Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

Note that two lexemes, saœ-√il 2 “to lift the head” and saœ-√se 3 “to entrust; to take care of”
are not included although the bare nominal, saœ, “head,” is generally thought of as part of
the body. This is due to the fact that saœ “head” presumably stands in opposition to saœ.ki
“forehead” in that saœ is probably relational like an “sky; above” or ki “earth, below,”
whereas saœ.ki is limited in meaning to a part of the body. There also seem to be some
telling grammatical differences such the fact that compound verbs headed by saœ occurs
in the *nam.mi-√ construction, whereas the other alienable nouns occur in the *nam bi-√
construction, an opposition that seems to depend on the inalienability of the head noun; I
explore it detail in chapter 4. Note that in the most famous case of disembodied head in
Sumerian literature, namely when Gilgamesh and Enkidu dump Huwawa’s head out in
front of Enlil (Gilgamesh and Huwawa, version A, line 183), the possessive pronoun
refers to the original owner, but the form is saœ.du.ni rather than saœ.œa.ni. This leads me
to suspect that saœ itself does not directly refer to the head.
kas 4-√kar “to sprint” is also excluded even though Karahashi included it in her study of
compound verbs that involve a part of the body. Karahashi herself notes that “kas 4
normally means ‘runner, courier’ but may have originally designated a part of the leg/foot
which became obsolete during later times…” (Karahashi 2000, 129).
The reason that few if any of these lexemes occur in texts earlier than the Old
Babylonian period is, in my view, that the kinds of generic contexts in which verbs of
perception, adversity and possession that constitute the vast majority of the members of
the class simply did not exist in the written medium. In other words, the genres in which
the particular semantics that I argue are associated with this distributional class are not
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