Read Online Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Nicholas Ostler
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ends our exhaustingly rapid review of language leapfrog in West Asia, a linguistic zone which ultimately expanded to take in most of North Africa. We can now slow down a little, and look more closely at some of the individual languages: many were unique pioneers in the known language history of the world.
Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death
Father Enki answers Ninshubur:
’What has happened to my daughter! I am troubled,
What has happened to Inanna! I am troubled,
What has happened to the queen of all the lands! I am troubled,
What has happened to the hierodule of heaven! I am troubled.’
From his fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the
kurgarru
,
From his other fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the
kalaturru.
To the
kurgarru
he gave the food of life.
To the
kalaturru
he gave the water of life.
Father Enki says to the
kalaturru
and
kurgarru:
…
’Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, sprinkle upon it,
Surely Inanna will arise.’ 8
Sumerian knows better than any the tantalising evanescence of life and fame for a language. All knowledge of this language had been lost for almost two thousand years when the royal library of the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest documents were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the Assyrians of the seventh century BC had approached it armed with a student’s panoply of bilingual dictionaries, grammars and parallel texts. Nothing in the Greek or biblical record of Mesopotamia had prepared the new researchers to expect such an alien foundation for this civilisation; the majority of the documents after all were written in a language reassuringly similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. Whatever had survived down the ages of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the linguistic basis of their achievements had been totally effaced.
Sumerian, the original speech of
Šumer
, as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those documents from Sennacherib’s library were written. But it turned out that the only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.
This was not too big a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent. Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever was closest.
So Sumerian survived its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical language, its great literary works canonised and quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression of Akkadian, and indeed any subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing, as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman
Sumerian—the first classical language: Life after death
Father Enki answers Ninshubur:
’What has happened to my daughter! I am troubled,
What has happened to Inanna! I am troubled,
What has happened to the queen of all the lands! I am troubled,
What has happened to the hierodule of heaven! I am troubled.’
From his fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the
kurgarru
,
From his other fingernail he brought forth dirt, fashioned the
kalaturru.
To the
kurgarru
he gave the food of life.
To the
kalaturru
he gave the water of life.
Father Enki says to the
kalaturru
and
kurgarru:
…
’Sixty times the food of life, sixty times the water of life, sprinkle upon it,
Surely Inanna will arise.’ 8
Sumerian knows better than any the tantalising evanescence of life and fame for a language. All knowledge of this language had been lost for almost two thousand years when the royal library of the ancient Assyrian capital, Nineveh, was excavated in 1845, and it turned out that the earliest documents were written in a language older than Akkadian, and so different from it that the Assyrians of the seventh century BC had approached it armed with a student’s panoply of bilingual dictionaries, grammars and parallel texts. Nothing in the Greek or biblical record of Mesopotamia had prepared the new researchers to expect such an alien foundation for this civilisation; the majority of the documents after all were written in a language reassuringly similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. Whatever had survived down the ages of the greatness of Nineveh and Babylon, the linguistic basis of their achievements had been totally effaced.
Sumerian, the original speech of
Šumer
, as they called the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those documents from Sennacherib’s library were written. But it turned out that the only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.
This was not too big a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent. Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever was closest.
So Sumerian survived its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical language, its great literary works canonised and quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression of Akkadian, and indeed any subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing, as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman
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