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THE PHONETICELEMENTSOF SUMERIANAND SOUND-CHANGES 37
only four vowel signs. Of these a stood for a, a, 6, o,. i for l, l, Ü. lt
seems that the scribes had no special means of writing 6 until they
ingeniously hit upon using e to umlaut vowels.
§ 38. l'he consonants, so far as we are now able to determine their Consonants.
qualities and places of articulation, are the following :
1. Velar's: the back explosive surd ls- (q) and the front explosive
surd k; the corresponding sonant explosive g must have been ar­
ticulated well towards the palate in most cases. l'he language
certainly possessed a spirant sonant velar g" which when
reduced becomes g, cL ~Tlag also with value lag, ~B gil' > gire,
~~ gas = maoJl,~u and ==~ gaz = maOJJJ}u. l'he velar voiceless or
surd spirant !J appears to have been the actual Sumerian value in sev­
eral of the signs containing g as ig, gi, ga, ag etc. l'he reduced value
of this sound would be k, for which cL H< ga, lJa with value ku. In
fact the same set of signs served for the syllables containing g and lJ.
2. Palaials : the semivowel i written with the vowel-sign l (==E:)
occurs only before a and chiefly in the combination iá Vl, ia :-n ' id
:n ~f,and ==~Hia. l'he sound occurs in the complete palatalisation
of l, cf. malla> maiia, wri tten mal-ia, el'. 11, 14, 15, also in ge-ni-ib-il­
ia-dúg, pronounced genibijiadúg, RADAU,Miscel., no. 4, 53. l'his semi­
vowel developed between the vowels a-a = ajia, consequently we find
m(¿-ma-a-a = mamajia [POEEEL, no. 18, 13J, whence the combination
H H took on the values ia, ai, and the Semites wrote it interchangeably
with ~~Hto express their own diphthong ia. Perhaps also palatal
nasal i1. See below. In the case of the g which becomes d, it is pro­
bable that we have to do with the sound (j, a palatal spirant.
3. Denials : the voiced and voiceless explosives d and i,o a spirant
1. Arabic t' rare in Indo-Germanic languages, v. SIEVERS, 344.
2. Rm. 2588, 1. 44 and cf. MEISSNER,SAL 2864.
3. The first to make a clear statement on this point was RANKE, Personal
Names, p. 12; a more detailednote by POEBEL,p. 3, and later by RADAU,1. C.