Studies in Sumerian Semantics and Vocabulary
Sept 22, 2014 22:45:24 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Sept 22, 2014 22:45:24 GMT -5
Thread Orientation: The below thread is intended to facilitate the exploration of key Sumerian words and phrases using primary and secondary sources.
Framing the Task At Hand/
It is to the great Lexicographers of the Mesopotamian languages that we owe the current state of understanding the Sumerian word. According to Jeremy Black (Writing in Analysing Literary Sumerian... 2007, pg.5): "In the case of Sumerian, grammatical and lexicograpical work has tended also to reflect a broader tradition including Akkadian, for reasons of academic history. The inchoate Pennsylvania Dictionary of Sumerian volumes A and B were influenced by the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, itself modeled in some ways on the Oxford English Dictionary."
Can we rely on ePSD for the final answer?/
According to Prof. M.J. Geller, the answer is not entirely (extract from Geller's review of Halloran 2006, in BASOR 71/3 561-565):
"The modern student, of course, turns to the internet, where he/she easily finds two major sources of help. One is the "electronic PSD" (http://psd. museum.upenn.edu/epsd/), which is a sophisticated glossary of Sumerian with many useful features, such as showing sign forms behind individual Sumerian lexemes. There is substantial value to having an electronic glossary of all words from A-Z, in exchange for a dictionary requiring nearly a century to complete. The glossary is easily and widely accessible, and all this has been accomplished within a few years. As for attestations, the student can turn to the Oxford Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/), in which a great many Sumerian literary texts have been transliterated and translated, with the ability to search the site electronically. So what is the problem? A glossary is not a lexicon. The electronic PSD offers a dazzling array of information about Sumerian, but definitions are usually confined to a single word related to an individual phrase, taken out of context. This is hardly lexicography. What is required is the rather old-fashioned idea of someone collecting all of the contexts in which a word appears, carefully considering its semantic range of meaning, and then drafting a definition based on these contexts. For this kind of painstaking work, moreover, one ideally requires correct readings of the basic source material, and this too presents problems. The Oxford Electronic Corpus is useful in many ways, but the texts are mostly composites without giving manuscript variants, and many manuscripts remain unpublished."
The Use of Halloran's 2006 Sumerian Lexicon/
While Geller critiques the book as it does not reference the source for the meaning of a given Sumerian word (is it the sense which occurs in literary texts, in incantation texts, in administrative texts? etc.) Geller nonetheless remarks: "Halloran has managed to collect an impressive range of Sumerian words, and the brief definitions make sense for most of the texts one reads with students. This Lexicon turns out to be a good starting point when searching for a basic meaning that might work."
What is required for further understanding/
As indicated above in the highlighted segment of Geller's comments, what is needed is the "old fashioned" idea of someone sifting through every instance of a given Sumerian word in order to discern the full range of its semantic meaning. However I will certainly admit that I am no trained Sumerian lexicographer and I am largely unaware of the methodologies involved in this activity. Therefore what I propose to do below is to review several examples of case studies in Sumerian lexicography in an effort to observe how they do it, and of course, to learn more about Sumerian words.
Framing the Task At Hand/
It is to the great Lexicographers of the Mesopotamian languages that we owe the current state of understanding the Sumerian word. According to Jeremy Black (Writing in Analysing Literary Sumerian... 2007, pg.5): "In the case of Sumerian, grammatical and lexicograpical work has tended also to reflect a broader tradition including Akkadian, for reasons of academic history. The inchoate Pennsylvania Dictionary of Sumerian volumes A and B were influenced by the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, itself modeled in some ways on the Oxford English Dictionary."
Can we rely on ePSD for the final answer?/
According to Prof. M.J. Geller, the answer is not entirely (extract from Geller's review of Halloran 2006, in BASOR 71/3 561-565):
"The modern student, of course, turns to the internet, where he/she easily finds two major sources of help. One is the "electronic PSD" (http://psd. museum.upenn.edu/epsd/), which is a sophisticated glossary of Sumerian with many useful features, such as showing sign forms behind individual Sumerian lexemes. There is substantial value to having an electronic glossary of all words from A-Z, in exchange for a dictionary requiring nearly a century to complete. The glossary is easily and widely accessible, and all this has been accomplished within a few years. As for attestations, the student can turn to the Oxford Electronic Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/), in which a great many Sumerian literary texts have been transliterated and translated, with the ability to search the site electronically. So what is the problem? A glossary is not a lexicon. The electronic PSD offers a dazzling array of information about Sumerian, but definitions are usually confined to a single word related to an individual phrase, taken out of context. This is hardly lexicography. What is required is the rather old-fashioned idea of someone collecting all of the contexts in which a word appears, carefully considering its semantic range of meaning, and then drafting a definition based on these contexts. For this kind of painstaking work, moreover, one ideally requires correct readings of the basic source material, and this too presents problems. The Oxford Electronic Corpus is useful in many ways, but the texts are mostly composites without giving manuscript variants, and many manuscripts remain unpublished."
The Use of Halloran's 2006 Sumerian Lexicon/
While Geller critiques the book as it does not reference the source for the meaning of a given Sumerian word (is it the sense which occurs in literary texts, in incantation texts, in administrative texts? etc.) Geller nonetheless remarks: "Halloran has managed to collect an impressive range of Sumerian words, and the brief definitions make sense for most of the texts one reads with students. This Lexicon turns out to be a good starting point when searching for a basic meaning that might work."
What is required for further understanding/
As indicated above in the highlighted segment of Geller's comments, what is needed is the "old fashioned" idea of someone sifting through every instance of a given Sumerian word in order to discern the full range of its semantic meaning. However I will certainly admit that I am no trained Sumerian lexicographer and I am largely unaware of the methodologies involved in this activity. Therefore what I propose to do below is to review several examples of case studies in Sumerian lexicography in an effort to observe how they do it, and of course, to learn more about Sumerian words.
