A language probably centered around and thus named after the land of
Sumer; origins are uncertain, but the first Sumerian
texts most likely date from about the end of the 4th millennium. Without any
related languages, the
ethnic group of its speakers is still unknown, and is commonly referred to as the
Sumerian Problem.
By about the year 2000, Sumerian had probably already become a dead language, but was used continually thereafter in Babylon and Assyria as a literary and official language; there seems to be evidence that scribal education was conducted in Sumerian (quite naturally, considering the cuneiform script was only adapted for the Akkadian language). Comparisons are often made with the development of Medieval Latin.
Features of Sumerian include:
- It is an agglutinative language; that is, verbal roots are immutable, and inflection occurs through the addition of suffixes and prefixes. Thus, sentences are divided into verbal clusters: e-dumu-lugal-la-ka, the house of the son of the king, all connected.
- It is a split-ergative language. This means that the subject of a transitive verb is inflected, whereas the absolute case (without an ending, or a 0-ending) serves as the verbal object or the subject of an nominal or intransitive sentence. Thus, lugal-e e mu-n-du, The king built a house, where the king, lugal, takes the ending.
- It is an aspectual language. There is no true verbal tense (past or present), though translating it like that is often more convenient for English. Rather, it concentrates on duration; the perfective aspect refers to a single, momentary action: 'I slaughtered the Canaanites'. The imperfective refers to continued action: 'I kept on slaughtering the Canaanites' or 'I am slaughtering the Canaanites'.
- There is no distinction for gender (though there may be a lexical difference, i.e., two different words for a male or female sheep), but rather between animate and inanimate.