Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

view. Although it is one of the central presuppositions of the Woods’ hypothesis about
Sumerian deixis, I find it untenable that Old Babylonian scribes would have glossed both
*-e and *-ne with annûm, the Akkadian proximal demonstrative, if they were perceived
as part of the same deictic series. 25 Given the fact that there appear to be at least two
deictic series, the simplest hypothesis would be that *-e and *-ne each head a distinct
series; since it is fairly clear that *-e is the proximal member of set B, I would argue that
*-ne heads set A. If we further assume that *-be is a distal member of set A, the resulting
table of deictics would be something like the following.
Set A Set B Deictic value
*-ne *-e PROXIMAL
*-be *-ße DISTAL.VISIBLE
(*-re) *-re DISTAL.NON-VISIBLE
Woods (2001, 95-130) has shown that the VISIBLE/NON-VISIBLE opposition is valid
in at least some cases, and, furthermore, that in the literary tradition *-re in conjunction
with temporal nouns was typically used to refer to the mythic, a-historical time period
typically associated with cosmogony and mythology. Woods has also shown that the
visibility-driven system of set B can be mapped into person-driven system as represented
in set A (Woods 2001, 146, 158, 168). I would argue, further, that the primary difference
between set A and set B is that set A seems to be more closely associated with
25 Even if *-e specifically referred to speech act participants to the exclusion of non-participants, as suggested by
Woods, the absorptive character of deictics (Agha 1996, 647-648) would nearly ensure that, on at least some occasions,
*-ne, which is “less proximal” in Woods’ reconstruction would have been equated with ullûm, the distal member of the
Akkadian deictic series. In other words, a reconstruction in which *-e is proximal to speaker, *-ne is proximal to
addressee, and *-be is distal from both is not unreasonable, but we might expect to find *-ne occasionally equated to
ullûm if that were the case.
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