The Sumerian Word of the Day

KA - mouth

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:54:57 GMT

Today's Sumerian word of the day is the sign KA, which has a number of different readings. The sign looks like this:

You can see that this is the SAG ("head") sign, with a few extra strokes. These are called "gunu" marks, which highlight an area of the sign. Because the SAG sign was originally a drawing of a head (turn the sign 90 degrees clockwise and you can sort of see it), these gunu marks are over the region of the mouth - and that's the basic meaning of ka, "mouth".

By extension, this sign can also represent a number of other Sumerian words. It can be read "dug₄", which means "to speak", and it makes sense that a picture of a mouth would be used to represent speaking. It can also be read "gu₃", which means "a loud noise, voice, a cry", "inim", which means "word", or even "zu₂", which means "tooth". As well, the gunu marks can be seen as over the nose, so the sign can mean "kiri₃", "nose". And finally, the idiom for becoming angry in Sumerian and Akkadian was the nose getting hot (which is pretty awesome), so this sign can be read "sumur", "to become angry." Phew!

UD - day

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 23:16:42 GMT

Today's Sumerian word of the day is ud (pronounced "ood"), a sign with a couple of different meanings. It looks like this:

This is the sign that, when preceded by the divine determinative, stands for the god Utu, who is the sun god (also the god of justice, divination, etc). It also means the sun itself, and by extension "day", "time", and the preposition "when". The sign can also be read "babbar", which means "white" (you can see how that's connected to its meaning of "sun"), and as babbar is part of the very common compound word kug-babbar, which means "silver". It's also a sign that appears in a lot of place names and other compound words.

BAD3 - wall

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 22:07:34 GMT

I bet you forgot you had this friended. The Sumerian Word of the Day is back for the summer, and probably will be updated a couple of times a week at least.

Today's word is "bad₃", which means "city wall" or "fortification". You can vaguely see how it was originally a picture of a wall around a central area.

(Images are all now taken from the online Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary, which is a great resource I encourage you to use. Another resource, if you're interested in Sumerian literature, is The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.)

(As well, old entries of this community are now in the memories.)

KI-AG2 - to love

Tue, 27 Apr 2004 00:45:32 GMT

This week's Sumerian word is made of two cuneiform signs, "ki" and "ag₂". "ki-ag₂" means "to love", and looks like this:

As you can see, we've had the sign "ki" as a previous word. "ag₂" is a new sign. The phoneme at the end of the sign, which in the past was written "g", is actually an "ng" sound - this phoneme is a recent discovery. (All 'g's are not 'ng's in Sumerian, though - only some of them. In older literature they're not differentiated, but they are in newer literature.) The compound as a whole would be pronounced "key ong" ('a's are always pronounced long, so the second word would rhyme with "song" rather than with "sang".)

In Sumerian (according to P. Steinkeller), love has a very specific social context. A superior loves an inferior, but inferiors cannot love their superiors. A god can love a human, but a human cannot love a god - humans fear or respect gods. Rather than exactly indicating warm, fuzzy feelings, "love" indicates something like preferment or benevolence.

I3 - oil

Mon, 19 Apr 2004 00:38:38 GMT

Due to serious time constraints, I'm not going to be able to keep up the pace of a Sumerian word every single day. It's just too much. But instead of stopping altogether, I'm changing the format to make it the Sumerian Word of the Week, rather than of the day. The word for each week will be posted on Sunday nights from here on out.

This week's word is "i₃", which means "oil" or "butter". The sign also has the reading "zal", which is a verb meaning "to flow, to melt" or "to pass (time)". As well, the sign has several additional phonetic readings - "li₂", "ne₂" and "ni".

I₃ looks like this, and is pronounced like the name of the English letter "e".

URU - city

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 04:28:44 GMT

Today's Sumerian word is "uru", which means "city" or "town".

"uru" is the traditional reading of the sign, but more recently Sumerologists have begun writing it "iri", as a more accurate transcription of how it would have sounded. ("uru" is pronounced "oo-roo" and "iri" like the English word "eerie".) My professor is of the opinion that in fact the vowels there were a sort of rounded 'i', a sound between 'i' and 'u', similar to a German umlaut sound.

And I am not describing that very well, but it's late and I'm tired.

Uru looks like this:

UDU - sheep

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:19:13 GMT

Today's Sumerian word is "udu" (pronounced "oo-doo"), which means "sheep".

It looks like this:

NIN - lady

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 03:26:53 GMT

Today's Sumerian word is "nin", which means "lady, mistress, queen". You can see how one of the parts of the sign is the sign "munus", which means "woman".

This sign is often part of divine names. However, oddly, sometimes it is part of the name of male gods, such as Ningirsu or Ningišzida. (In these names, we translate it "lord".) This has led to speculation that these gods were in fact originally goddesses.

Nin is pronounced like the first syllable of the English word "ninny", and it looks like this:

IGI - eye

Fri, 09 Apr 2004 04:07:22 GMT

Today's word of the day is "igi", which means "eye". It can also have the extended meanings of "sight, vision" or "face, front".

Igi is pronounced so that it rhymes with "Ziggy", and it looks like this:

KI - place

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 03:38:39 GMT

Today's word is "ki", which means "place." It can also mean, "ground" or "earth", and is a term for the netherworld. Ki is also used as a determinative indicating something is the name of a place, but instead of being put before the place name (as is usual for determinatives), it's put after the place name (Lagash-KI, for example, to talk about the city of Lagash).

"Ki" is pronounced like the English word "key", and looks like this:

A - water

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 03:19:21 GMT

In the past, we've had "a₂" as the word of the day - well, today, we have "a" number one! (Signs that are lucky enough to be labelled number one are written without a number in Assyriology, so just "a'.) "A" has the basic meaning "water". As extensions of this meaning, it can also mean a watercourse or any kind of fluid. In particular, it can also mean "semen" or "seed", and by extension of that, it can mean "offspring, child"; or even sometimes "father".

"A" is pronounced "ah" (like the first vowel in father), and it looks like this:

EN - lord

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 03:15:53 GMT

Today's word is "en" which has the default translation "lord". The office of En in Sumer seems to have originally been a kind of priest-king, whose duties were both sacred and secular. While the god of a city was seen as the city's real ruler, the En was the god's steward on earth, in charge of the administration of the city on the god's behalf.

But over time, the office of En became purely a religious one, used for the high priest or priestess of the god, while another office, that of the "ensi", was in charge of secular matters. (And after the Ur-III period, at the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, the term "ensi" was applied only to a provincial governor. The northern term "lugal" then became the default for secular authority.)

En is also used syllabically, and is found in the name of several gods (Enlil, Enki, etc. - though the etymology of those names are debated).

En is pronounced like the letter 'N' in English, and it looks like this:

AMA - mother

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 00:30:22 GMT

Welcome back to the Sumerian word of the day! I hope you all enjoyed your spring break.

Today's word is "ama" which means "mother." It's interesting how in almost every language the word for mother ends up being something like this, a baby-talk kind of word. Mama. ("Ama" is pronounced like the American mama, but without the first 'm'. Basically so it rhymes with llama - two long 'a's.)

It looks like this:

GAL - great

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 03:33:42 GMT

Today's Sumerian word of the day is "gal", which means "great", or "large". It's been part of such compound words as "lugal" ("great man", or "king") and "e₂-gal" ("great house", or "palace").

It's pronounced like the English word "gall" (e.g. "I can't believe you had the gall to do that!"), and it looks like this:

The Sumerian word of the day will be on hiatus next week, but will be back a week from Sunday night. Use the time to review!

E2 - house

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 03:37:06 GMT

Apologies for the lack of the Word of the Day yesterday... midterms. Sigh.

Today's Sumerian word is "e₂", which has the basic meaning "house". It's also the word for temple, as the Sumerian temple was seen as simply the house of the god, the place where the god lived and ate and got dressed and everything else. (Literally - the statue of the god was dressed, and fed, and bathed daily in the temple.)

It's also part of compound words like "e₂-gal" (literally "great house") which means "palace".

E₂ looks like this:

ETA: I always forget the pronunciation, don't I? This one is pronounced "eh", like you're Canadian. Or, to put it another way, the way we say the name of the letter 'a' in English. Or like the letter 'e' in Spanish or French or most languages.

ŠU - hand

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 03:14:03 GMT

Today's word is "šu", which means "hand". You can see that the sign, if turned 90 degrees, was originally a picture of a hand - four fingers and a thumb.

šu looks like this (and is pronounced "shoe"):

GUD - ox

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 03:15:23 GMT

Today's word of the day is read either "gud" or "gu₄". The final consonants of Sumerian words weren't pronounced unless they were followed by a vowel (in a suffix, for instance), so the second reading (gu₄) is phonetic, while the first reading (gud) is phonemic. (So if a Sumerian was saying this word by itself, they'd say "gu", but if they were saying the word followed by the locative suffix "a", they'd say gu-da.) I generally prefer the longer reading of the word, myself, but either is accepted.

Gud means "ox", and if you look at the logogram at a 90 degree angle, the way they were originally written, you can see how it looks like the head of an ox, with little horns and all.

It looks like this:

ETA: It's pronounced with a long 'u' and a hard 'g' - "goo" or "goo'd".

KUR - mountain

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 05:25:50 GMT

Today's word is "kur", which can mean "mountain", "foreign land", or "netherworld".

It looks like this:

DU3 - to build

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 06:02:31 GMT

Today's word of the day is "du₃", which means "to build". Obviously very common on building inscriptions, which are your most common basic Sumerian text. Sumerian kings were always building things, then writing a dedicatory text and sticking it in the foundation for archaeologists to dig up. Thoughtful of them.

Du₃ looks like this:

ETA: The pronunciation of this word is "doo". Like doo-doo.

NITAH - male

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 02:48:51 GMT

Today's Sumerian word is "nitah", which means "man" or "male". And yes, it was originally a picture of a penis. This is also the word which marks nouns as specifically male in gender (when you write dumu-nitah, you mean "son").

This is pronounced (conventionally - of course we have only a very sketchy idea of how Sumerian was originally pronounced, since it died out over 3500 years ago) as "NEE-tach" (the last sound is a guttural, like the sound at the end of the German "Bach"). The 'a' in the last syllable is an 'ah' sound, like in the first syllable of "father".

Nitah looks like this:

DUMU - child

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 02:54:28 GMT

Today's SWotD is "dumu" which means "child". Another reading of this sign is "banda₂", meaning "small" (and obviously these two readings are related).

You can mark this sign for gender by putting "munus" after it to mean "daughter", or "nitah" after it to mean "son". (We still haven't had nitah - we'll get around to it sooner or later.)

Dumu looks like this:

MUL - constellation

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 02:57:34 GMT

Today's SWotD should be remarkably easy to remember. It's written "mul", it means "star" or "constellation" and it looks like this:

The relationship of the picture to the meaning should be pretty obvious.

This sign is also used as a determinative before the names of constellations. The previous SWotD "ur", when prefixed with this determinative, apparently refers to a constellation (the Dog, in Sumerian) which my French sign list calls "Hercules". I've never heard of that constellation myself, which either means I'm lame at astronomy or that the French have freaky names for constellations. Take your pick.

Just so you know, I'm pretty sure all our Mesopotamian names for constellations and the zodiac and things come from the 1st millennium BC (late in Mesopotamian history and after the Sumerian language was very dead). So the determinative with constellation names would've been used in late Sumerian texts (when Sumerian, though dead, was being used as a scholarly or religious language, like medieval Latin), or in Akkadian texts (Akkadian texts often use Sumerian logograms).

MU - name

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 04:28:39 GMT

Today's Sumerian word of the day is "mu", which has several meanings. It can mean "name" or "reputation, fame," as well as "year". It can also be used phonetically, and is a verbal prefix which indicates proximity to the speaker in time or space.

Mu looks like this:

SAG

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 03:38:35 GMT

Today's word of the day is "sag", which has the basic meaning "head". As extensions of this meaning, it can also mean "front" or "beginning" or "first" or "foremost". For instance, when combined with the earlier WotD, "ur," in the expression "ur-sag", it literally means "top dog" or "warrior".

Sag looks like this:

It's pronounced "sahng", with a long 'a' like in 'father', and that last phoneme was recently found to be an "ng" sound.

GAZ - to smite

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 02:00:09 GMT

Today's Sumerian word of the day is "gaz". It's a bit complicated to draw - it looks like this:

Gaz means "to crush; to smite, slaughter, kill". And if it's preceded by giš, the determinative for items made of wood, it means "mortar". Because a mortar crushes things, and Sumerian is nothing if not logical. At least most of the time.

It's basically pronounced like the English word "gauze".