Dewart, Leslie (1989). Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-2690-7.

Archaic Sumerian is the earliest stage of inscriptions with linguistic content, beginning with the Early Dynastic period from about 2900 BC to 2600 BC. It succeeds the proto-literate period, which spans roughly 3300 BC to 2900 BC. Rubio, Gonzalo (1999). "On the alleged 'pre-Sumerian substratum' ". Journal of Cuneiform Studies. 51 (1999): 1–16. doi: 10.2307/1359726. JSTOR 1359726. S2CID 163985956. It does help to understand the terminology of grammar. Most people don't bother remembering all the parts of a sentence by name but it comes in handy when 'normalizing' a string of cuneiform.There is some evidence for vowel harmony according to vowel height or advanced tongue root in the prefix i 3/e- in inscriptions from pre- Sargonic Lagash, [49] and perhaps even more than one vowel harmony rule. [52] [50] There also appear to be many cases of partial or complete assimilation of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable, albeit not absolute, tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables. [53] These patterns, too, are interpreted as evidence for a richer vowel inventory by some researchers. [49] [50] What appears to be vowel contraction in hiatus (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a, */ae/ > a, */ue/ > u, etc.) is also very common. The term "Post-Sumerian" is meant to refer to the time when the language was already extinct and preserved by Mesopotamians only as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes. The extinction has traditionally been dated approximately to the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the last predominantly Sumerian state in Mesopotamia, about 2000 BC. However, that date is very approximate, as many scholars have contended that Sumerian was already dead or dying as early as c. 2100BC, by the beginning of the Ur III period, [4] [10] and others believe that Sumerian persisted, as a spoken language, in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia ( Nippur and its surroundings) until as late as 1700 BC. [4] Whatever the status of spoken Sumerian between 2000 and 1700 BC, it is from then that a particularly large quantity of literary texts and bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists survive, especially from the scribal school of Nippur. Sumerian school documents from the Sealand Dynasty were found at Tell Khaiber, some of which contain year names from the reign of a king with the Sumerian throne name Aya-dara-galama. [11] Classification [ edit ] Bomhard, Allan R. & PJ Hopper (1984). Toward Proto-Nostratic: a new approach to the comparison of Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Afroasiatic. {{ cite book}}: |work= ignored ( help) Hallo, William W., "On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 83, no. 2, pp. 167–76, 1962

Because of the variant spellings of more or less identical sounds, an easy transcription system cannot be created. It may be more correct to spell a word like á-ki-ti-še-gur 10-ku 5, but Akitu (the name of a festival) is a lot easier. Sathasivam, A (2017). Proto-Sumero-Dravidian: The Common Origin of Sumerian and Dravidian Languages. Kingston, UK: History and Heritage Unit, Tamil Information Centre. ISBN 978-1-85201-024-9. Simo Parpola (July 23, 2007). "Sumerian: A Uralic language". Language in the Ancient Near East. Compte rendu de la 53 e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Moscow. (work in process)

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Monaco, Salvatore F., "Proto-Cuneiform And Sumerians", Rivista Degli Studi Orientali, vol. 87, no. 1/4, pp. 277–82, 2014 CDLI: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative a large corpus of Sumerian texts in transliteration, largely from the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods, accessible with images. The general principle for pronominal agreement in conjugation is that in ḫamṭu TA, the transitive subject is expressed by the prefix, and the direct object by the suffix, and in the marû TA it is the other way round; as for the intransitive subject, it is expressed, in both TAs, by the suffixes and is thus treated like the object in ḫamṭu and like the subject in marû (except that its third person is expressed, not only in ḫamṭu but also in marû, by the suffixes used for the object in the ḫamṭu TA). A major exception from this generalization are the plural forms – in them, not only the prefix (as in the singular), but also the suffix expresses the transitive subject. Jagersma, Bram (January 2000). "Sound change in Sumerian: the so-called /dr/-phoneme". Acta Sumerologica 22: 81–87. Archived from the original on 2023-03-19 . Retrieved 2015-11-23. Halloran, J. A. (2007). Sumerian lexicon: a dictionary guide to the ancient Sumerian language. Los Angeles, Calif: Logogram. ISBN 0-9786429-1-0

In 1838 Henry Rawlinson, building on the 1802 work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend, was able to decipher the Old Persian section of the Behistun inscriptions, using his knowledge of modern Persian. When he recovered the rest of the text in 1843, he and others were gradually able to translate the Elamite and Akkadian sections of it, starting with the 37 signs he had deciphered for the Old Persian. Meanwhile, many more cuneiform texts were coming to light from archaeological excavations, mostly in the Semitic Akkadian language, which were duly deciphered. Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8. (Well-organized with over 800 translated text excerpts.)

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Zólyomi, Gábor. 2016. An introduction to the grammar of Sumerian. P. 12-13" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-16 . Retrieved 2018-09-16. The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two-syllable root ( igi "eye", e 2 "house, household", nin "lady"), although there are also some roots with three syllables like šakanka "market". There are two grammatical genders, usually called human and non-human (the first includes gods and the word for "statue" in some instances, but not plants or animals, the latter also includes collective plural nouns), whose assignment is semantically predictable. The dimensional prefixes of the verb chain basically correspond to, and often repeat, the case markers of the noun phrase. Like the latter, they are attached to a "head" – a pronominal prefix. The other place where a pronominal prefix can be placed is immediately before the stem, where it can have a different allomorph and expresses the absolutive or the ergative participant (the transitive subject, the intransitive subject or the direct object), depending on the TA and other factors, as explained below. However, this neat system is obscured by the tendency to drop or merge many of the prefixes in writing and possibly in pronunciation as well.

Krejci, Jaroslav (1990). Before the European Challenge: The Great Civilizations of Asia and the Middle East. SUNY Press. p.34. ISBN 978-0-7914-0168-2. Ebeling, J., & Cunningham, G. (2007). Analysing literary Sumerian: corpus-based approaches. London: Equinox. ISBN 1-84553-229-5 Once you have made headway with Sumerian fundamentals, there are some more detailed grammars that will become indispensable. Konstantopoulos recommends the following linguistics-focused resources for such students: P. Michalowski’s chapter “Sumerian” in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages [Cambridge; Ref 4 P371 .C36 2004], edited by R. Woodward; M.-L. Thomsen’s The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure [Akademisk Forlag; Ref 4 PJ4021 .T46 1984]; and B. Jagersma’s 2010 dissertation, A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian [PhD Diss., 2010; available online]. Another grammar that students may find useful as their Sumerian skills mature is D. O. Edzard’s Sumerian Grammar [Society of Biblical Literature; Ref 4 PJ4013 .E38 2006]. For morphology specifically, Konstantopoulos brings our attention to G. Rubio’s chapter “Sumerian Morphology,” in the collection Morphologies of Asia and Africa, Vol. 2 [NYU P381.A75 M67 2007; ebook available], edited by A. S. Kaye.GAZ means "to kill". If we reconstruct Si-lu in the lacuna and read ku as a syllable, we have "He killed Seleucus". Alternatively, we can reconstruct "ina TUKUL GAZ": "He killed with a weapon". This makes Babylonian cuneiform an entertaining puzzle. It must be noted that this is not without parallel in our own writing system; think of the song by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, Nothing compares 2 u. (Just imagine Hamlet saying 2B or not 2B.) Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, both appearing in 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel, published a grammar with the same title, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik, in 1923, and for 50 years it would be the standard for students studying Sumerian. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure, by Marie-Louise Thomsen. While much of Thomsen's understanding of Sumerian grammar would later be rejected by most or all Sumerologists, Thomsen's grammar (often with express mention of the critiques put forward by Pascal Attinger in his 1993 Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du 11/e/di 'dire ') is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar. Edzard, Dietz Otto, "Wann ist Sumerisch als gesprochene Sprache ausgestorben?", Acta Sumerologica 22, pp. 53–70, 2000 The morphemes /-n-/ and /-b-/ are clearly the prefixes for the 3rd person singular animate and inanimate respectively; the 2nd person singular appears as -e- in most contexts, but as /-r-/ before the dative (-ra-), leading some [77] to assume a phonetic /-ir-/ or /-jr-/. The 1st person may appear as -e-, too, but is more commonly not expressed at all (the same may frequently apply to 3rd and 2nd persons); it is, however, cued by the choice of mu- as conjugation prefix [76] (/mu-/ + /-a-/ → ma-). The 1st, 2nd and 3rd plural infixes are -me-, -re? - and -ne- in the dative [76] and perhaps in other contexts as well, [77] though not in the pre-stem position (see below).