Sumerian

node · earth · Southern Mesopotamia

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.