"" زبان شناسی‌ و انقلاب

Sumerian: A Uralic Language

Simo Parpola (Helsinki)

In the early days of Assyriology, Sumerian was commonly believed to belong to the Ural-Altaic language phylum. This view originated with three leading Assyriologists, Edward Hincks, Henry Rawlinson and Jules Oppert, and other big names in early Assyriology such as Friedrich Delitzsch supported it (Fig. 1). The Frenchman Fran�ois Lenormant, who wrote on the subject in 1873-78, found Sumerian most closely related to Finno-Ugric, while also containing features otherwise attested only in Turkish and other Altaic languages.

The wind turned in the early 1880s, however, as two prominent Finno-Ugrists, August Ahlqvist and Otto Donner, reviewed Lenormant's work and concluded that Sumerian was definitely not a Ural-Altaic language (Fig. 2). This was widely considered a death-blow to the Sumerian-Ural-Altaic hypothesis, and since then Assyriologists have generally rejected it. Typically, when a Hungarian scholar in 1971 tried to reopen the discussion in the journal Current Anthropology, a few linguists welcomed the idea but the reaction of the two Assyriologists consulted was scornfully negative.

Attempts to connect Sumerian with other languages have not been successful, however, and after 157 years, Sumerian still remains linguistically isolated. This being so, there is every reason to take another look at the old Ural-Altaic -hypothesis, for it has never been properly investigated. In the 19th century, Sumerian grammar and lexicon were as yet too imperfectly known to be successfully compared with any languages, while all more recent comparisons suffer from the lack of Assyriological or linguistic expertise and are hence for the most part worthless. This does not mean, however, that they are all garbage: at least 194 of them seem perfectly acceptable both phonologically and semantically (Fig.3). That is a number large enough to deserve serious attention. Of course, it does not prove that Sumerian was related to Ural-Altaic languages, but it does indicate that the possibility exists and should be carefully re-examined in order to be either substantiated or definitively rejected.

To this end, I started in November 2004 a project called "The Linguistic Relationship between Sumerian and Ural-Altaic," on which I have been working full time since May 2006, with funding from the Academy of Finland. The aim of the project is to systematically scrutinize the entire vocabulary of Sumerian with the help of modern etymological dictionaries and studies, identify all the words and morphemes that can be reasonably associated with Uralic or Altaic etyma, ascertain the validity of the comparisons, convert the material into a database, and make it generally available on the Internet.

The database under construction will contain all the attested phonetic spellings and meanings of the compared Sumerian and Ural-Altaic lexical items, as well as, for control purposes, all Indo-European etymologies proposed for these items. The relevance of each comparison is assessed separately for form and meaning on a scale from 4 to 1 (Fig. 4). The highest