A Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from either at least a 4th millennium BC. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BC, however continued to exist as utilized as a sacred, ceremonial & scientific language inside Mesopotamia until astir Unity AD. So, it was forgotten until a 19th century.

Chronology
A chronology of the Sumerian language can be divided into several periods based on data from linguistic & historical considerations:

Archaic Sumerian - 3100 – 2600 BCE Definitive Sumerian - 2600 – 2300 BCE Neo-Sumerian - 2300 – 2000 BCE Post-Sumerian - 2000 – 100 BCE

From either a beginning of the 2nd millenium, Babylonians & Assyrians maintained & utilized a out Sumerian language within good deal a equivalent way that ancient Greek & Latin come utilized for artistic, religious & scholarly purposes in todays world.

Decipherment
Henry Rawlinson (1810-1895) deciphered the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia, and helped develop A Cuneiform Inscriptions of American Asia (Five vol., 1861–84) for the British Museum. These oversized volumes of cuneiform tablet transcriptions were a primary source of texts for cuneiformists, e.g., Father Johann Strassmaier who compiled an Alphabetisches Verzeichnis (= "cuneiform syllabary") in the Eighties, however Rawlinson's volumes contain little Sumerian because it primarily reproduce tablets from either Akkadian-speaking Nineveh and Babylon.

Ernest de Sarzec (1832-1901) began excavating the Sumerian places of Tello (ancient Girsu, capital of the state of Lagash) around 1877, & promulgated a 1st section of Découvertes nut Chaldée by using transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884.

A University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888.

The Classified Names of Sumerian Ideogram by R. Brünnow appeared around 1889.

Credit for existence 1st to scientifically handle the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt (1858-1926), who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze [= The Sumerian family laws]: within Keilschrift, Transcription und Übersetzung : nebst ausführlichem Commentar und zahlreichen Excursen : eine assyriologische Studie (Leipzig : J.C. Hinrichs, 1879).

the bewildering total & kind of phonetic values that signs stand witharound Sumerian led to an poor roundabout way in understanding a language - a Paris-based orientalist, Joseph Halevy, argued from 1874 forward that Sumerian was a secret code, and for on top a decade the leading Assyriologists battled all over this issue. For a xii years, starting within 1885, potentially the low Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halevy's arguments, not renouncing Halevy until 1897.

Withinside 1908, Stephen Langdon summarized a rapid expansion in noesis of Sumerian & Akkadian vocabulary in the places of Babyloniaca, the journal edited by Charles Virolleaud, within an article [http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=genpub;cc=genpub;sid=925969e1cdb54224dccf86fdb4bdef76;rgn=full%20text;idno=ACG1616.0002.001;view=image;seq=00000217 'Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies'], which reviewed the worthful freshly book in uncommon logograph by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars keep close at hand detected Langdon's function, including his tablet transcriptions, to become non completely dependable. Inside 1944, the extra careful Sumerologist, Samuel Noah Kramer, provided a elaborated & decipherable sum-up of the decoding of Sumerian inside his [http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum05.htm Sumerian Mythology, accessible on the Internet].

Friedrich Delitzsch published the conditioned Sumerian lexicon & grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar & Grundzüge 500 sumerischen Grammatik, each appearing within 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel, published a grammar by using a equivalent title, Grundzüge 500 sumerischen Grammatik, around 1923, & for L years it would become a standard for students researching Sumerian. Poebel's grammar was eventually superseded within 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language, An Introduction to its History & Grammatical Structure, by Marie-Louise Thomsen.

the difficulty within translating Sumerian may be illustrated by a quote from either Miguel Civil of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, regarding the tablet for making beer:

"Two previous attempts, by J.D. Prince in 1919 and M. Witzel in 1938, had produced less than satisfactory results. A line that now even a first year Sumerian student will translate "your family is a 1 world health organization spreads a roast malt on a big mat (to cool)," was translated "k very producer of the lightning, rarified official, right a single!" by the first author, and "starkest du massachusetts institute of technology dem Gugbulug(-Tranke) den Gross-Sukkal" by the second.

"Both developments when you took the fifties processed conceivable a better understanding of Sumerian literature. Within Chicago, Benno Landsberger was editing the Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon. Inside Philadelphia, within which We got been working prior to 1963, Samuel Noah Kramer wwhen occupy making available to scholars when numerous literary tablets as imaginable from either a collections in Philadelphia"

Landsberger worked to publish important bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical tablets from the Old Babylonian period, which have greatly helped our knowledge of Sumerian vocabulary. Kramer and Thorkild Jacobsen both increased our understanding of Sumerian by publishing and translating Sumerian literary texts.

Transcription, in the context of cuneiform, is the process in which an epigraphist makes a line art drawing to show the signs on a clay tablet or stone inscription in a graphic form suitable for modern publication. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before a scholar publishes an important treatment of a text, the scholar will often arrange to collate the published transcription against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently.

Transliteration is the process in which a Sumerologist decides how to represent the cuneiform signs in roman script. Depending on the context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms, each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). See the article Transliterating cuneiform languages. Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri-spellings, after the logogram 'diri' which is written with the signs SI and A. The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word 'diri', not the separate component signs.

Classification
Its script, called cuneiform, meaning "wedge-shaped", was later also used for Akkadian, Ugaritic and Elamite. It was even adapted to Indo-European languages like Hittite (which also had a hieroglyphic script, as did the Egyptians) and Old Persian, though the latter merely used the same instruments, and the letter shapes were unrelated.

Sumerian is a split ergative and Ergative-absolutive languagelanguage. In an ergative language the subject of a sentence with a direct object is in the so-called ergative case, which in Sumerian is marked with the suffix -e. The subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object (of a transitive verb) are in the absolutive case, which in Sumerian, and most ergative languages, is marked by no suffix (or the so-called "zero postfix"). Example: lugal-e e2 mu-du3 "a king built a home"; lugal ba-gen "a king went". A split ergative language is one that behaves as ergative in some contexts and as a nominative-accusative language (like English) in others. Sumerian behaves as a nominative-accusative language e.g. in the 1st and 2nd person of present-future tense/incompletive aspect (aka maruu-conjugation), but as ergative in most other instances. Similar patterns are found in a large number of unrelated split ergative languages (see more examples at split ergativity). Example: i3-du-un (<< *i3-du-en) = I shall go; e2 i3-du3-un (<< *i3-du3-en) = I shall build the house (in contrast with the 3 person past tense forms, see above). Besides, Sumerian is a language with Suffixaufnahme (see more at the relevant entry).

Sumerian distinguishes the grammatical genders animate/inanimate (personal/impersonal) with separate pronouns, but does not have separate male/female gender pronouns. Sumerian has also been claimed to have two tenses (past and present-future), but these are currently described as completive and incompletive aspects instead. There is a large number of cases - nominative, ergative, genitive, dative, locative, comitative, equative ("as, like"), terminative ("to"), ablative ("from"), etc (the exact list varies somewhat in different grammars).

Another characteristic feature of Sumerian is the large number of homophones (words with the same sound structure but different meanings) - or perhaps pseudo-homophones, since there might have been differences in pronunciation (such as tone) that we do not know about. The different homophones (and the different cuneiform signs that denote them) are marked with different numbers by convention, 2 and 3 being replaced by acute accent and grave accent diacritics repectively. For example: du = "to go", du3 = dù = "to build".

As the most ancient known language, it has a peculiar prestige, and such proposals sometimes have a nationalistic background and generally enjoy little popularity in the linguistic community because of their unverifiability.

More credibility is given to inclusion of Sumerian in Basque language and Dravidian language (see Elamo-Dravidian).

Grammar
Finding a place for the Sumerian language in modern analytic linguistics has proven to be a formidable challenge since the first steps of decipherment. Contributing to this dilemma are, first and foremost, the lack of any native speakers (a problem with all ancient tongues); second, the sparseness of linguistic data (which is a distinct difference to many other ancient languages, but a similarity to many others); third, the apparent lack of a closely related tongue (contrast with Akkadian to the Semitic tongues); and finally, the comparatively small amount of research dedicated to the task so far.

These issues notwithstanding, researchers have generally agreed on a few broad typological classifications for the language, as seen above. Sumerian is an agglutinative language, in which many small affixes may be attached to a word, gradually building up refinements in meaning and specificity to the typically abstract lexical root. Furthermore, we see strong indications of at least partial ergativity, where we have the morphological marker for intransitive subjects identical to that of transitive direct objects.

When we make these claims, however, we must be acutely aware that our understanding of the language is frighteningly incomplete.

Leaving aside the problems of classification and typology, however, linguists have pieced together what might be termed a "framework" descriptive grammar of the language, aided lexically by lists of Sumerian words with Akkadian counterparts left to us by ancient scribes. (These lists were necessary as Sumerian was, apparently, the "official language" of Mesopotamia for some time after the language ceased to be spoken by the local population.)

It is this grammar, albeit incomplete and often frequently revised and updated, that we can use to read the basic meanings from a wide variety of the extant texts found throughout Mesopotamia and the surrounding lands. And it is this grammar that is presented below.

A complete Sumerian sentence
As an example, consider the short (and unattested) Sumerian sentence Inanna, nin.ani.r, Ur.Nammu e.0 mu.na.n.du = For Inanna his queen, Ur-Nammu built this temple. We will take as givens the two proper names Inanna and Ur.Nammu, the names of a deity and a ruler, respectively. For the rest of the sentence, we need to do a little linguistic exploring.

Noun
The Sumerian noun is typically a one or two syllable root, occasionally more, of simple structure. Examples are lugal = king, e = temple, or nin = queen. Most frequently, a noun is seen with one or more morhpological case markers, which modify the meaning of the noun or attach certain syntactic roles. For instance, the 3rd person possessive marker, -ani, might be suffixed to make lugal.ani = his king.

Nouns may also be placed in adjunction to form a genitive compound, or more simply, two nouns in direct succession with no other markings will often imply a "X of Y" relationship. Proper names, for instance, often take the form Ur.Nammu = Man of Nammu (Nammu being a particular city's patron deity).

In our example sentence above, we see immediately that we have two noun formations, nin.ani.r = for his queen, and e.0 = temple, where we have assumed the .r morpheme to be the dative case marker and .0 to be the ergative. We have thus translated most of our example sentence just by considering nouns and noun formations; this leaves only what must be the verbal form at the very end of the sentence.

Verb
The Sumerian verb, typically a short one or two syllable root, has two conjugations, transitive and intransitive, and two aspects, referred to as hamtu and maru (following the terms in Akkadian grammars of Sumerian).

The prototypical verbal endings are: However, the construction of a Sumerian verbal form is a bit more complex than in many modern tongues, especially English. The verb not only indicates the relationship or activities of the other syntactic players in the sentence, but will also restate many of those relationships in the verbal form itself. For instance, a common verbal form in dedicatory inscriptions (left as "cornerstones" under large building projects) is mu.na.n.du.0 = he built. We have verbal agreement expressing the 3rd person singluar agent of the action in the .na. morpheme, as well as the .n. morpheme noting that there was a dative clause (or a "X did Y for Z" form) somewhere in the meaning. Further, linguists have added the .0 = morhpeme, indicating a non-verbalized marker for an ergative clause. Finally, and most cryptically, the introductory mu. marker has yet to be given a definitive, or even plausible, interpretation.

So the verbal form in our example sentence means something like he built it for her, where the it and her are references to some of the noun formations earlier in the sentence, in this case, the temple and Inanna respectively.

There is clearly much work to be done in the decipherment of the language itself. There is strong motivation to do so, however, as Sumerian is uniquely positioned as one of the few languages for which a writing system was developed without foreknowledge of other systems, and as such, a firm understanding of the connection between the Sumerian tongue and the development of the writing system would shed light on not a small number of interesting linguistic and psycholinguistic areas.