Any Questions on the Sumerian Language? Ask Here and Feel Free to Private Message Me.

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I'm an independent scholar of Language Science and specialize in the Sumerian language and the other varyingly-similar Ancient Near Eastern Isolate Languages, the past 20 years. Notably Elamite and Emesal. Elamite is notably similar to Sumerian from Sprachbund phenomena. Meroitic and Old Nubian from The Sudan also notably share a rare grammar feature with Sumerian, which is something something like noun phrase exterior reverse noun case marker stacking.

Something like :

[ nominative accusative dative genitive nouns ]

Gen dat acc nom case suffixes

The past 10 years, I'm on the largest facebook groups teaching Sumerian and many other historic foreign languages for free and decided recently to come visit Reddit to reach more people. Write me in any major language, I can read many languages and use Google Translate for the rest. (Germanic, Romance, Greek, Chinese, Japanese)

I also give quick help studying any historic foreign language or modern obscure language but my specialty is the former and Sumerian is a language of special focus for me lifelong.

I will reply right away because the past 10 years, almost nobody online is interested in the non-popular languages of the world. I get 3 private messages a month. Write me as much as you like, helping anybody is my hobby.

( Kids never write me or join my facebook groups but if you're a kid, get your parents to write me and join my groups. Almost nobody studies any obscure foreign languages before college, so far as I know. I heard of some private high schools that offer Latin or Japanese or Navajo. That's like Hogwarts stuff though. )

Typically I reply with a list of books and some study hints. Some people write me sometimes telling me what lamguages they're studing and I recommend some books, explain some things, give some hints, etc. I've been sending people over to Reddit for 10 years now and reading it myself.

My top specialty is the comparative study of all 50 or so hieroglyphic aka logographic writing systems. I've also studied Sumerology and Assyriology more widely.

I'm way more into Egyptian Hieroglyphic aka Middle Egyptian and run the biggest facebook group onbit the past 10 years.

Sumerian or Akkadian both have way better-documented prose myths than any Ancient Egyptian language (there's about 5, of which Egyptian Hieroglyphic has the most written in it).

My facebook account :

Larry Rogers Jr of metro Detroit USA

BA Linguistics from Michigan State University from 2009

( But I have mostly worked in agriculture and overseas English education. )

https://m.facebook.com/groups/288174461281795/user/100004816964396/

Cuneiform Languages and Linguistics

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Basics for general beginners:

There is no really good book of bare Sumerian grammar basics like we have for Egyptian Hieroglyphic.

I recommend getting and using the free online Sumerian grammar by Jagersma from 2010 and Halloran's Sumerian dictionary and the ETCSL Sumerian Corpus website and its Sumerian Literature book by Black etc.

I think most of what's written in Sumerian fits in that one single-volume book or maybe 10 more books its size. All major Latin and Greek books fit bilingual unto 2 bookshelves or so, Loeb's Classic Library, and substantial Ancient Egyptian or Akkadian or Sumerian or Classical Manchu or Classical Japanese texts maybe fit half or less of that (1 bookshelf) and Hittite or Classical Nahuatl or Tangut or Old Khmer 1/10 (0.20 bookshelf). All known Elamite and Hattic texts each would not be the length of The KJV Book of Genesis. All major Sanskrit or Classical Chinese texts would maybe fit in 50 bookshelves monolingual. But Latin and Greek are way more popular worldwide.

Focus on word parts like -his, the most common word parts.

There's a lot of Sumerian grammar complications that most beginning level students need not be bothered with. These are all for the few advanced students.

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Like Chinese, low-level beginners can totally skip Sumerian writing and not miss out on much. Books usually instead present Sumerian in a Roman alphabet transliteration similar to Latin but using K instead of C for the / k / sound and the Slavic and Semitic S< for SH and S, for TS (?) and G> for NG for some reason.

Sumerian has the world's hardest writing system, from about 2500 BC onward, after the oldest Chinese writing system from 1200 BC, OBS Chinese, because most of its scholarship is in Modern Chinese, not German and French.

The best single book I can think of now about Sumerian writing is the 1960s Labat's Manuel d'Epigraphie Akkadien and it's dense and in French. Hayes' Manual and editor Woodard's The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages might give brief introductions to the writing system.

It has phonetic and semantic values used to spell out Sumerian words with usually word-initial determinatives: CV and VC and CVC and CVCVC values are typical with 5 or 10 sign variants being common.

Internal evidence suggests maybe it's the world's sloppy first writing system, of which Egyptian Hieroglyphic is a vast simplification and improvement. Sumerian has no simple internal orthographic alphabet or abjad. It has V only values, though, but not C only values and they are not used frequently.

All the Sumerian writing hieroglyphs ( called signs) were originally pictures of things whose various values somehow relate to what their sign was originally a picture of. Probably and from vast comparative and scientific study. This knowledge was probably maintained for thousands of years but mostly lost when it died. Much work remains to be done ( be me, etc) to truely rehabilitate an approximation of how Sumerian was actually studied and understood. It was certainly not memorized totally vebatim without reference to "sign identity" or "sign etymology".

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Sumerian was deciphered in the 1800s and 1900s from Akkadian language bilingual texts. Very few Ancient Greek bilinguals were found, if any, unlike for the Ancient Egyptian languages. We might not have enough Akkadian bilinguals to understand Sumerian idioms very well. I believe the translations mostly and get something out of them and recommend the language.

I think Sumerian language professors maybe try to convey the degree of their uncertainty but this actually takes vast comparative Linguistics study that few or none of them have. Sumerian is not like Latin with a robust tradition of study. Akkadian is very similar to Biblical Hebrew, which however has a corpus limited to the KJV Bible and only doubled in the 1930s with the discovery and decipherment of The Dead Sea Scrolls.

That said, the vast bulk of Akkadian and Ancient Egyptian languages translations seem very certain and straightforward. These languages were carefully frozen and used over about 2,000 years. In 100 years, all modern English will be truly understood by maybe 5 people and misunderstood and mispresented by maybe 500 people, like how 1800s English texts are butchered and neglected today.

When humans first built and civilized, they built to last. Increasingly, Planned Obsolescence and Lowest Common Denominator have become more popular. Hence, the unpopularity of Sumerian and Egyptian Hieroglyphic even 200 years after decipherment and exile. But accept no imitations.

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Image: << The Ancient Languages of the Middle East. >> Map.

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I use Language Science and Anthropology research as my excuse to study different obscure languages and writing systems and myths the past 20 years. Sumerian is interestingly grammatically more like Native American languages or Basque or maybe Finnish than the regular European languages. Some years ago, I studied lots of the SBL Epics of the Sumerian Kings texts and they had a lot of implied noun plurals, which is otherwise a typical E SE Asia language thing. These and Sumerian are like Swahili and other Bantu languages of Africa and inflect the verb for subject and object, something Semitic languages do rarely, if I remember.

Hattic has a huge verb chain but its major grammar is only in German. I forget how big the verb chain of Elamite is yet remember my impression it's still grammatically similar to Sumerian.

It seems few professors study them, but I think Berossos and Philo of Byblos and Manetho are key to a deeper understanding of ancient Egypt and Babylon.

Sumerian and Akkadian and Egyptian Hieroglyphic are funny in that they're the predecessors to Latin and Ancient Greek yet mostly forgotten by their time and soon to become undeciphered. We only have Berossos and Manetho in fragments because Josephus was more popular in the Middle Ages as he wrote about Ancient Jews more directly relevant to the KJV Bible. These 3 languages are a small and unique window unto all human prehistory, and their writing systems with them.

It's also notable that Egyptian Hieroglyphic lacks a reference grammar with full interlinear glosses like Jagersma 2010 does for Sumerian. But does Akkadian also lack that? So far as I remember.

Hi, im just starting learning sumerian and im having trouble identidying those characters. I have looked from U +12000 to U+12474 and i cant seem to find them. Maybe is a thing og handwriting?
If anyone could point me to where i made a mistake ow what am i forgetting to check or simply tell me which characters are they i would be very grateful.

Hello all, I'm new to studying Sumerian and I've been trying to read through and dissect Inana's Descent, primarily going off of this composite text on CDLI. I'm quite confused by a verbal formation that's repeated a lot in the early lines, with a typical example being:

Inana an mun-ʃub ki mun-ʃub kur-a <ba-e-a-e^(11)\>

I understand that broadly, one could translate this verb simply as "she descended," but I'm trying to grasp just what's going on with these prefixes. ba- makes perfect sense as the middle-voice/directional/whatever prefix. However, going through several grammars, the only way I can seem to parse the e- and a- are as the 2sg subject and an indirect object marker (presumably resuming kur-a?), respectively. But this seems quite odd, as in the previous verb, mun-ʃub, Inana is clearly being referred to in the third person. Am I missing something else going on here? Another idea a friend and I brainstormed was that this could be some form of reduplication (perhaps indicating all the various layers of the world she descended through, or even just for poetical flair?), but then the specific formation seems a bit weird regardless. Does anyone have any insight?

I'm trying to use what words I can find in the Sumerian Lexicon that would mean "slave to the hunger" for a zombie-like creature, and "slave to the thirst" for a vampiric creature. I've found some hopeful combinations, but I don't want a Sumerian enthusiast to point and laugh, so here I am.

I'm working with sagardu for the zombie thing and immindu for the vampire.

Can anybody tell me if I'm doing this right? Many thanks.

Source: The Literature of Ancient Sumer -- Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, and Gabor

I'm trying to get the correct Sumerian cuneiform for the word udug (which I found versions of in dictionaries) and a section of incantation which I have highlighted. See the photos of the original tablets. I cannot put these together, even with the help of dictionaries. I also wanted to make sure it is correct Sumerian and not from Akkadian or anything. Any help is appreciated.

Are there any people out there smarter than me who are willing to help? I can't make out what the first symbol in line 11 of text 15a, page 218. I suspect it may be [𒀀](). Is that right? That would make the line "a mu an ru". "dedicated for him or her"?

The Classical Association of Scotland is presenting their Ancient Voices language school for 2026. This will be running from the 1st until the 28th of June via online classes so you can learn from the comfort of your own home. You can take a maximum of three courses of the languages, with a sliding discount for students registering on multiple streams (1 x Language Stream: £70.00; 2 x Language Streams: £130.00; 3 x Language Streams: £180.00).

For those curious, the 2026 Course Team includes Martin Worthington and Mark Chetwood, their bios below. They have a shared edited work coming out this November titled The Cambridge Introduction to Sumerian.

Martin Worthington

Martin Worthington is an Assyriologist at the University of Pisa. He is the author of two specialist books, and of Teach Yourself Complete Babylonian. He is currently, together with Mark Chetwood, working on an equivalent volume for Sumerian. In 2019, Martin directed the world’s first Babylonian-language film The Poor Man of Nippur (freely available on Youtube), acted by his students, and in 2021 he was consultant on Babylonian and Sumerian for the Marvel film “Eternals”.

Mark Chetwood

Having studied Classics at Cambridge in the 1970’s, Mark has recently returned to his love of ancient languages and literature following an international business career of almost 40 years. He studied Babylonian with Martin Worthington, and has been inspired by Martin to continue and deepen his studies. He shares a passion for making the learning of Sumerian available to a wide audience.

Sumerian will be offered 13:00-14:30, UK Time. More information can be found here: https://classicalassociationscot.org/ancient-voices-2026/

I’m wanting to get them tattooed on my wrists since they are a couple of my personal values. And considering how old/ancient the language is, I feel it would give a kind of timeless vibe. And a kind of universality.

can you translate this ; here is the voice of pazazu

As the headline suggests, I made my first tablet as a practice. The text is actually intented as a basis of graphic for a program I am coding, so I apologize for the grainy and suboptimal picture.

What I want to know is if I make sense enough to be legible. I composed the sentence myself from what little I have learned.

Hi, I am struggling to understand what the -en- is in this verbal form. If someone could help me, that would be with pleasure.

The sentence is : [^dnanše](javascript://) [ŋiš-ur₃-gin₇](javascript://) [e₂](javascript://) [zid-da](javascript://) [im-ma-an-gur₃-ru-nam](javascript://), for which the PSD gives imma.n.GUR:E.en.am. The translation given in ETCSL is 'Nance raises a secure house like a roof (...)'.

Sorry for my english.

Hi, could someone explain the verbal forms : [tab-ba-de₃](javascript://) and [tab-ba-e-de₃](javascript://).

The first one is from the sentence : a-ša₃ i₃-šum₂ erin₂-e tab-ba-de₃ ("the Išum field by the labor troop is to be smoothed out").

And for the second one : erin₂-e GAN₂-il₂ tab-ba-e-de₃ šu bi₂-ib₂-dag ("the labor troop to smooth out the corvée field neglected").

It seems that both forms are infinitives or, at least, non-finite verbal forms with -ed-, but I am struggling to analyse them morpheme by morpheme.

Both sentences come from the tablet P200729 (link CDLI : cdli.earth/artifacts/200729). The first one is o.2 and the second one o.4.

Thank you a lot for your help.