Sumerian/Akkadian decipherment

[sumerianistamil]

Hi,
I am new to this forum. I have been reading Sumerian texts from etcsl website, and finding a lot of sentences make sense with a Tamil language context, though not successful enough to completely say, that Sumerian text is early Tamil or predecessor to Tamil or so, since an intermediatory
Tamil Text is not available.

I don't want to make that as an argument. But here, I want to see how the language is deciphered. How Akkadian was understood first? Was that simple guess work, or continuity that existed so we are able to clearly pinpoint the phonetics and their meanings.

As far as I know, there is no history of phonetic system of the middle eastern languages, and there is no direct transition from cueniform to middle eastern languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and so on.

If so how this works, can any one clarify?

[us4-he2-gal2]

Hello SumerianisTamil:




First, about your suggestion that Sumerian is related to Tamil, I wanted to say that this suggestion is put forward by various groups who have a presence on the internet. Of course one can google Sumerian and Tamil and see that alot of work has been done on this theory.. so perhaps you are one of these persons or have been inspired by one of these persons. For purposes of clarification, I can say that the field of Sumerology does not accept this view at the current time. This is not to say that the Tamil-Sumerian people cannot make their case, of course they can, however it has not yet won acceptance in Western academia. Most scholars still maintain that Sumerian is a "language isolate" and are do not accept other suggestions. Recently there has been a scholar within the field of Sumerology who has tried to make the case that Sumerian was an early Uralic language related to Finnish (Prof. Simo Parpola). His ideas have not yet won acceptance either.


As for the history of the decipherment of Akkadian (which includes Assyran and Babylonian dialects) the important thing to note is that there was a "rosetta stone" for Mesopotamia to, an inscription at the site of Behistun found to be written in 3 languages: Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. Once one language was read, it provided the key to starting scholars on the decipherment of Babylonian itself. The information provided here is basically accurate:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription


Because the cuneiform languages were part of an ancient scribal tradition and many tablets were discovered that came from ancient "schools" where young scribes learned to read and write, it was possible for modern scholars to learn Akkadian from the tablets of the ancient schools, following decipherment. This, and the similarities of Akkadian to other known Semitic languages (i.e. Biblical Hebrew or Arabic etc.), mean that the reading of Akkadian is a fairly strong and fairly certain science, although some uncertainties do remain.

Sumerian is another story, a related story, but yes different altogether. Because the language is considered a language isolate there is no real benefit from comparative language studies. However, the Semitic scribes continued to value Sumerian language long after it had ceased to be spoken (sometime around 2000 BC) so again there were many bilingual Akkadian / Sumerian tablets and also many tablets used by the ancients to preserve or teach the Sumerian language which enabled modern scholars to decipher Sumerian. It remains imperfectly understood compared to Akkadian.

[sumerianistamil]

Hi Administrator,
I have been doing this freelance research of connecting Sumerian with Tamil with the texts available online especially the etcsl library, with my limited
available time and money, and have found that many genetic components of Tamil language are from Sumerian, though I am not able to directly connect
Sumerian with Tamil, but I can make each grammatic sentence of Tamil associated with Sumerian, ie reverse engineering. The reason not able to
connect directly could be due to errors in decipherments etc, or Sumerian was a language family associated with a parental language of Tamil, etc.

I know there are other claims, like Turkish, Polish and eastern linguistics scholars claims of their language is so close to Sumerian. Such claims
are there everywhere, even some claim that Korean and Japanese are related to Tamil and so on, by just comparing word by word, rather than seeing
grammar by grammar.

Since, I am doing my research only through online, I am not able to get research works that led to decipherment, which are only available in the labs.
Especially how the behistun inscription decipherment that has led to extract words such as an, nin, en, da , ra, ur, lu, gal etc, which are basic components
of Tamil. The opposite pronouns of Tamil, eg. en and nin ( I and you), exactly appearing in Sumerian as opposites, such as in phrashes en me uru ene, nin me uru ene, though the interpretations of scholars are different, but still it is formin exact Tamil grammatic sentence. So, I want to know the
grass roots of decipherment and see if I can fix the errors of decipherment, so we are able to get Sumerian - Tamil connection appropriately.

I know there are linguistics blabberism, we need to address this carefully, if we publish any loose materials, the illusionists start
their fictions on it.

Any help appreciated.
Thanks