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Article: Try reading Sumerian.(Activity)
- Article from:
- Calliope
- Article date:
- September 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Carus Publishing Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Sumerian was the spoken language during the Early Dynastic period (c. 2900-2350 B.C.), while Akkadian-a language similar to Arabic and Hebrew-had replaced it as the spoken language by the beginning of the second millennium B.C., but Sumerian retained an important place in scholarly and religious settings until the disappearance of cuneiform. Some texts from the later periods give pronunciations of Sumerian words in the Greek alphabet.
Sumerian is unrelated to any other language. One of its most distinctive features is that it is agglutinative (a-GLUE-ti-na-tive). Such a language makes words and phrases by combining smaller pieces that do not lose their shape or ...