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Sumerian (Sumerian: ð’…´ð’‚ , romanized: eme-gir 15 [a], lit. ''native language'' [1]) was the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 2900 BC. It is a local language isolate that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia, in the area that is modern-day Iraq.
Igor Dyakonov and Vladislav Ardzinba proposed a different term, "banana languages", based on a characteristic feature of multiple personal names attested in Sumerian texts, namely reduplication of syllables (as in the English word banana): Inanna, Zababa, Chuwawa/Humbaba, Bunene, Pazuzu, etc found in Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian and Babylonian ...
The cuneiform lexical lists are a series of ancient Mesopotamian glossaries which preserve the semantics of Sumerograms, their phonetic value and their Akkadian or other language equivalents. [1] They are the oldest literary texts from Mesopotamia and one of the most widespread genres in the ancient Near East .
The word medina (root: d-y-n/d-w-n) has the meaning of "metropolis" in Amharic, "city" in Arabic and Ancient Hebrew, and "State" in Modern Hebrew. There is sometimes no relation between the roots. For example, "knowledge" is represented in Hebrew by the root y-d-Ê¿ , but in Arabic by the roots Ê¿-r-f and Ê¿-l-m and in Ethiosemitic by the roots ...
The Akkadians also called the Sumerians "black-headed people", or á¹£almat-qaqqadi, in the Semitic Akkadian language. [2] [3] The Akkadians, the East Semitic-speaking people who later conquered the Sumerian city-states, gave Sumer its main historical name, but the phonological development of the term šumerû is uncertain. [17]
Sumerian was the last and most ancient language to be deciphered. Sale of a number of fields, probably from Isin, c. 2600 BC. The first known Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual tablet dates from the reign of Rimush. Louvre Museum AO 5477. The top column is in Sumerian, the bottom column is its translation in Akkadian. [44] [45]
During this period, a large number of loan words were included in the language from Northwest Semitic languages and Hurrian. However, the use of these words was confined to the fringes of the Akkadian-speaking territory. From 1500 BC onwards, the Assyrian language is termed Middle Assyrian. It was the language of the Middle Assyrian Empire ...
This family of languages also has the distinction of being the first historically attested group of languages to use an alphabet, derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, to record their writings, as opposed to the far earlier Cuneiform logographic/syllabic writing of the region, which originated in Mesopotamia and was used to record Sumerian ...