[Lingtyp] Gumuz languages and Sumerian

Hartmut Haberland hartmut at ruc.dk
Sun Nov 29 21:46:55 UTC 2020


Peter, look at this here:
Høyrup, Jens (1996). Sumerian: the descendant of a proto-historical creole? I L. Heltoft, & H. Haberland (red.), Proceedings of the Thirteenth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics (p. 157-176). Roskilde University (should be available in many university libraries)
Høyrup, Jens (1994). Sumerian: the descendant of a proto-historical creole?. an alternative approach to the "Sumerian problem". Roskilde University. Rolig papir, No. 51 (Many papers of the ROLIG preprint series are available at https://eric.ed.gov, search for hoyrup, and this one definitely is downloadable from https://www.academia.edu.)
Hartmut
Fra: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> På vegne af Peter Arkadiev
Sendt: 29. november 2020 21:39
Til: Thomas Goldammer <thogol at gmail.com>; LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org
Emne: Re: [Lingtyp] Gumuz languages and Sumerian

Dear Thomas, dear colleagues,

the typological parallels between the Gumuz languages and Sumerian that you have spotted are by no means exclusive. If you look at the relevant chapter in WALS https://wals.info/feature/34A#2/25.5/146.1 you'll see that plural marking restricted to humans is quite widespread in the languages of the world. Suppletion of verbs according to the number of participants is also not that rare (see https://wals.info/feature/80A#2/18.0/149.6 ), notably, it occurs in such languages as Georgian and Ubykh, which are much closer to Sumerian at least geographically. Likewise, verbal affixes marking deixis are widespread in the languages of the Caucasus (e.g. in Kartvelian, Northwest Caucasian and Ossetic) as well as elsewhere (cf. German her-). Finally, incorporation of bodypart nouns into the verb is also attested in Northwest Caucasian and cross-linguistically. Against this background, the parallels you have spotted do not seem so striking and can be considerd accidental.
I hope this helps.

Best regards,

Peter



29.11.2020, 13:00, "Thomas Goldammer" <thogol at gmail.com<mailto:thogol at gmail.com>>:
Dear all,

I'm currently reading a very interesting chapter by Dimmendahl et al. in the Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics (edited by E. Wolff), Linguistic features and typologies in languages commonly referred to as ‘Nilo-Saharan’. While reading the section about the Koman/Gumuz languages I thought I was reading a paper about Sumerian typology - especially for the Gumuz languages. For those not familiar with my favorite subject, Sumerian is a language isolate spoken until about 1700 BCE in what today is southern Iraq, written in cuneiform script that was invented for this language. Of course, it is geographically distant to where the Gumuz languages are spoken nowadays, but not too far, separated "only" by the Ethiopian highlands, the Red Sea and the deserts of the Arabic Peninsula. But nevertheless, the typological similarities are pretty interesting and definitely cry for further investigation.

I would be extremely grateful for any reading suggestions about any kind of (typological) comparison of Sumerian and the Gumuz languages, or other families commonly referred to as part of the "Nilo-Saharan" entity. Unfortunately, I do not have access to any good library or to papers behind paywalls, or to institutional journal accesses of any kind, so if you can spare a PDF file, I'd be even more grateful.

For those who are still with me, here is what I mean in some more detail (yay, data!)...
Dimmendahl et al. list several typological features for the Gumuz languages. I'll skip the phonological features, as the Sumerian phonology is subject to a lot of uncertainty and disagreement among scholars. Some rarer features include:

1. "Typically, only human and some animate nouns can be marked for plural." (Dimmendahl et al., p. 12, in section 11.3.3). It is noted in the chapter that this is an areal feature in the region. The same rule is true for Sumerian.

2. Gumuz languages have a small set of verbs that inherently mark singular or plural of participants. Dimmendahl et al. give an example from Daats’íin: dugw ‘run.SG’ vs. ranɗ ‘run.PL’. Sumerian has the same for a couple of verbs, e.g. gub ‘stand/put.SG’ vs. sug ‘stand/put.PL’. This plurality marks participant plurality.  Daats’íin (according to Dimmendahl et al.) also uses reduplicated stems to mark event plurality - so does Sumerian.

3. Gumuz languages use a deictic directional towards the deictic reference point (ventive) form in the verb. Sumerian does have such a bound morpheme (m(u)-) as well.

4. Noun incorporation into verb stems, especially of body part terms, but occasionally also other nouns, to form new lexical meanings is found in Gomuz languages. Something strikingly similar can be found in Sumerian, but the noun is not fully incorporated. It is positioned in the S/P position (immediately preceding the verb) and changes the lexical meaning of the verb. Some verbs only occur with one of these bound nominals. Examples for such complex verbs are ĝeštug2 du3 ‘ear erect’ = ‘listen’, šu gi4 ‘hand return’ = ‘repay’, ki(-ig) aĝ2 ‘xxx measure’ = ‘love’ (the meaning of ki-ig is unknown, it occurs only in this lexeme). These verbs are pretty abundant in the lexicon of the language. They also exist for making noises, different types of speaking and similar things: šud3 ša4 ‘prayer sound’ = ‘pray’.

Numbers in the Sumerian examples do not indicate tones. They are conventional numberings of lexical entries with the same transcription.

Please note that I see no evidence for cognates between Gumuz languages and Sumerian, and every such comparison would be pretty weird, anyway, given the temporal distance between the two data sets. Neither would I dare to claim any genealogical relationship between the two.

With best regards and greetings from Koblenz,
Thomas Goldammer, PhD.
,

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Peter Arkadiev, PhD Habil.
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