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Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad
Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad
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239
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240 J. S. Cooper
8 Kraus 98. But note the expression of the more conventional view on p.
91, where Nippur, just 12 miles south-east of Abu Salabikh, is considered "wohl
sicher" a Sumerian speaking area in the Sargonic period.
9 MAD 22 5; Kraus 83.
10 MAD 22 6ff.; additions in J.Roberts, The Earliest Semitic Pantheon
(Baltimore, 1972), p. 9 fn. 5.
11 MAD 22 11 ff.; Genava 8 (1960) 268 f.
12 Kraus 99.
13 The objections of Kraus (p. 20) to this type of hypothesizing, while un-
reasonably harsh, should be kept in mind.
14 The archive studied by S. Walters m YNER 4, from the time of Abisare
and Sumuel of Larsa (ca. 1900-1850), already manifests the Sumerian documents
- Akkadian letters syndrome. But from the preceding century there are at
least three Sumerian letter-orders datable to Ishbi-Erra, Ishme-Dagan, and
Lipit-Ishtar of Isin (see Hallo, BiOr 26 172 for references and discussion), as
well as one half- Akkadian letter-order from the same period ( BIN 9 475, edi-
ted by Hallo, op. cit., 175). Thus, Gelb's generalization may not hold true for the
reigns of the earliest Isin kings, who, in any case, are known for their conscious
preservation of Ur III forms (see e.g., Edzard in Bottéro, op. cit., p. 175).
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Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad 241
language of the country" 16 is still valid. These Akkadian letters were written
for the same individuals represented by legal documents still composed, to
a great extent, in Sumerian. Unless we are willing to assume that some letters
were dictated in Sumerian and then translated into Akkadian and written
down by a scribe 16, we must conclude that Sumerian was not spoken by any-
one who sent letters, or at least, if they did speak Sumerian, they were bilingual.
The survival of Sumerian in legal contexts, where phraseology is highly formal-
ized, and not in epistolary contexts, which require greater flexibility of expres-
sion and hence greater linguistic competence, suggests that Sumerian was no
longer a living language 17 .
This extinction of Sumerian as a spoken language was the end result of
a process that began with the first contact between Akkadian and Sumerian
speakers 18 . Barring violent incidents, such as wholesale annihilation, deporta-
tion, or deliberate supression, language displacement is a slow process, and
occurs when the bilingual community expands to include all members of one
mother-tongue group, who then neglect to teach the mother tongue (here Su-
merian) to their children. If this process was substantially complete by early
OB, then it must have been well underway during the preceding Ur III period
(ca. 2100-2000). In reviewing the evidence for this period, Kraus observes that
"es scheint sich ein Staatsvolk, eine Nation akkadischer Sprach herauszubil-
den" 19 ; his review of the Akkadian loanwords in Sumerian during Ur III gives
the impression that Sumerian was a "tote Schriftsprache oder die absterbende
Sprache einer Minorität" 20. Kraus' reluctance to be decisive on this point
(p. 96) seems unwarranted in light of his own presentation. Sumerian as a spo-
ken language was in all probability dead or nearly so in Ur III.
The only counter-indication for this is the extraordinary amount of Sume-
rian literary composition in this period 21. While it is difficult to imagine this
kind of activity without roots in a mother-tongue community, it is not without
historical parallel, as the history of L,atin literature in Europe or the Hebrew
renaissance in Spain amply demonstrate. In any case, this composition of Su-
merian texts continues into OB and beyond, and cannot be used to justify
the existence of a Sumerian speaking population group. Nor do the overwhelm-
ing number of Sumerian administrative and legal documents 22 and the com-
paratively miniscule number of Akkadian texts found from the Ur III period
warrant the designation "Neo-Sumerian" for this period. The Ur III texts
come almost exclusively from southern sites, where such texts were written
in Sumerian prior to Ur III, and continue to be written in Sumerian in the Old
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242 J. S. Cooper
Babylonian period. No Ur III texts have yet been published from northern sites,
which, based on evidence of previous and succeeding periods, one would expect
to yield Akkadian texts 23. Gelb's view that "the Sumerian renaissance affected
only the written language, while the country in general continued in the direc-
tion of total Semitization and elimination of Sumerian elements" 24 is valid,
albeit on the conservative side 25. By the end of the Ur III period, Akkadian
w7as so solidly entrenched as the spoken language in southern Mesopotamia
that it was able to resist the pressures of large numbers of Amorite speaking
settlers on the one hand, and absorb any remnants of the Sumerian mother-
tongue group on the other.
The question remains: how far back should the dominance of Akkadian
as a spoken language in Sumer be projected? If Sumerian could be used almost
exclusively for writing in Ur III, when spoken Akkadian was probably wide-
spread, then the use of Sumerian in Sumer for the same purposes in KD III
and the Sargonic period does not necessarily indicate that Sumerian was the
dominant spoken language during those periods. The same may be said of the
overwhelming number of Sumerian names found in southern documents 26 .
Naming customs "survive even a total displacement of the language in which
they originated" 27 , and the use of Sumerian names in the south continued into
Ur III 28, OB and beyond, although with a gradually increasing and eventually
superior number of Akkadian names.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it does not seem unreasonable
to posit a situation in which the displacement of Sumerian as a spoken language
in Sumer was in progress in ED III 29. The subsequent Akkadianization of
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Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad 243
language use can be illustrated by the following table. The use of parentheses
indicates a significant , but smaller amount of usage of the language in question.
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244 J. S. Cooper
Sumerian verbs on the model of their Akkadian counterparts and the use of
the Akkadian conjunction u in the inscriptions of Gudea and his predecessors39,
does the structural influence of Akkadian on Sumerian become apparent 40 .
This begins after we assume Sumerian to be dead, for all intents and pur-
poses, as a spoken language, and thus highly vulnerable to interference from
the mother tongue (Akkadian) of the scribes who wrote it. Akkadian
interference continues and increases in the Sumerian of the Ur III and Old
Babylonian periods, although the amount of interference varies considerably,
depending on the provenience, genre and date of any given text.
It is in the Old Babylonian period that the scribal schools begin to treat
Sumerian as a foreign language41. Lexical texts, originally intended as aids
in learning the writing system, were eventually transformed into language
learning aids by the addition of an Akkadian translation column42. Similarly,
the first explications of Sumerian grammar were composed43. Occasionally,
Akkadian glosses are found in OB Sumerian literary texts, but their infrequency
testifies to the high quality of Sumerian education in the OB schools, as does
the paucity of bilinguals dating from this period. In contrast to subsequent
periods, when Sumerian texts had relatively fixed Akkadian translations that
often, if not always, appeared together with them on the same tablet, the rare
bilinguals of the Old Babylonian period were school exercises or the work of
individual and apparently less competent scribes44. This kind of "pony" was
not needed by the great majority of literary scribes, who not only composed
in and understood Sumerian, but spoke it in the schools as well 45, much as their
analogues spoke Latin in the academies of medieval Kur ope. There is, however,
no evidence at all for spoken Sumerian in Post- Old Babylonian schools, and we
may suppose that Sumerian as a spoken language died out completely in its
last bastion, the scribal school, a thousand or more years after it had begun
to be displaced by Akkadian. It continued to be studied and written for another
millennium and a half.
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Sumerian and Akkadian in Sumer and Akkad 245
46 Weinreich, op. cit., 106 ff.; Emeneau, op. cit., 432 ff.; Iv. Bloomfield,
Language (New York, 1933), 463 ff.
47 But cf. the remarks of Biggs, referred to in note 26, above.
48 In view of the universality of the flood motif, one must be highly skepti-
cal of the attempt to interpret that motif in Mesopotamia as a metaphor for
hordes of invading Semites (A. Falkenstein in Bottéro, op. cit., 51, followed,
but modified by Van Dijk in S. Hartman, Syncretism [Stockholm, 1969],
p. 179).
49 W. von Soden, WZKM 56 (1960) 185 ff. and Iraq 28 (1966) 144. Kraus,
p. 21, is also inclined toward this view.
50 Moving from hypothetical examples to fact, the recent expansion of
speakers of one Germanic language (German) into Eastern Europe led to the
virtual extinction there of another Germanic language (Yiddish) and its
mother-tongue community of many millions.
61 The relative closeness of two Semitic languages and their remoteness
from Sumerian would play little or no role here. An immigrant group would
learn the language that would be most useful to it; that is to say, language use
would be determined by socio-economic rather than linguistic criteria. In any
case, it is not certain that languages close to one's own are more easily learned
that those that are more remote (V. Vildomec, Multilingualism [Leiden, 1963],
19 ff.), and for children learning Sumerian in a contact situation, it would be
irrelevant. Turkish, a language frequently compared to Sumerian, was learned
as a second language by many speakers of both Semitic and Indo-European
languages during the Ottoman period.
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246 J. S. Cooper
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