Sumerogram

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As sumerogram call Altorientalisten the word signs of the cuneiform once it into languages other than Sumerian be used. The Sumerians , who originally developed the cuneiform script, wrote the stems with these word characters and only the grammatical endings and prefixes with syllable characters. Other cuneiform languages ​​such as Akkadian , Elamite , Hurrian , Urartian and Hittite took over the script from the Sumerians, but mainly wrote the stems with the syllable characters. For many frequently occurring words, however, the spelling was often shortened by writing the root of the word with the Sumerian word sign of the same meaning, as in Sumerian. The same character must then be read in the respective language. In ancient oriental studies, the Sumerian phonetic value of the word in question is always used to transliterate a word sign, even in non-Sumerian languages, which has led to the term Sumerogram. The character is noted in capital letters.

An example: The cuneiform character LÚ, originally the image of a person, notes a noun in Sumerian that means “man, person” with the assumed pronunciation / lu /. The same symbol is also used in Akkadian texts, where it can be read awīlum (the Akkadian word for "man"), or in Hittite texts for antuhšaš "man", and is considered a Sumerogram in these languages. In both cases it is conventionally transliterated as LÚ.

Most of the sumerograms are used in Akkadian; Hittite also has many sumerograms, but only those that were also familiar in contemporary Akkadian. In other cuneiform languages ​​such as Hurrian and Elamish, the inventory of sumerograms used is smaller. In Sumerian, by definition, one does not speak of Sumerograms, but simply word signs.

From a modern linguistic point of view , the term sumerogram can be perceived as unclean because it does not serve to describe the writing system of a language synchronously, but rather classifies a character in one language according to the criterion of what function it has in another language - namely Sumerian. A linguistically more satisfactory term for largely the same class of characters, but more general, is logogram or word mark.

literature