[Lingtyp] Gumuz languages and Sumerian

Mon Nov 30 21:52:22 UTC 2020

Dear Peter and all,

Thank you! I wouldn't consider the German "hin-/her-" an itive/ventive.
It's restricted to verbs of motion (not so in Sumerian), and it's
derivational in German, rather than inflectional. In Sumerian, it doesn't
only mark deixis, but it's also obligatory with a 1st person dative
argument in the clause, independent of the actual verb. It also appears
with a (not necessarily overtly expressed) 1st person beneficiary:

e4      ummud=gin          u-mu-naĝ
water waterbag=EQT     PROSP-VENT-[1SG.A]drink[PFV][3.P]
"After I drank water like (from) a waterbag, ..." (Lugalbanda and the Anzud
bird, line 241, ETCSL corpus)

It can also appear in sentences where the speaker as a person isn't
involved in any way, but only the current location of the speaker
(independent of the actual speaker). It's usually translated with "here, at
this place" then.

Best regards,
Thomas.

Am So., 29. Nov. 2020 um 21:38 Uhr schrieb Peter Arkadiev <
peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>:

> 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>:
>
> 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.
> Institute of Slavic Studies
> Russian Academy of Sciences
> Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
> http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>
>
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