Sumerian Language for Beginners

Learn Sumerian nouns, their human versus non-human classification, singular and plural forms, and about ten cases, with essential vocabulary for people, gods, animals, body parts, and places.

Explore Sumerian noun phrases in this lecture, learning how agglutinative morphemes attach in a fixed order: noun, adjective, possessive pronoun, plural marker, and case ending.

Learn Sumerian possessive pronouns in noun phrases, their position after the noun and adjective and before plural and endings, with examples like my, your, his, her, our, and their.

Explore ergative and absolutive in Sumerian, learning how transitive verbs mark the agent with the ergative ending e and the object with absolutive zero, while intransitives place subject in absolutive.

Explore three Sumerian cases of space: locative, terminative, and ablative, with examples showing where something takes place, toward a place, and from a place.

Explore the four Sumerian cases - dative ra for animate nouns indicating to whom, directive for non-human nouns, comitative da for 'with', and equative with Gann seven meaning 'like'.

Learn to form simple Sumerian sentences with a copula, the to be verb, by linking noun phrases to genitive and absolutive forms.

Explore how Sumerian marks past and present as aspects, rather than tenses. Learn to use pronominal prefixes and suffixes with transitive and intransitive verbs, including ergative and absolutive marking.

Learn how Maru expresses present and future in Sumerian, including suppletive and reduplicated forms, intransitive and transitive verb patterns, pronoun placement, and a future marker after the root.

Analyzes the ventive, a Sumerian verbal marker of movement near the beginning. Shows ventive denotes movement toward the here of the speaker, with examples like I go and I went.

Explore how locative marks attach to the verb in the Sumerian verbal chain, using the ni prefix to show place, and how dative and locative noun cases influence verb forms.

Study comitative, terminative, and ablative cases in Sumerian verbs, which behave similarly to locative, marking with initial person prefixes and case prefixes, plus glottal stops for first singular.

Form Sumerian relative clauses by adding r to the end of the verbal chain, yielding 'the man that built the house' with absolutive endings and the relative marker ah.

The imperative mode in Sumerian attaches suffixes to the verb root, with a zero ending for singular and zen or xen endings for plural or multiple addressees.

Explore how modality arises from verb-initial prefixes, including predicative desiring mood and cohortative forms like let me/let us, with ga, absolutive endings, and prospective oo prefixes.

Learn how Sumerian negation uses the prefix nu to negate intransitive and transitive verbs, including forms, and how prohibitive construction with non and reduplication forbids actions and uses dative addressing.