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It seems safe to say that this Sumerian Grammar by Professor D.O. Edzard will become the new classic reference in the field. It is an up-to-date, reliable guide to the language of the Sumerians, the inventors of cuneiform writing in the late 4th millennium B.C., and thus essential contributors to the high cultural standard of the whole of Mesopotamia and beyond. Following traditional lines, the Grammar describes general characteristics, origins, linguistic environment, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and phraseology. Due attention is given to the symbiosis with Semitic Akkadian, with which Sumerian was to form a veritable linguistic area. With lucid explanations of all technical linguistic theory. Each transliteration carries its English translation.
The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed, giving speakers a series of options for better approximating in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human conceptualization and experience.
With 6,400 entries, this is the most complete available lexicon of ancient Sumerian vocabulary. It replaces version 3 of the author's Sumerian Lexicon, which has served an audience of over 380,000 visitors at the web site www.sumerian.org since 1999. This published version adds over 2,600 new entries, and corrects or expands many of the previous entries. Also, following the express wish of a majority of online lexicon users, it has merged together and sorted the logogram words and the compound words into purely alphabetical order. This book will be an indispensable reference for anyone trying to translate Sumerian texts. Also, due to the historical position of ancient Sumer as the world's first urban civilisation, cultural and linguistic archaeologists will discover a wealth of information for research.