SumerianGrammar

4 CHAPTER ONE
It cannot be excluded that, within Mesopotamia proper, Sumerian
had neighbours who spoke a language—or languages—that were,
step by step, superseded by Sumerian, but which left their traces in
Sumerian proper names (gods, places) and vocabulary. Thus, e.g.,
divine names such as Nan“e or ΩGatumdu, goddesses at home in the
ΩGirsu/Laga“ region, may belong to a substratum, or adstratum,
because these names defy all efforts to explain them by way of
Sumerian etymology. Our judgement in this matter is, however,
highly subjective because we know nothing of the early history of
Sumerian and its sound structure. In fact, our first tentative identification
of Sumerian “sound” hardly goes farther back than 24th
century B.C., and the publication of the Ebla glosses for Sumerian
lexical items brought more than one surprise.
For some time, a “monosyllabic myth” has been popular among
Sumerologists, relegating words of more than one syllable to a “Proto-
Euphratian” substratum.
Cf., e.g., B. Landsberger 1944, apud A. Salonen 1968, 31.
See, however, the very sobering discussion of G. Rubio 1999, 1–16,
“On the alleged ‘pre-Sumerian’ substratum” where the author arrives
at the conclusion (p. 11), “Thus, there is no monolithic substratum
that would have left, in a sort of primeval age, its vestiges in Sumerian
lexicon. All one can detect is a complex and fuzzy web of borrowings
whose directions are frequently difficult to determine”.
Nan“e and ªGatumdu (and others) may be pre-Sumerian names,
as may many place names. But we have no means at our disposal
to prove such a supposition. It is a well known fact that proper
names are specially prone to changes of all kind (slurring, abbreviation,
deformation by analogy, popular etymology).
Hurrians—with a language of their own—first appear in cuneiform
sources toward the end of the third millennium B.C. They most
probably never were immediate neighbours of the Sumerians, and
so direct language contact can be excluded, at least during the centuries
before the Third Dynasty of Ur.
In general, it may be said that the Mesopotamian plain was not
conducive to a great variety of languages, as against Iran, Anatolia
or the Caucasus which, until our days, has been a veritable language
museum.
As a consequence of early close contacts between Sumerians and
Semites, a situation arose which greatly stimulated mutual influences.
Sumerian was heading for a Sumero-Akkadian “linguistic area”—