Lets write The Etymology of Sumerian Cuneiform!

[damansky]

Hello, esteemed Enenuru!
Now, everybody knows how intellectually appealing it is to delve into the ideographic reasoning behind hieroglyphs, be it Chinese or Sumerian or other. Unfortunately, the Traditional Chinese is 90% composed around the phonetic clues of how to read the glyph, therefore diminishing greatly the intellectual appeal of deconstructing it's etymologies. Not so with Sumerian. Just as the language itself is agglutinative and the meaning of words is connected to the meaning of the phonemes, so too the cuneiform symbols' meaning is in fact a function of their components. So a simple A TIMES BAD means "to open-bad the waters-a", and with the same reasoning one can find real historical meaning and real logic in the process of creation of Sumerian cuneiform. I assure you, this sort of scientific analysis has a vast demand for it among the public.

Now I must mention that I do not come from an ANE academic background, have never studied Sumerian professionally, and even own not a single Sumerian dictionary. However, none of that is mandatory for actually deciphering the logic of specific cuneiform characters. I started 2 days ago, beginning with U+12000, intending to cover the entire Unicode range, and I am incredibly determined to bring this to conclusion, mostly because it's both great fun and very rewarding. A good sample of an explanation I would put forward for my etymology would be:
 is asag, meaning "Heir". Why is it Metal+Heaven? The correct reading is "The Nobility of Heaven", which phrase hints at the sacred nature of leaving a proper heir: remember, the Sumerian dynasties have existed since way of 5 thousand years. Therefore, to refer to a Heir, they refer to the consummate excellence of the Heaven's task of leaving a proper heir. Another example would be a more generic one, where a pond for flood drainage  I would render as "Waters that are fed by the rain". I believe my hypotheses on the organization of logograms to be adequate and consistent.

However, the place where I am blocked all the time is trying to reconstruct the original meaning of the proto-sumerian pictograph from the signlist that's hosted on Enenuru, along with it's CDLI counterpart. For example, to translate "sea"  I need to understand what  means, and to do that, I must basically find out what  means, and I find it almost impossible to do, even using the Sumerian Freq Dictionary.

Therefore I am wondering if anyone versed in Sumerian would like to co-author and consult me on the darker moments of sumerian writing. You could help me wrap the entire enterprise and participate in creating a dictionary that will be applauded and in demand everywhere and by everyone. We would be equal partners, and we could make this thing work and have an experience of our lifetimes!

Thanks,
Kevin Damansky

[damansky]

If anything, you can check the current copy of the work at dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23175917/ETY/SUMER.txt
but you must use the BabelStone text editor to see the cuneiform on your computer.

[damansky]

Well, it seems that a-ab-ta means "waters from the opening", referring to the myth about Abzu situated below the earth-ma and the underworld-kur.

[damansky]

Just to demonstrate that the process is advancing relentlessly and there is no reason to fear any disruption or fatal failure, here's the work up to the end of AB section.

At this point, the general mechanism of the origination of Sumerian structural units is quite evident.

It's never too late to join :3

[us4-he2-gal2]

Kevin:



Well I am pleased to see someone so interested in this topic! I think you may notice by my document "Sumerian Freq" and by our thread here Cuneiform Sign Logic that I am quite interested in the ideographic value of cuneiform signs (if the sign is read for its sound it is syllabographic, producing a syllable, if it is read ideographically, the idea it originally expressed is interpreted - pictogram is another word for basically the same thing). So to put things in perspective, I want to comment on two things:

i) This endeavor will never be of interest to the public. Now I don't say that for the sake of contradicting you, but for clarification, the public doesn't care about Mesopotamian anything, unless its fiction and made into a cool story. That said, it doesn't matter to anyone here, we are all eccentrics who do things for odd reasons.

ii) Well, I also must add that scholarship won't be interested in these endeavors but for very different reasons. First of all, Sumerologists mainly get their sign values and essential lexical information from ancient scribes, that is to say, Akkadian scribes - these Akkadians wrote long lists of Sumerian and Akkadian words side by side (the lexical lists), and made bilingual works. Because Akkadian is fairly well understood, scholars use Akkadian to understand Sumerian. They do not attempt really to figure out the ideograms in the way that you are, although that doesn't mean it is not academic to do so - because in some cases it is possible.


As you can tell from my Cuneiform Sign Logic thread, I am one of those persons who think such an effort is interesting and worth while. Many academics feel that on the whole, it is impossible to decode this material and any attempt would amount to guess work - I do feel certain signs have a logic or an idea that is undeniable, for example šud3 "prayer" is KA x ŠU (hand + mouth, this is the ancient gesture of prayer). However, we have to be sober about this at the same time and not presume all sign are intepretable - judgement should be used in determining which sign have a logic too obscure for interpretation.


So perhaps you could post some of your more likely associations on the Sign Logic thread, and we could discuss whether these interpretions seem right. Cuneiform could be posted as picture files since fonts dont work here. I think you would benefit immensely from using the ePSD psd.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html if you aren't already - this is the standard go to Sumerian dictionary for all working on this material, just search the Sumerian sign value of English translation. Its actually not very easy to use but there is no choice. There are several other academic materials which would help your efforts which should be used we can get to those as well.













enenuru.proboards.com/thread/498/cuneiform-sign-logic

[damansky]

Dear us4-he2-gal2,
yes I can see quite clearly how there must be in this enterprise, first of all, a very sensible and solemn procedure of evaluating and appraising the different etymologies. I would try to ensure there has been adequate discussion and evaluation of etymologies, so that a high degree of consensus and thus both convincingness and validity can be ensured reliably.
However, I have noticed that the basic details of the structure of the vocabulary support the claim for a level of objectivity. If there are two synonyms out there for a single linguistic unit, and what's more, both of them share a similar ideograph, then the distribution of frequency of using any of the latter similar ideograph's meanings is not at all random (they tend to consciously use employ all the possible meanings with equal frequency) and this deviation from a true random can be measured in sigmas and be used to support the claimed authenticity of our etymologies. Sumerians seemed to try to render a single linguistic unit in as many unique similar-sounding forms as possible, key word being "unique" because it can be measured and compared to normal distribution. If there's in 100 words of 2 synonyms a 100 pairs of the two different meanings, then that's very different if there'd be 50% of 1+2, 25% of 1+1 and 25% of 2+2. That's, I think, the way to undeniable credibility.
The consistency with which the same basic method of logogram construction is seen applied again and again and again is also a method to prove we are correct in our explanations; it can also be measured in sigmas and apply to statistics to ward off any skepticism and accusations of arbitrariness.
Personally I find that whatever meager results I have produced all look very convincing. Much more convincing that one can find in the Shuowen Jiezi, and that book is a world classic.

Now, regarding the particular signs, I could perhaps maybe make a PDF with all the cuneiform I've explored so far and include my etymologies, and discuss it on enenuru, but what I propose is that perhaps we start to use some medium where we could cooperate live on the entire array of the glyphs until the book is done? I'd say that is a bit more efficient than a forum thread.
I am using ePSD and the Sumerian Lexicon web version, I am wondering if there are any books or sources that cover the semantics of archaic cuneiform like the one one can see in the enenuru sign list. I mean, the sign list and the freq 100-1500 dictionary is, like, cutting edge. You are probably among a very few people who have any definite knowledge with this; maybe you would like to help this knowledge make itself into the text that this thread is about? Even if it'll never see the light as a paper book and remain an electronic resource - that is still a mighty achievement.
:3

[damansky]

okay, moved the discussion to the cuneiform logic thread