by Anna Wierzbicka and her colleagues. On account of this principle of language formation, it is feasible for the descendants to develop different languages as an identical feature of a region like what we use today. Uri, Urin meaning "bald eagle". Its a surprise that multilingualism has been dated from 5000 years ago and is carried on by evolving language in spoken and written form. An ancient god was named after this and Ur was a famous Sumerian city. 41.Penzer (English origin), meaning "hearth-tender/leather-worker". By logging in to LiveJournal using a third-party service you accept LiveJournal's User agreement. It is also interesting to know that all language is an unbroken chain of transmission and although it has evolved, there are still visible links and borrowing of words that go all the way back to the ancient era. Hasselbach-Andee, R. (2020). Ubil-Eshtar, brother of the king, Kalki, scribe, is your servant (Image credit: British Museum). Majoring in linguistics, I have always been curious about how was it like to communicate when people didnt have so-called official languages.

There are many Vietnamese words that actually do not exist in English or hard to find a corresponding word to describe exactly Vietnamese versions in English. The words for interpreter in Turkish (tercmen), Georgian (tarjimani), Russian (tolma), Polish (tumacz), Hungarian (tolmcs), and German (Dolmetscher) all go back to the same source (Jyrknkallio, 1952). 457-470). No wonder many people regard language as a connection between us with ancestors. 4.Anki (Sumerian origin), meaning "universe". In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed. 0000012590 00000 n

Yet, I am still curious about the way other people during the ancient time learn each other language until they be able to translate each other language and create their own bilingual dictionaries. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed. The people of Sumeria were quite close to nature. This article is an interesting piece to make us learn more about the inventions of writing from the ancient period.

For more baby names, take a look at Babylonian Names and Mayan Names. Variants of this name are Shandana and Shandan - the queen of Mesopotamia was known by this name.

Sumerian was the powerful lingua franca of the time, but it may well be that, by the time writing really began to take off, most people had switched over to speaking Akkadian. The obelisk is basically a title deed to four estates. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed. By joining Kidadl you agree to Kidadls Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receiving marketing communications from Kidadl. 45.Sagmi (Sanskrit Origin), meaning "slave-girl". 122. I had managed to overlook your postscript and only saw that my comments never got through. Now, if he knows all those other languages of areas surrounding Sumer, why wouldnt he know Elamite, given that he just bragged (earlier in the poem) about utterly trouncing Elam but it would be even stranger if he knew all those languages but not Akkadian!

Yes, I certainly agree that stimulus diffusion from Mesopotamia to Egypt may be why the hieroglyphs were developed; theyre definitely not descended from cuneiform in any narrower sense than that, though (there is no correspondence in shapes, meanings or sounds). Does these signs depict numerical or alphabets? Anyone who went to the trouble of chiseling a record like this into stone surely put up the best kind of language they could think of. Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 19161958. (2013).

The humiliations of the Opium Wars and the turmoils of the 19th and early 20th century did actually put the possibility of script change close, as a supposed means to become modern: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The name Nirgal can mean Nergal, the Babylonian gods of war. Kishar meaning "line of the horizon". A beautiful Mesopotamian female name. It is also interesting to acknowledge that the language mixing in Sumerian and Akkadian languages were the results of most people fluent in one spoken language only. While I havent done any research, some casual reflection on my own experiences indicates a link between monolingual societies and historically recent status as a colonising power- or personal dentification with that power. 2022 Language on the Move.

In the peoples of the Ancient Middle East we see our modern selves like through a very old, cracked, blunted, and dusty mirror. These nouns could sit well with any parent who wishes to give a gender-neutral name to their child. 33.Namkuzu meaning " wisdom, cleverness". 129. 77.Lugalbanda - meaning "young and fierce king". But have you ever stopped to think in which language they were writing? 0000001714 00000 n In short, they collected and distributed goods. Here is a list of Sumerian that is related to the natural world: 117.

The blog also states that the reason to start the earliest writings was to keep the records but if they invented the writing for record keeping then, what did they write? 0000001071 00000 n Enki was the Sumerian god of water and wisdom and the keeper of the Me, the divine laws. 31.Musarra (Arabic origin), meaning "inscription of the king". During the process of writing invention, from the images indicating concrete objects to signs carrying abstract meanings, morphemes and phonemes came up to us and built a complex world of writing. 0000006247 00000 n This is certainly true of the scribal caste and keep in mind that everyone else would have been illiterate and the kingly elite. This makes me admire the Sumerians language ability and wonder what motivates these ancient people to become multilingual rather than monolingual. 159-184).

105.Shezilzilla meaning "dehusking barley corns". Back then, the fundamental purpose was record keeping, and they displayed an excellence on language use to achieve that purpose. 134. 131. Zur Etymologie von russ.

This weeks articles and lecture highlighted the ingenuity of our ancestors and how language was invented by a collective of people, to fulfil practical needs like keeping accurate records for trade, bureaucracy and religion. Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Sumer civilization was one of the first civilizations, located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. I myself can correct his confused words in his own language. It is not entirely clear what the Meluhha language was and who the Meluhhans might have been, but they are assumed to have been located in the Indus valley, where the Sumerians had extensive trade interests (Thornton, 2013). The evolution of language, from concrete pictures into more abstract logograms, was a collaborative effort, highlighting the importance of cooperation for the highest good of society.

It refers to the Sumerian goddess of fertility. 343-366). For example, though the first writing is in a form of spreadsheet rather than a story which most people might guess, it allowed the next generation to learn and understand about the complexity of social administration. Die Inschriften der altakkadischen Rollsiegel. The Rosetta Stone, bearing the same message in three different scripts (Egypt, 196 BCE) is well-known in Europe and its name is now a byword for multilingualism. Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world. Subscribe for parenting tips, family money advice, baby names and more. 0000013807 00000 n Nowadays, I found that most of written language mixing is due to the writer being competent, if not fluent, in both languages. As is to be expected from the above, the Sumerians used two different words for linguistic mediator a Sumerian word (eme-bal) and an Akkadian word (targummanu). Thank you, Jenny! As can be seen the text makes use of both languages in about equal parts translanguaging avant la lettre! 18.Harran meaning "road". For instance, I speak Hindi which is developed from Sanskrit there are certain similarities in the sound and certain words remain the same. When you buy through the links on our site we may earn a commission. The word for each week will be posted on Sunday nights from here on out.

However, there is debate whether these were even language-specific. You can see how one of the parts of the sign is the sign ". Lillan meaning "stalk with a ripe ear of grain". Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Madala meaning "a thick bundle of reeds used to build a raft". Initially, I thought Sumerian was the only language for Sumerians whereas they were multilingual speakers. 0000011779 00000 n Our Sumerian history highlights that multilingualism may be more ideal for expressing complex ideas between languages and cultures. I found the lecture on the invention of writing very interesting. This fascinating research into the history of writing really amplifies Ingrid Pillers question: what motivates some cultures to become monolingual? In my palace no one in conversation switches to another language as quickly as I do. Studia Orientalia, 17(8), 3-11. It is not an easy domain of knowledge, but it is outstandingly exciting. 0000013841 00000 n The ultimate monolingual dictionary is a great range of explications based on a foundational list of less than a hundred words, or even parts of words. This name is associated with Namshita, who was a Mulani warrior and the leader of the rebel Untherans. There are doubtlessly many reasons but among the most prominent must be (a) that the steppe nomads from the north (Mongols, Manchu) who succeeded in conquering China were less literate and needed to turn to Chinese bureaucrats and their knowledge to keep the empire going; and (b) that China was never (fully) colonized by a European power.

This is the name of one of the Mesopotamian Goddesses. 124. Personally, I found it quite interesting to note how multilingual societies and societies with individuals able to communicate in more than one language appeared to be more like the norm rather than the exception also in ancient times. It is another name for the remover of diseases. 93. For completeness sake, I should add that there are also fragments of monolingual word lists among the earliest surviving records.

It is fascinating to trace back the long history of the invention of human beings writing system, albeit there is no final result of who is the one exactly put the first stroke on a clay tablet or animal bone piece. Now we can add the Manishtushu Obelisk to what we know about the prevalence of multilingual State administration. The status of interpreters seems to have been similar to that of scribes, as is evident from another famous seal, the seal of the interpreter Shu-ilishu. The sentence immediately before the quote posted here is: When I like a torrent with the roar of a great storm, in the capture of a citadel in Elam , I can understand what their spokesman answers. Depending on what the damaged parts of the tablet said, this seems to mean the second of his five languages isnt Akkadian, but Elamite. 55.Uanna meaning "light of the heavens".

Archiv fr Orientforschung, 22, 12-20. 0000010666 00000 n London: Routledge. I am impressed by translation and interpreting aspect written in the blog. ), The Sumerian World (pp. I refuse to be satisfied with my monolingual status even though I am fast running out of years to do anything more about it.

85.Ninurta - Nin means "lord" and urta means "ear of barley". %PDF-1.2 % The aspect of Sumerians that I find most interesting is the use of multiple languages and the powerful lingua franca. ), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (pp. Agree we actually have no way of knowing how he counted his languages; even today, its not unusual for people to exclude their mother tongue(s) from a count of their languages, or a widely used lingua franca that everyone is supposed to know . Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (2nd ed.). Hm0ws. 78.Nanaya - This was the name of a goddess worshipped by people of Ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia. Dragoman arrived in English from Old French drugemen or Medieval Latin dragumanus and, via late Greek dragoumanos, goes back to Old Arabic targumn. The modern Arabic word is tarjumn, and from Arabic it goes all the way back to the Sumerians. The Sumerian Word of the Day is back for the summer, and probably will be updated a couple of times a week at least. Thank you for the very comprehensive and stimulating overview of the invention of writing.

I was made aware that we unintentionally interpret and translate sentences to our friends if they dont know that language likely to occur in a group of colleagues, friends gathering, etc., and loan words from another language into our everyday life.

Mesopotamia, Meluhha, and those in between. This reflects back to that writing used to belong to elite group who possess the asset and incline to manage their asset and stabilize their prestige and administration through record keeping and information storage. It can also mean, "ground" or "earth", and is a term for the netherworld. As an heir of Sumerian, I feel so much proud of how bright our ancestors were and grateful for such great invention. 128. The image on the seal depicts a Sumerian dignitary being approached by two figures, presumably Meluhhans, and a small interpreter sitting between them. One feature we see reaching back into that long history is the commonality of our linguistic diversity. Sharan, Sharin meaning "tick, bedbug". Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Thirdly, I can conduct a conversation with a man from the black mountains.

I am looking forward to deepening my understanding of the topic further.

It surprises me how multilingualism already existed then and that they even had interpreters and translators. 29.Minesh (Indian origin), meaning "a calendar month".

Maybe we moderns think too narrowly about translation and interpreting, as limited to language. Edin meaning "Garden of eternity". Shulgi. 2.Agarin meaning "a flat area; father, mother, womb". It is amazing that the ancient people have multilingual ability as well as their impressive abilities of translation and interpreting when their written and spoken languages at their time still limited.

0000005107 00000 n Aria meaning "desert". In saying this I allude to the multilingualism of first nations people. Thank you for the detail history of the writing.

As scribes established themselves as a powerful professional caste, training of scribes became formalized and included Sumerian language teaching, as explained above. Over a period of around a thousand years, writing developed from proto-cuneiform a logographic aide memoire to become a language-specific writing system, of the sort we are familiar with today. 0000003999 00000 n In addition, it is reasonable that Sumerians could operate the bilingual language regime as they were already bilingual between Sumerian and Akkadian. The Sumerian Empire under King Shulgi (2094 to 2046 BCE) (Image Credit: Wikipedia), It is a clich to state that everyone who reads this sentence is an heir of the Sumerians, regardless of what your genetic background may be.

Jyrknkallio, P. (1952).

82.Ninlil - This was the name of a Sumerian goddess, the consort of Enlil. Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.

A key indicator of language contact lies in the fact that the language name Sumerian is not actually a Sumerian but an Akkadian word. It was an informative lecture and Im still fascinated by how writing started with concrete images of objects and emerged into letters. What made them powerful was not their writing skills per se but the fact that scribes controlled the Sumerian bureaucracy and administration. Our ancestors of that period though had strong memory but needed the power of writing to only record something when moving towards urbanization like how many cattle kept to ploy land. 0000007628 00000 n This evidence takes three forms, namely language mixing, parallel translations, and metalinguistic commentary. I find it surprised when there were still a great influence of one language to another during the earliest period of invention of writing.

Over the same period, people who knew how to write established themselves as a small and powerful elite of scribes (Taylor, 2013). The advanced interpretation practice also surprised me since it is so close to nowadays. Here are some of the gender-neutral names that were found in Sumeria: 87. Below we have compiled very popular mythological names in the Sumerian language: 67.An - meaning "heaven, sky". A very powerful Mesopotamian Goddess goes by this name. Thanks, Zoe! Sign up now to stay updated on our news and latest posts.

70.Enki - meaning "underworld, mountain".

In the Akkadian epic called the Enuma Elish, Kishar was considered the daughter of Lahamu and Lahmu. Sheli meaning "pine/juniper seeds".

The appearance of writing systems was great.

0000037961 00000 n

74.Inanna - meaning "lady of the heavens". The Sumerian language. This was the name of the Sun God.

Good question, Thao! Thank you, John! (2000). The name of a famous Sumerian hero found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In H. Crawford (Ed. The Sumerian word for their language was Eme-gir, which literally means native language (Cunningham, 2013).

Hi Ingrid, thanks for sharing a clear picture of the first inventors of writing the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and three specific forms of evidence proving that the Sumerians were multilingual. Just a little correction: the Latin alphabet is descended not from cuneiform, but from Egyptian hieroglyphs (reinterpreted according to the rebus principle in Semitic languages), and the linked video does not claim its descended from cuneiform.

As a result, there are many names originating from Sumeria which reflected the inclination towards nature that Sumerians had.