Sumerian

Assembled from 16 blocks · 1 evidence · 9 related

1. Story
2. The language of the earliest cities and the earliest substantial writing of southern Mesopotamia, and an isolate with no accepted relatives despite an enormous surviving corpus. Sumerian is agglutinative and ergative, structurally unlike the Semitic Akkadian that eventually displaced it, and the two coexisted for centuries in a bilingual scribal culture that is itself the reason so much is recoverable: Akkadian-speaking scribes compiled bilingual lexical lists and grammatical texts to teach Sumerian, so the language was documented from the inside by people who needed to learn it. It appears to have ceased to be a mother tongue in the early second millennium BCE while continuing for more than a thousand years afterwards as a language of liturgy, scholarship and prestige — a written afterlife comparable to Latin's in medieval Europe. Sumerian shows that isolation has nothing to do with obscurity or marginality. A language can be the vehicle of the first literature known to us, be recorded on hundreds of thousands of tablets, and still have no demonstrable relative anywhere.
3. Knowledge
4. The language isolate
5. Sumerian
6. Connections
7. The language isolate
8. Sumerian ceases to be a mother tongue
9. Language death
10. Basque (Euskara)
11. Sumerian
12. Glottolog
13. Sumerian ceases to be a mother tongue
14. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, third edition
15. Evidence
16. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.