Talk:Sumerian language

message: This is Prof. Dr. Osman Nedim Tuna's work: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0308&L=language&P=2828626&E=2&B=--------------050000000408020202070501&N=Sumerian-Tuna.pdf&T=application%2Fpdf This may be added to external links section. --78.191.47.19 (talk) 11:09, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Has your list been looked at by some of the linguists that regularly look over Wiki? HammerFilmFan (talk) 16:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: OR? Verification?

message: I would suggest to remove all categories (except for the :Category:Sumerian language of course) and write them into the category rather than into the article, so that Category:Sumerian language is a subcategory of all of them, as probably all pages in the Category:Sumerian language could also fall within the scope of the other categories. Opinions? --Thogo (Talk) 18:34, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories 

message: I would like to know what evidence has been presented to indicate when the languae had died out. A lot of tlk but no dosh is indicated. So by whom and when did this date come up? Enlil Ninlil (talk) 02:44, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi. It's not an exact date, it's more like a "the first half of the second millenium BCE" thing (or 1800 BCE +/- 200 years if you like). The land of Sumer has been conquered by Akkadians and Sumerian primary texts ceased to be produced sometime after that. They continued writing Sumerian texts, but these were copies of older texts or religious/ceremonial/liturgic texts, not any every-day stuff like administrative texts or new literature anymore. So it's obvious that there were either no or at least not many native speakers by then. There might have been some folks who still used Sumerian at home, but there is no indication at all that this was the case after the time mentioned. IIRC the latest native-looking Sumerian texts (texts with more or less the full range of vocabulary and grammatical forms and more or less correct grammar) are from the Nippur area from about 1700 BCE or so (don't nail me on that, it's long ago when I learned that stuff ;) ). --Thogo (Talk) 18:53, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Evidence of language extinction date

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thread_title: File:Sumerian 26th c Adab.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion

message: Alot of history is skipped. There is no mention of the Babylonians being the first to adopt the language in its written form and not its spoken. The Babylonians took what they wanted and changed stuff around. Yes, the written Sumerian was around until the Assyrians and Akkadians took over everything, but the spoken had changed significantly.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.217.89.55 (talk) 03:11, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Skipping alot of history 

message: There is a misquote (false citation) added for the book that states something else completely.  The actual quote from Samuel Kramer is here:  Kramer, Samuel, Noah 1963. The Sumerians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
pg 306:“In vocabulary, grammer, and syntax, however, Sumerian still stands alone and seems to be unrelated to any other language, living or dead”..  It clearly says that Sumerian is a language isolate yet some users have added the opinion that Samuel Kramer has mentioned it as Turkic!  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.255.251.165 (talk) 03:58, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, but it's not just Turkish nationalists...some Hungarian nationalists assert this as well.  It's hard to tell which nationalist camp is pushing this one, but they are both wrong.  --Taivo (talk) 08:59, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Kramer and misquote

message: The infobox says "Attested from 3350 BCE. Effectively extinct from about 2000-1800 BCE; used as classical language until about 100 AD."
So why did it stop getting used for 200 years from 2000-1800 BCE, and then presumably start being used again until 100 CE? This information seems highly suspicious and probably incorrect.
109.144.174.200 (talk) 17:26, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll have to check, but I think it became extinct as a spoken language but was still used as a written language. Dougweller (talk) 21:00, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extinct from about 2000-1800 BCE 

message: "Archaic Sumerian is the earliest stage of inscriptions with linguistic content, beginning with the Jemdet Nasr (Uruk III) period from about the 31st to 30th centuries BC." 
Then the Vinča script (pre 5000 BCE) is probably after the Sumerian (3000 BCE)?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.210.251.1 (talk) 14:33, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Please read the statement again. Then read Vinča symbols: "The symbols are mostly considered as constituting the oldest excavated example of "proto-writing" in the world; that is, they probably conveyed a message but did not encode language, predating the development of writing proper by more than a millennium." You are calling them a script but that making an assumption. Dougweller (talk) 15:02, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  "the oldest writing" (lie)  

message: Removed:  *Hurro-Urartian languages (see Subarian, Alarodian Citation needed | date=June 2012)   HammerFilmFan (talk) 18:06, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed - tagged over 2 yrs ago - restore if citation noted 

message: His other two books, the grammar and the shorter work for non-Assyriologists, are both on Internet Archive.
108.18.136.147 (talk) 20:37, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delitzsch 

message: Snipped:
:Several linguistic problems arise in the attempt to relate Sumerian with known language families. First, the amount of time between the earliest known form of Sumerian and the oldest reconstructable form of the proposed related language is too great to make reliable comparisons. Another problem difficult to overcome is that the phonetic and semantic change to vocabulary that can occur over long periods of time can make a language unrecognizable from its ancestor. Words in two languages that may sound alike today are more likely to be unrelated than related.
It is not clear to me what point this paragraph is this trying to make. While comparison with modern languages is of course likely to run into so many accidental similarities that we could not tell them apart from any possible actual cognates, Sumerian is still e.g. younger than Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afro-Asiatic, approximately as old as Proto-Uralic, and not enormously older than Proto-Dravidian.
(This is also not a problem that affects Sumerian specifically. We see the same issue just as well with e.g. "family-internal isolates" like Tocharian or Hungarian, whose first attestations or earliest reconstructible forms are also several millennia separated from their last common ancestor with other related languages. Regardless their affinities are quite recoverable by standard methods of historical linguistics.)
The last phrase seems to be trying to point out the existence of false cognates, but a discussion of this really ought to mention something about the regular methods of establishing relationship as well — such as regular sound correspondences in basic lexicon. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 14:18, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems in attempting to relate Sumerian 

message: An unused refernce was causing a cite error to dispaly at the end of the reference list. I have commented it out, but left it in place in case a further edit would find it useful. If those editors who know this topic better think it is not of value to the article, they can and should simply remove it. The reference was:

I came to this issue from a post on the Help desk. DES (talk) 23:27, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unused reference 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The first line of the article states "Sumerian is the language of ancient Sumer and a language isolate which was spoken in northern Mesopotamia", but if you look at the map in the Sumer article , you'll see that all the Sumerian cities are in the south. Is "northern" just a mistake, or is some important information missing here (like the language first developed in the north, but then shifted southwards)?
:You are quite right.  Fixed.  --Taivo (talk) 20:44, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't understand why such trivial forms of vandalism in important articles that have many watchers (182 in this case) and are on topics that are relatively prominent among laypeople (and, in this case, notorious for attracting cranks) aren't caught more quickly. Clearly, our watchers aren't very good at watching. This is something that deeply concerns me. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 13:56, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Some watchers have hundreds of articles that they watch and due to limited time on Wikipedia, we don't always notice changes to articles that are not typically subject to vandalism, especially when the change shows up as a "0" in the size of change parameter on our watchlist.  In other words, we're only human :)  (Hope that helps.)  --Taivo (talk) 16:09, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I do understand that, but a size change "0" is a very bad reason to neglect inspecting a change: a troll could insidiously swap figures, for example. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:24, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, with all due respect, a watchlist that includes hundreds of articles is pointless exactly because it is overwhelming. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:29, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: This is hardly the place to be making aspersions against the habits and practices of other Wikipedia editors.  Mistakes happen and edits slip under the radar because we are all only human.  A large watchlist is hardly uncommon, especially when 90% of the articles are small and have no edits in any 5-year period.  99% of all "0 size" edits are bots making minor, trivial administrative changes, so not inspecting every one is reasonable.  Bravo to the anon IP who spotted this one.  That's the way Wikipedia is supposed to work--people spotting things that need fixing and either making the fix or notifying other editors that there is a potential problem.  Wikipedia will never be a perfect resource--even EB has bogus information--but as long as we work as a group, things won't go off the rails.  --Taivo (talk) 19:13, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair enough, though obviously IPs are not bots – clearly there is usually no need to inspect bot edits, especially "0 size" ones, but IP edits are another matter – I for one never trust IPs, sorry. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:49, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

text: Even more southern than you may think. The southern half of what was once Sumeria is now under water, in the Persian Gulf. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:1D4D:ECEB:719:853D (talk) 09:19, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Northern or southern Mesopotamia? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This should have been taken to the TP back in August 2015.  So, here it be (now.)  Any valid complaints on this, or does the tag need to go? 98.67.1.124 (talk) 18:14, 15 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  drive-by citation-format tagging by SynConlanger 

message: Check out Tamil and Sanskrit too properly.... Rktheking (talk) 15:08, 20 January 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: This article is about the Sumerian language, not about Tamil or Sanskrit. Also, this article doesn't say anywhere that Sumerian was/is the oldest language. - Lindert (talk) 16:46, 20 January 2019 (UTC)

text: The oldest language probably dates to some 250,000 years ago - or more. Sumerian is one of the oldest documented languages with which we have a written form.HammerFilmFan (talk) 08:54, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oldest language 

message: I recently added this article : http://www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2019/a045109-930.pdf 
It was removed with my content by Doug Weller under the pretext it was written by a computer scientist and so not reliable. I would like a proper explanation why one cannot add this article as a reference ? It seems to me a serious research paper using the latest techs available to find the origin, root of the Sumerian languages.It strengthen the hypothesis (already made by some scholars) that a Sumerian is a king 'creole' language made of 2 main languages : Dravidian & Uralic.--2A02:C7D:E028:C100:7C7B:926C:BE94:5C56 (talk) 19:26, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  Sorry, but that article is rubbish. About the author being a computer scientist, unfortunately it happens in all academic disciplines that a person with accreditation in one field feels that they can and should branch out into others. And it is a well-known piece of academic folklore that computer scientists are particularly prone to producing pseudo-science in other fields than their own. This has certainly been my experience, and, anecdotically, that of every serious scientists I have ever interacted with. I do not mean to belittle or offend anyone; it is just a sad fact of our times. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:1D4D:ECEB:719:853D (talk) 09:15, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

text: The guys who know all those three languages know that Sumerian is an isolate, and is totally unrelated to Dravidian & Uralic. The closest one is Archaic Chinese which belongs to Sinitic family.--Vitaly.v.ch (talk) 14:49, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Article about Sumerian Language removed 

message: The page for emesal redirects here, but there is no mention of “emesal” anywhere in the article. As far as I remember, it’s some way of speaking Sumerian that was reserved to women? There should be more explanation about it… CielProfond (talk) 01:18, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: It's briefly discussed in the 'dialects' section. --Spasemunki (talk) 02:29, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh! Indeed… However, it’s spelled there as “eme-sal” and not “emesal,” which might elude a person doing a search as I did… Should we add nonhyphenated spellings for “emeg̃ir” and “emesal”? CielProfond (talk) 02:00, 2 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Emesal redirects to the Dialects section. I don't know what the standard transliteration is, but you can add it if you think it would help. --Spasemunki (talk) 02:55, 2 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emesal 

message: I don't mind, but it looks as though editors put in bits and pieces without checking what was already there. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:1D4D:ECEB:719:853D (talk) 09:10, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree, that's too much redundant detail for an introduction to the following subsections. Fixed. –Austronesier (talk) 10:03, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  case markers are listed twice 

message: What's the quickest way to get the Sumerian language letters/glyphs in this article to render for me in Chrome? I'm just seeing white boxes right now. Thanks. –Novem Linguae (talk) 04:58, 23 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode 

message: Greetings! Regarding this edit, what type of notation is "eme-gir₁₅"? If it's a transliteration, I can tag it . Is there a page on this notation scheme that explains what the subscripts mean? I didn't catch anything skimming the article. Thanks! -- Beland (talk) 08:24, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi! It's the canonical way of transliterating cuneiform signs. The indexes distinguish signs that have been reconstructed as having the same pronunciation. For example: 𒄫 = gir, 𒄈 = gir₂, 𒄊 = gir₃, 𒌋𒀜 = gir₄, 𒁽 = gir₅, 𒁼 = gir₆, 𒂠 = gir₁₅, etc. I don't know whether it's explained on Wikipedia, but it's standard practice. Sartma (talk) 08:53, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  So tagged, thanks! -- Beland (talk) 08:56, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tagging of non-English text 

message: I'm pretty certain that we don't know what the language of Proto-cuneiform tablets was. People guess Sumerian because thats what the first cuneiform writings were in. Since cuneiform starts 2900 BC then it seems like Archaic Sumerian also starts then. If they ever do show proto-cuneiform is Sumerian then it would go back to 3300 BC (Uruk III). I am prepared to be educated if I have this wrong.  :-) Ploversegg (talk) 00:43, 23 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Archaic Sumerian