Diggir?

[enkur]

Any linguistic insights as to the origin of the word diggir?

[us4-he2-gal2]

Okay and by that do you mean the word sometimes rendered diĝir or dingir - the divine determinative DINGIR? Some people may give it as diggir.

[enkur]

Yes, Bill, but being not able to transliterate it here as diĝir (having no idea how to use diacritic signs except by copying and pasting them as in the case), I wrote it as diggir. Yes, dingir. So are there any linguistic insights as to the origin of that word? Iknow it's written by the sign of AN and used as a determinative for deities but I suppose it should have some other origin.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Enkur - of course, I didn't that mean as a criticism, but just a clarification. I think I have seen it written diggir on the rare occasion, but had to ensure that we are talking about the same word. So this is a good question, I will have to think about it for a bit. Usually, people just thing deity and that's it.

[dingo]

Feb 16, 2014 20:07:59 GMT -5 enkur said:

Any linguistic insights as to the origin of the word diggir?

John Halloran in his Sumerian Lexicon suggests a derivation from DI-ĜAR which he regards as composed of DI = 'decision' + ĜAR = 'to deliver'.
But as other members will surely comment John's derivations are considered speculative and generally unprovable.

[us4-he2-gal2]

Dingo/Enkur etc.:




Yes this is the etymology as given by Halloran. Beyond this suggestion, I really don't think scholars have attempted to interpret the meaning of the word dinger outside of what the texts tell us it means: deity. Lexical lists supply the value of the logogram AN, one value of the sign can also be dinger (or dimer in emesal). Although nothing exists to spell out the real semantic range of the word dingir - no texts will state "this word originally had to do with such and such notion of the divine and came to be used in such in such a way' - it may help to look at the way the dingir sign was used in the earliest texts.


Such an examination was undertaken by G. Selz in an article entitled The Divine Prototypes (2008). The author notes that the DINGIR sign is attestable from the Uruk period on, and yet, it was not systematically applied to the names of the divine from earliest times through the ED period. Sometimes the sign is applied sometimes it isn't - what is the pattern? Scholars generally agree that the form of the sign is a pictorial representation of a star. It may be the the sign originally designated astral deities in particular, at which point we may suspect that the word dingir would have something to do with the celestial sphere. Inanna seems to regularly have had the DINGIR determinative even in the early periods while other gods such as Gibil did not. However, the picture is far from that simple, as Selz discussion indicates, and the author refrains from concluding that it was necessarily an astral thing.. in fact, at one point Selz even states that it is "doubtful [that] the celestial bodies are correctly considered as prototypes for the divine class." This seems to state that the celestial deities are not necessarily the prototypes for the divine in general - it does not necessarily speak against the idea of DINGIR referring specifically to the astral gods - at least in its earliest values. Here is Selz' discussion: