Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

103. saœ.ki.ni œiß.gi bi 2.gu 7.a lu 2
145
No one dare approach his brow, which
nu.mu.da.te.œe 26.e.dam devours the reed-beds,
(var. nu.mu.un.da.kar.re.de 3) 22
104. lugal.œu 10 za.e kur.ße 3 u 5.a œa 2.e Travel on, my master, up into the
iri ki .ße 3 ga.u 5
mountains!—but I shall travel back to
the city,
The fact that œiß.gi “reed-bed” is in the absolutive case has led previous translators to
interpret it as the patient of the verb √gu 7 “to eat.” Why, however, the brow of a forest
guardian would be expected to devour reed-beds and why such an image would strike
fear into the heart of a listener (as it was clearly intended to do) is beyond me: I would
rather propose that the particular syntactic configuration of a bare noun followed by the
*bi-√ prefix, where no pronominal agreement morpheme such as *-n- or *-b- occurs
before the verbal root, be seen as an indefinite relative construction. In this case, the
construction is particularly clear in that the head of the indefinite relative is set apart from
the topic of the line through the use of the possessive pronoun topic-marking construction
and the indefinite relative offers an elaboration as to “why no man dares to approach it.”
At the discursive level, this particular configuration of topic-marked phase followed by a
parenthetical comment in apposition to the topical noun, forms a tripartite rhetorical
structure as in (50) that will reappear in a slightly altered guise in chapter 4.
22 The variant probably arises from the fact that te.œe26, the marû form of the root √te(œ), is written TE.ŒA 2 and if it
was misunderstood as a nominalized verbal root such as te.œa 2, it might, at some point in its transmission, have been
written te.a. TE.A could have then been misunderstood as a diri writing for the verbal root √kar followed, as in the
original, by the *-ed suffix, yielding kar.re.de 3. Since version B, in example (56) below, has a non-finite verbal form,
te.œe 26.dam, the misinterpretation could easily have arisen on the basis of the several possible interpretations of TE
ŒA 2 DAM.