Some Euphratic Adjectives

Gordon Whittaker

Zusammenfassung: Es wird argumentiert, daß sowohl in den archaischen Texten Südme-

sopotamiens vorkommende syntaktische Merkmale als auch in der sumerischen Sprache
belegte Farbadjektive auf das Vorhandensein einer bisher historisch unbekannten Sprache
hinweisen, die ihre Spuren in den Lautwerten des Schriftsystems und in Lehnwörtern hin-
terlassen hat. Diese Sprache ist als sehr frühes Mitglied der indogermanischen Familie
identifiziert worden. In der ersten Hälfte des Aufsatzes wird darüber referiert, wie sume-
rische Adjektive im Laufe der Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Assyriologie betrachtet und
klassifiziert worden sind. Der heutige Stand des sumerologischen Denkens zum Begriff
Adjektiv wird vermittelt, um eine Grundlage für die weitere Diskussion zu schaffen.

As argued in a series of recent papers (Whittaker 1998, 2001, 2004, 2005), the first of which
was kindly published in the first number of the Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft,
there is a growing body of evidence pointing to the presence of an early Indo-European soci-
ety in Southern Mesopotamia prior to the rise of the Sumerian city-states of the historical era.
This society, which I have dubbed Euphratean (and its language Euphratic),1 has, on the sur-
face, little in common with that reconstructed for the alleged ‘Indo-European homeland’ (on
the basis of implications drawn from shared vocabulary in recorded Indo-European languages)
as presented in numerous articles and monographs over the last half-century. For one thing, it
was pre-equestrian, suggesting a separation from the community ancestral to the historically
attested Indo-European peoples, at some point before the beginning of the fourth millennium
B.C. This is a date preceding, or coincident with, the break-up of Proto-Indo-European.
Moreover, in terms of material culture, there is nothing in the archaeological or historical re-
cord that would allow us to identify one of the early peoples of Mesopotamia as patently

1
In each of my previous articles I have sought to explain that the terms ‘Euphratean’ (for the culture and society)
and ‘Euphratic’ (for the language) were chosen for convenience – that is, for lack of a better term – and do not
reflect a theoretical unity or relationship with Landsberger’s 1944 ‘Proto-Euphratic’ substrate, nor an affiliation
to Oppenheim’s 1964 ‘Euphrates Valley’ civilization. I referred in my first article (Whittaker 1998: 114) to
“this Indo-European language, which I shall henceforth call Euphratic in deference to (but also in distinction
from) Landsberger.” In my next paper (Whittaker 2001: 41 n. 9), I wrote: “Neither this term [Euphratic] nor its
referent should be confused with the ‘Proto-Euphratic’ substrate proposed by Landsberger.” Despite such dis-
claimers, and despite personal exchanges with him on this matter in 2002, Rubio (most recently, 2005a: 323-324)
persists in misrepresenting my position, alleging that “Whittaker attempts to identify the pre-Sumerian substra-
tum (Landsberger’s “proto-Euphratic”) with an as yet unknown Indo-European language.” This strategy, which
smacks of gross academic dishonesty, is embraced in order to criticize, as he has done before (Rubio 1999: 6),
the “lack of coherence” of the substrate theory, although there clearly is no such unitary theory shared by Lands-
berger and others – nor any intrinsic reason why there should be one.

Göttinger Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft 10/11 (2004/2005): 119-139

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Indo-European. On the surface, the same can be said – and was originally said – of the Hit-
tites and related Anatolian peoples, who had, by the onset of the historical period, assimilated
to the cultural patterns of the Ancient Near East.
In previous articles I have set out the evidence for Euphratean society in late 4th- and early
3rd-millennium Mesopotamia, which consists (a) of a series of predominantly polysyllabic
loanwords in Sumerian (and, to a lesser extent, in Akkadian), such as nerah ‘snake, adder;
Nerah (snake god),’ from Indo-European *neh1-tr-ah2 ‘snake, adder,’ and (b) of inherited sign
values in the cuneiform writing system descended from the archaic script of the Late Uruk
period (ca. 3200-3000 B.C.; see especially Whittaker 2001), such as pec, an unmotivated
value of the stippled variant of the FISH sign, from IE *peisk- (or *peisc-; see Adams 1997)
‘fish.’ Many of the proposed loanwords have been described in the past by respected As-
syriologists as, variously, “foreign” (e.g. Civil 1964: 88 and, more excessively, Rubio 1999: 6
with regard to the entire inventory of brewing terminology2) or “substrate” terms (e.g. Lands-
berger 1944; 1974; Salonen 1968), origin unknown or unknowable.
In this article, intended only as a brief, preliminary study on the theme, I will now present
evidence for Euphratic influence, not on cultural and societal categories, but on a word class
in the Sumerian language, which, in lieu of a decipherment of the language behind the archaic
tablets of Uruk (see in particular Englund 1998: 73-81), remains the key to the identification
of the Euphrateans and their influence on Mesopotamia of the protohistorical period. I am
referring to the class of Sumerian adjectives, which, I shall argue, preserves a series of loans
from the Euphratic language illustrating the latter’s patterns of word formation and derivation.

The development of Sumerological thought on adjectives

Scholarly literature on Sumerian adjectives is scarce and tentative. Poebel (1923: 61-65),
the father of modern Sumerology, divided adjectives, which as a rule stand directly after
nouns, into (a) “einfache wurzelhafte Adjektiva” identical in form to the roots of intransitive
verbs (e.g. mah ‘magnificent; be magnificent’) and (b) adjectives formed by affixing -a to
the verbal root and thus identical in form to participles (e.g. kug-a ‘shining, pure, holy’ from
kug ‘be shining’). These views are supported in their essence by Falkenstein (1949: I, 57-74;
1964: 41-42), who accords the adjective no independent status. Gragg (1968: 91) draws the
inevitable conclusion that adjectives are a subclass of verbs.

2
Rubio cites not a single example of such brewing terms, nor does he explain how he detects their thoroughly
“foreign” nature, given that several words in this category are either monosyllabic (e.g. kac ‘beer’; cim, an
aromatic substance used in brewing) or (like dida ‘sweet wort’; munu4 ‘malt’) in other ways exhibit what he
calls “well-attested Sumerian patterns.” No potential source of the terminology is even known to him.

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 Kienast (1975) notes the lack of a formal distinction between verbs (more precisely, unaf-
fixed verbal bases or roots), substantives and adjectives, arguing that these classes can only be
recognized in their syntactical context. He introduces the category of “Primäradjektiv” to de-
note the simple (uncompounded) adjectival base without the affix -a. Although he describes
the primary adjective as substantival, he recognizes that its predicative use has much in com-
mon with verbs. One might, however, ask why the absence of -a is crucial for characterizing
the uncompounded form as a primary adjective, whereas the presence of other suffixes, in
particular those normally attached to verbs, presents no such hindrance.
Thomsen (1984: 64), whose grammar of Sumerian represents a major contribution to-
wards making the language (and discussion of the language) accessible to general linguists,
not to mention students of Assyriology, sums up the majority opinion among Sumerologists,
stating that, because of the dual function of some adjectives as verbs in finite and non-finite
forms, adjectives “can therefore also be regarded as a subclass of the category verb.” Attinger
(1993: 148-149, 167-168), following on from Kienast, divides the word class into two sets:
primary adjectives, which are those neither derived from verbs nor followed by the morpheme
-a, and secondary adjectives, which are in effect participles, to which the suffix can be at-
tached. The first set is comparatively rare, constituting a closed class, the second numerous.
For Attinger (1993: 161), like Gragg and Thomsen before him, most adjectives are a subclass
of the verb – he explicitly excepts (in n. 236) only gal ‘big’ and tur ‘small,’ adding mah
elsewhere (1993: 148).
Schretter (1996) brings fresh wind into the sails of Sumerology by drawing into the dis-
cussion new impulses from general linguistics. Inspired by Schachter’s (1985) typological
study of what he calls parts-of-speech systems, Schretter, to some extent echoing Attinger,
reflects on the question as to which word classes in Sumerian can properly be considered
open and which closed. Noting that previous studies had tended to regard the few known ad-
jectives that do not take the suffix -a as an indication that Sumerian lacked an open adjectival
class, whether or not this was always stated explicitly, he refers (1996: 404) to Schachter’s
division of systems with this characteristic into (a) those with a closed class consisting of a
relatively small number of adjectives, and (b) those with no class of adjectives at all. Attinger
has, he remarks, already postulated a closed class composed of the adjectives gal, tur and
mah.
At this point Schretter draws Dixon (1977), a further general linguist and comparativist,
into the fray. According to Dixon’s findings, there is a universal tendency in languages with
closed adjectival classes to have the equivalents of some or all of the following adjectives and

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to have them in the following order: large, small, long, short, new, old, good, bad, black,
white, red, raw, green, unripe. Schretter proceeds to list the Sumerian equivalents for each
(except for ‘raw’ and ‘unripe’), demonstrating in the process that only gal (but cf. Krecher
1993: 87 n. 20) and sa5 ‘red-brown’ are not known to occur with verbal prefixes. This sug-
gests strongly, he argues (1993: 406-407, 411), that Sumerian indeed classified adjectives as a
rather small, closed subclass of the verb.
Black (2002) takes up where Schretter left off. The latter had applied Schachter’s analysis
to Sumerian, identifying (a) nouns and verbs as large, open classes; (b) pronouns, numerals,
and interjections as small, closed classes; and (c) adjectives as, in all likelihood, a small,
closed subclass of verbs. Black, incorporating the insights of Schretter and of Jagersma (un-
published), proposes the following scheme for Sumerian lexical classes:

major classes 1. nouns

2. verbs
minor classes 3. pronouns (“a very small closed class”)
4. adjectives (“a fairly small limited class”)
5. conjunctions (“an extremely small closed class”)
6. interjections (“a very small closed class”)
7. adverbs (“a small closed class”)
8. ideophones (a “very small closed class”)

Black notes (2002: 68) that, as in English, “many Sumerian words can function both as nouns
and verbs, and sometimes also as adjectives.” For him, adjectives are not a mere subclass of
the verb, but instead have autonomous status. Nor are they a homogeneous class. Sumerian
has, he states (2002: 72; similarly, Balke 2002: 31), “few true adjectives” which can function
as nouns but have no corresponding verbs. These are, or at least include: di4-di4-la2 ‘small’
(animate plural only), uru16(-n) ‘high, lofty,’ sis ‘bitter,’ huc(-a) ‘fierce,’ ban3-da ‘junior,’
libir-ra ‘old,’ da-ri2 / du-ri2 ‘long-lasting’ (an Akkadian loanword), idim ‘honoured,’ zid
‘just, good’ (as opposed to zid-da ‘right-handed’), and gab2-bu ‘left-handed.’ Oddly, At-
tinger’s minimal set, consisting of gal, tur, and mah, is not mentioned.
This is indeed a mixed bag: di4-di4-la2 occurs only in reduplicated form, and huc(-a), if
not ban3-da, can optionally take the suffix -a, which, while having no discernible influence
on the meaning in this instance, nevertheless is alleged to be contrastive in the case of zid
‘just, good’ vs. zid-da (for zid-a) ‘right-handed.’ Here Black is following Krecher (1978).
As the passages with zid and zid-da collected by Zschästak (2003: 35-37, without comment)

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abundantly demonstrate, however, there is no such consistently clear-cut distinction in actual
Sumerian literature, where zid-da occurs in an obviously non-right-handed reference to trees,
the heavens, ewes, cows, crowns, commands, and temples.
Furthermore, of these very few “true adjectives,” two are Akkadian loans, the other one
being libir-ra (for libir-a). The implication of the latter form is that libir, unlike huc, re-
quires -a. This is, however, contradicted by lexical texts, where libir occurs both with and
without the suffix (see, e.g., CAD 9: 27). In a major departure from the stance of most of his
predecessors and contemporaries, Black views the co-occurrence of the morpheme -a, the
function of which remains obscure and controversial (cf. Krecher 1993; Yoshikawa 1993), as
no obstacle to the classification of an adjective as “true,” i.e. as primary.
For Black, the adjectival class can be expanded in a number of ways: (a) by (adjectival)
forms that have corresponding verbs; (b) by verbal phrases formed by appending -jal2 ‘being;
having,’ -tuku ‘having,’ -zu ‘knowing,’ or -du/-dug4/-di ‘doing (or the like)’ to a noun or
adjective (see, especially, Black’s unpublished list in his notes on Sumerian hyphenation at
www.etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/edition2/pdf/hyphenprinciples.pdf); and (c) by the employment of
determiners and other nominal modifiers, such as quantifiers, numerals, and demonstratives.
The status of numerals as adjectives rather than nouns, however, remains uncertain.
Edzard (2003: 24-25; 47-48) regards a division of nouns into substantives and adjectives
as “not unproblematic” (sic). What disturbs him is the fact that, unlike substantives, an adjec-
tive such as sikil ‘pure’ cannot be pluralized, whereas, like substantives, it may have the plu-
ral copula attached to it in the meaning ‘they are pure.’ What he is apparently trying to say is
that adjectives cannot be substantivized, something which Attinger (1993: 167-168), for one,
has shown to be false, or that adjectives, even when substantivized, cannot take a plural
marker. This, however, hardly makes a subdivision of nouns problematical. It is precisely
such differences which allow us to make lexical distinctions, even when the categories have
otherwise much in common. Dixon (1994: 29-30) has, for example, argued that even when
adjectives have almost all features in common with verbs it is the differences that allow us to
recognize the autonomous status of adjectives.
Edzard, who as a rule only acknowledges Thomsen (1984) when he is criticizing her,
takes the latter to task for considering adjectives a subclass of the verb, remarking, that “ad-
jectival bases can often be turned into verbal bases, but this can hardly be stated as a general
overriding rule.” But as already shown above, a number of his colleagues have amply demon-
strated that it is the rare exception, rather than the rule, that an adjective has no verbal coun-
terpart or cannot be transformed into a verb.

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 The most recent – and by far the longest – work on adjectives in Sumerian is a dissertation
from the University of Innsbruck (Zschästak 2003). Its author set out, under Schretter’s su-
pervision, to determine the nature of the adjectival class, examining for this purpose both the
available corpus of Sumerian literature and the material assembled in the two leading diction-
aries of Akkadian, which list Sumerian-Akkadian lexical equivalences in the form in which
they occur in ancient lexical lists. Neither source category is examined thoroughly or system-
atically. Most unusually for a dissertation, and most disappointingly for the subject at hand,
this study lacks (a) an introduction that lays out the strategy of analysis to be pursued, (b) a
discussion of the textual and lexical material assembled (almost entirely without comment) in
the various chapters, and (c) a conclusion that draws the material together and reveals the au-
thor’s results. This in a monograph of some 243 pages, which, nevertheless, does provide a
considerable amount of empirical data of potential use in a future discussion of the subject.
Michałowski (2004: 37), in the last word to date on this complex subject, rounds off the
discussion of adjectives for us in the following manner: “It is generally agreed that Sumerian
had only a limited number of “true” adjectives and that most are uninflected verbs with the
nominalizer -a” and adds, “There are only a handful of adjectives that are not attested as ver-
bal roots, and, for lack of a better analysis, one should maintain that all Sumerian adjectives
are in fact verbs.” One could go further and say that, of the high-frequency adjectives at least,
none is known to never occur with verbal affixes. And with regard to nominalization, it
should be kept in mind that the suffix -a, the distribution and function of which, Michalowski
admits, are unclear, is far from indispensable. The bare adjectival base alone can be, and is
frequently, transformed into a verb or substantive without the addition of derivational affixes:
cf. sukud ‘high,’ sukud ‘be high,’ sukud ‘height.’

Adjectives and the writing system

A final issue to be discussed concerns the double writing, or reduplication, of the adjecti-
val base, which has been a matter of no little controversy since the onset of Sumerological
studies. This phenomenon is regarded by Poebel as indicating plurality or totality (1923: 54-
56; e.g. dingir gal-gal-e-ne ‘the great gods’ or ‘all great gods,’ from gal ‘great,’ with the
substantival plural marker -ene). Falkenstein (1949: I, 72; II, 93) concurs, except with respect
to the reduplication of colour and light terms, in which he discerns an intensification of mean-
ing (e.g. ‘snow-white’ for ‘white’). But, as he also notes, some adjectives (e.g. mah) never
occur in reduplicated form. Jestin (1951: 55-56), on the other hand, suspects in the practice an
expression of the superlative. Thomsen (1984: 65) agrees on a superlative or intensifying

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function (thus, e.g. dingir gal-gal-e-ne ‘the greatest gods,’ where -ene alone expresses
plurality), but cautions that reduplication “may denote different things with different adjec-
tives.”
Attinger (1993: 161, 167), taking issue with Thomsen, argues that the reduplication of
certain primary adjectives (such as gal) following an unreduplicated noun probably marks
plurality in the same way that reduplication of a noun without an accompanying adjective
does. Michałowski (2004: 31) concurs, while Edzard (2003: 25) incorrectly limits reduplica-
tion to dimensional adjectives, as an expression of the plurality of the preceding substantive.
Rubio (2005b: 1046), however, veers away from all other Sumerologists on record in seeing
reduplication as a mere script device for marking the plural. He alleges, “Grammatical num-
ber (plural vs. singular) does not need to be marked in writing (lugal ‘king’ or ‘kings’), but
can be made explicit through suffixation (lugal-e-ne /lugal-ene/ ‘kings’) or reduplication
(lugal-lugal ‘kings’). The absence of marker and lexematic reduplication are probably sim-
ple orthographic conventions to write the plural, as may be indicated by the construction of
plurals with reduplication of the adjective (dingir gal-gal = god-great-great ‘great gods’) or
with reduplication and an additional suffix (dingir gal-gal-e-ne = god-great-great-PLURAL
‘great gods’).” Needless to say, this is an extreme position and hardly warranted by the evi-
dence.
The writing system is more pertinent with respect to a discussion of the adjective kug
‘pure, shining, holy.’ Attinger (1993: 153-154) attempts to explain the anomalous occurrence
of kug before a noun (more accurately, before certain divine names) as that of a noun (kug
‘precious metal’) in apposition. Against his proposal, however, speaks the fact that one can
with equal or greater plausibility derive the noun kug from the adjective kug ‘shining, pure,
holy’ than the reverse, and that a meaning ‘holy’ far better fits the context before a deity’s
name. He then entertains the possibility that in an earlier stage of the language adjectives pre-
ceded the noun, a view that calls his previous conjecture into question. He postulates this
(1993: 154 and n. 199) on the basis of sign groups in which GAL (for gal ‘great, big’) regu-
larly precedes the next grapheme or graphemes (as, for example, in GAL+LU2 for lugal ‘king,’
literally ‘great person’ or, as some prefer, ‘big man’).
This is an interesting observation, considering the fact that sign or word-order reversal is
not just limited to kug and to certain archaic sign groups. In archaic tablets, and not infre-
quently in later texts, numerals precede what they count – the reverse of expected Sumerian
word order. This has been explained away by some (e.g. Edzard 2003: 32) as due to a conven-
tion placing the numeral to the left in lists for ease of tallying or, as Edzard puts it, “for the

125
sake of visual clarity.” The same argument could, of course, be made for placing the numeral
to the right, and justified to the right margin of the column (as we customarily do), where not
only downward tallying would be facilitated but also normal Sumerian reading order pre-
served. Clearly, something else beyond visual clarity is involved here.

Old Sumerian orthography and Indo-European

Old Sumerian tablets from Fara and Ebla provide evidence of further discrepancies be-
tween writing order and reading order relevant to the discussion of adjectives. In an important
paper on unorthographic spellings in a Sumerian word list from Ebla, Krecher (1983) com-
pares four parallel texts, one of which (text D) is unorthographic, that is, it employs syllabic
signs, rather than the standard logograms, to write Sumerian phonetically, whereas the other
three texts (A, B and C) retain standard orthography. It is these three orthographic texts, how-
ever, that are of interest here. While their spelling is conventional, their word order, like that
of the Fara lists before them, is not – at least not for Sumerian (or, for that matter, Akkadian).
What is significant about these texts is the fact that adjectives regularly precede the nouns
they describe, something which only happens in historical Sumerian with one adjective, kug
‘holy,’ and then only before certain divine names. A characteristic example is line 12:

A,B,C: DARK-COLOURED COW

(DARA4) (AB2)
D: ab da-ra
(COW) (DARK-COLOURED)
What is indisputable is the fact that text D records Sumerian. Word order and syllabic spell-
ings make this clear. The aberrant sign (and perhaps word) order of texts A-C suggests, on the
other hand, retention of the patterns of a language in which adjectives and adjectival phrases
precede the noun.
Let us consider another example, this time from line 37:

A: BLACK EWE
(GIKKI) (U8)
D: u3-wi ki-ki
(EWE) (BLACK)
Here we only have the evidence of text A for a sign order at odds with Sumerian word order.
Text B fails to preserve the line. Text C preserves only the first sign, EWE, which indicates
that in this instance the text follows normal Sumerian sign and word order. Note that in text D
the second sign in the word for EWE can be read wi or wa, but a Neo-Sumerian variant of u8

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~ us5 ‘ewe,’ namely u2-ia (from *uwia, with regular loss of w), indicates that Old Sumerian
wi is meant. Here I follow Civil (1982: 13) in reading u3-wi.
A more complex example is found in line 14:

A,C: DARK-COLOURED RIB COW

(DARA4) (TI) (AB2)
D: ab ti da-ra
(COW) (RIB) (DARK-COLOURED)
In this instance the modifying phrase not only precedes the noun but itself consists of the un-
Sumerian sequence ADJECTIVE + NOUN. All of this suggests strongly the influence of another
language, one that has long been suspected to have been spoken in Mesopotamia at the time
of Sumerian settlement (see, e.g., Landsberger 1944; Oppenheim 1977 [1964]: 33-34, 49).
Identification of such a language has until recently been hampered by the lack of recognizably
comparable linguistic evidence. In a number of recent articles (e.g. Whittaker 2001; 2004) I
have now identified this language as a member of the Indo-European family. Typical of Indo-
European languages is the (at least optional) placement of the adjective before the noun. In
Anatolian, Vedic, and Germanic this is the norm, whereas in other languages, such as Greek
and Latin, adjectival placement is more flexible.
Also typical of Indo-European (IE) are so-called bahuvrīhi or possessive compounds, con-
sisting of the sequence ADJECTIVE + NOUN functioning as a compound adjective. Common
instances include a body-part term as the nominal element. Examples (taken from Burrow
1965: 214) in representative members of the IE family are:

Skt. mádhujihva- ‘honey-tongued’

Grk. λευκώλενος ‘white-armed’
Lat. capricornus ‘goat-horned’
OCS. črĭnovlasu ‘black-haired’

This would match the pattern underlying the orthography of our Old Sumerian text, where
DARK-COLOURED + RIB + COW for ‘dark-ribbed cow’ reflects typical bahuvrīhi structure.
There are two further indicators of IE involvement in the development of cuneiform or-
thographic practices. The first involves a loan value in the writing system, the second a set of
loanwords in the adjectival class. The loan value is attached to the sign ONE, which is nor-
mally read ac ‘one’ or dili ‘single,’ but also bears the rare and unmotivated reading semed.
The latter stands out because it is never used in Sumerian or Akkadian texts as a word in the
semantic domain of ONE. Nor is it, for that matter, used in any other domain. Furthermore, its
disyllabic length renders it useless as a phonetic value. Thus, its preservation is a rather fortu-

127
nate coincidence. For it preserves the original Euphratic value of the sign, namely *sem-s
‘one.’ In a series of earlier articles (e.g. Whittaker 2004) I have presented a large body of evi-
dence establishing the correspondence of IE final *s to (Neo-)Sumerian d (a flap alternating in
spellings with r), the Old Sumerian predecessor of which is reflected in early loans into Ak-
kadian as s.
In the Mesopotamian writing system there are a number of signs preserving in this fashion
a set of values inherited from the Euphrateans, to which Sumerian and later Akkadian equiva-
lents were then added. The Japanese writing system, which preserves successive strata of
Chinese loan values from the donor script, has added native equivalents in similar fashion.
The intensive contact and interchange between the three coexisting speech communities in
Southern Mesopotamia and, above all, their use of a shared writing system led to a situation in
which semantic loans abound. As Penny (1991: 260) explains with respect to the intimate
contact between Arabic and Castilian Spanish in the Middle Ages: “Where two words (one
belonging to each of the languages concerned) are approximate translation equivalents, any
additional meaning belonging to one of the words may be transferred to the other.” This is a
very common phenomenon in the interchange between Sumerian and Akkadian, and it ex-
tends to equated logographic values in the writing system.
For an illustration of such parallel values in the cuneiform system, where the semantic
range of equated terms often appears to be identical, we can compare the following two signs
and semantic and phonetic values associated with them:

Sign Euphratic Sumerian Akkadian

ONE: *sem-s ‘one’ sem. → ac ‘one’ iþtën ‘one’
" " phon. → semed
dili ‘single’ wëdu ‘do.’

DOG: *wLq-o-s ‘wolf’ sem. → ur ‘canine’ kalbu ‘dog’

" " phon. → lig/k lig/k
*tWeis- ‘agitate’ sem./phon. → tec2 ‘come to shame’ ba’äþu ‘do.’
*tWis-i- ‘sparkle; sem./phon. → tec2 ‘dignity, baþtu ‘do.’
excitement, impetuosity’ good looks, pride’

In the sign for ONE *sem-s has been replaced semantically for the purpose of writing Sumerian
and Akkadian by ac and iþtën respectively, but its pronunciation has been adapted to Sumer-
ian and preserved as an isolated value in a list of sign values recorded by Mesopotamian

128
scribes. The same has happened to *wLq-o-s ‘wolf’ (perhaps ‘canine’ in Euphratic), replaced
by words for ‘canine’ and ‘dog’ in Sumerian and Akkadian respectively, but preserved as the
phonetic value lig/k in the cuneiform syllabary.
The value tec2 of the DOG sign is interesting, given the fact that the name of the dog-star
Sirius in Greek (Σείριος) also derives from IE *tWeis- ‘agitate, excite, spark,’ namely from a
pre-form based on *tWeis-ro-s ‘the blazing, sparkling one.’ The dog-star was often simply
known in Greek as ‘the dog.’ Together with the Mesopotamian evidence, this may suggest a
general Indo-European association of the dog with Sirius.
The archaic convention of writing numerals before the noun and justified to the left is,
thus, a holdover from the proto-cuneiform tradition initiated by speakers of an IE language in
Mesopotamia. The same practice with regard to adjectives, although limited to kug, can
likewise be attributed to Euphratean influence. Syntax and sign values thus come together to
confirm this pre-Sumerian state of affairs. We should not lose track of the fact, however, that
sign order in the early script was quite variable, despite the impressive consistency with
which numerals precede the nouns they quantify. Englund (1998: 81 n. 170) has argued that
archaic sources offering static sequences of two or more signs have a greater value than others
in any discussion of the possible identity of the underlying language. As he stresses, “the
regularity of the sign sequence … is striking, and may be language-bound.”
In recent days, Rubio (2005a: 322-323) has launched an assault on Englund’s (1998: 153 n.
350) assertion that the archaic Pig (or Swine) List provide good examples of the non-
Sumerian word order ADJECTIVE + NOUN, in particular COLOUR ADJECTIVE + NOUN. According
to Rubio, the reverse sequence “seems equally common, as it is dominant on the reverse” and,
thus, “one can hardly agree with Englund’s claim that the (un-Sumerian) order ADJECTIVE +
NOUN is the regular one in the archaic texts.” To an extent Rubio’s critique is valid – the Pig
List has on its obverse only one colour adjective, and this precedes the noun; but on the re-
verse we have three such adjectives, all of them following the noun. Rubio, however, is not
completely honest (or fair) in his representation of Englund’s statements. In the very same
footnote in which he cites the Pig List, Englund first names the Cattle (or Animals) List, and
here we do find consistency: I have counted no less than 14 occurrences of colour adjectives,
all of them preceding the nouns they modify. Moreover, since lists were handed down from
one scribal generation to the next, acquiring additional entries in the process over time, it is
quite possible that the reverse of the Pig List contains very early Sumerian additions and, thus,
reflects Sumerian word order. I have already argued elsewhere (Whittaker 2001) that Eu-
phratic was dominant in Uruk IV, the earlier phase of the archaic texts, but that the following

129
phase, Uruk III, the period from which both lists come, already shows indications of a Sumer-
ian presence in the form of rare phonetic complements.
Let us now look in more detail at the question of external influences on the adjectival class
itself in Sumerian.

Adjectival loans from Akkadian

As we have seen above, a number of Assyriologists have emphasized in recent years the
limited size of what they regard as a closed class of Sumerian adjectives. Schretter and Black
have cited Dixon on this point. It should, however, be noted that Dixon (1994: 34) puts an
upper limit on such closed classes – “anything between about five and around one hundred.”
If, however, we tally the incomplete number of Sumerian adjectives brought together (but not
systematically counted or discussed) in Zschästak (2003) we arrive at a figure well beyond the
hundred mark, suggesting an upper limit below two hundred in texts and lexical lists. Many of
the recorded adjectives are infrequent in the literature.
In this limited class are several Akkadian loans (here written morphologically): dari(-a)
‘everlasting’ (< däriu), gin-a ‘normal’ (< ginû), gin(-a) ‘correct, true’ (< kïnu), libir(-a) ‘old’
(< labïru), neh-a ‘secure, calm’ (< nëhu), silim(-a) ‘healthy; favourable’ (< þalmu), sumur
‘violent, fierce’ (< þamru), and perhaps sa5(-a) ‘red-brown’ (< sämu), for which Steiner (2003:
634) creates the ad hoc value samx. The forms libir, silim, and sumur, which have under-
gone assimilation of the unstressed first vowel to the stressed second, show that Akkadian
verbal adjectives were borrowed in the unaffixed base form preserved in the feminine singular:
labir, þalim, and þamur, not in the standard masculine citation form. This has not, to my
knowledge, been recognized in the Assyriological literature to date.

Colour adjectives of Indo-European origin

Colour adjectives in Sumerian are a small native set that, on the whole, appears to betray
neither Akkadian nor IE affinities. Notable exceptions involve terms for red. As we have seen,
Steiner has proposed an Akkadian origin for sa5(-a) ‘red-brown’ and in recent publications
IE etymologies have been put forward for both huc ‘red; angry’ (Whittaker 1998: 138) and
dara4 ‘dark-coloured, dark red’ (Whittaker 2001: 20; 2004: 405). The correspondences are as
follows:

huc(u) ~ ruc ‘red, ruddy; angry’ IE *h1rusto-s ‘red, ruddy’

The Sumerian term, borrowed into Akkadian as huþþû ~ ruþþû, appears to derive from an IE
dialect form in which the first of the two adjacent dental stops of earlier Proto-Indo-European

130
*h1ruD-to-s has resulted in a sibilant, a sound change known, for example, from Germanic.
The colour adjective is used, among other things, to describe gold and honey, suggesting the
meaning ‘ruddy.’ Neo-Sumerian (NS) phonetic spellings of the term are: hu-cu2 ~ hu-uc ~
ru-uc (SLOBA 334; CAD 6: 261-262; 14: 427-429).

dara(h)4 ‘dark-coloured, dark red’ IE *Dorg-ah2 ‘dark-coloured, red’

Steinkeller (1989: 3) has shown that this adjective was phonetically identical with the animal
name durah ~ dara3 ‘fallow deer’ (as identified in Civil 1983: 55/60 at line 107), which is
itself from IE *(d)Jork-ah2 ‘roe-deer.’ The Semiticized form of the Old Sumerian sign name,
written de3-ri-hum (with the Semitic suffix -um), preserves the laryngeal final. The IE term
may have been borrowed with the collective/feminine suffix -ah2 attached because of the ad-
jective’s employment in administrative documents describing cows, as above in the Old
Sumerian text discussed by Krecher. NS da-ra > dar4 (Steinkeller 1989: 3; CAD 3: 74).
The second colour adjective follows an interesting pattern in Sumerian loans from Indo-
European. All other probable loans from Euphratic with –ah2 are nouns, where the suffix
could simply be the (pre-gender) marker of a particular word class. An argument for gender,
rather than word class, in Euphratic can be based on the fact that the adjective was borrowed,
not with the unmarked (and later masculine) suffix –(o)s preserved on a number of other prob-
able loans from Euphratic, but instead with –ah2, which in later Indo-European is commonly
associated with feminine gender. The regular pattern of the –ah2 correspondences between
Sumerian and Indo-European can be observed in the following list:

durah ~ dara(h)3 ‘fallow deer’ IE *(d)Jork-ah2 ‘roe-deer’

Traditionally, durah has been translated ‘ibex,’ a variation on this being Steinkeller’s (1989:
3) ‘Persian wild goat, bezoar.’ Civil (1983: 55/60 at line 107), translates the term as ‘fallow
deer,’ while the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature fluctuates between ‘fallow
deer’ and the more traditional ‘ibex’ (see the discussion of the animal name in Whittaker 2001:
19-20). Note the reduction of the medial r cluster to r. This is the norm in the environment of
a velar or dental stop. The IE term is attested in Celtic, Germanic (metathesized), and in
Greek. Given its shape, it may well be a loanword in IE itself. Significantly, though, it is seg-
mentable in IE but not in Sumerian, a fact which establishes the direction of borrowing. NS
du-ra-ah ~ da-ra-ah! ~ ta-ra-ah > da-ra > da-ar2 (SLOBA 153; AHw 1372).

nerah ‘snake, adder; Nerah (god)’ IE *neh1-tr-ah2 ‘snake, adder’

131
Like the deer term, this IE snake word is a western dialect form, with cognates in Italic, Celtic
and Germanic, the closest parallels being to the latter. Such areally restricted words suggest
that Euphratic was an early ‘western’ IE dialect (from the period prior to dispersal of the his-
torically known western groups), since a considerable number of terms attested as probable
loans in Sumerian are only, or are best, attested in Italic, Celtic, Germanic, and/or Balto-
Slavic. O(ld)S ne-ra-[ah] (at Ebla, in the spelling of the town Nerah, named after the snake
deity) > NS ni-ra-ah ~ Emesal ce-ra-ah (with c from palatalized initial n; Schretter 1990:
255; MacEwan 1983: 215 n. 6; CAD 11/II: 259).
Despite such repeated statements on my part, both in print (most recently, in Whittaker
2004: 416-417; 2005: 424) and in personal exchanges with Rubio, the latter (Rubio 2005a:
328) yet again misrepresents my position by conveying the impression that I had failed to
notice and fathom the consequences of this areal tendency. He writes: “As in the case of the
Indo-European term for “fish”, this is a dialectal word attested only in western Indo-European
languages, which heavily undermines Whittaker’s proposal.” Unfortunately, Rubio has been
unable (or unwilling) to grasp the fact that I am not, and have never been, claiming that the IE
language in contact with Sumerian was Proto-Indo-European itself, but rather a very early IE
dialect from the area of the IE continuum, out of which the later western dialects emerged.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Proto-Indo-European (or Sumerian, or any other
language spoken over an extended area, for that matter) was a monolith lacking the dialectal
diversification characteristic of documented languages.3

zarah ‘grief, worry; dirge; vulva; eczema’ IE *surG-ah2 ‘grief, worry; illness’

Another example of the reduction of a medial r + velar/dental cluster. The vowel of the first
syllable has undergone assimilation to that of the (stressed) second, as we have seen earlier in
the case of the Akkadian loans. NS za-ra-ah (CAD 9: 102; 11/II: 274).

zarah ‘stork’ IE *sRg-ah2 ‘stork’

Witczak (1991: 106-107) has argued for derivation of the Germanic term for the stork from
*sRg-os. For this he finds cognates in Greek (in the second half of the compound πελᾱργóς

3
Among “innumerous [sic] matters of detail” alluded to but not specified for criticism by Rubio (2005a: 328-329)
is his astounding claim that “all his [Whittaker’s] Indo-European loanwords would have been borrowed as pure
roots, which implies that Whittaker’s Sumerians had to be quite familiar with Indo-European linguistics.” As the
examples in my articles show, however, not simply “pure roots” but stems with derivational suffixes – and
sometimes even inflections (nom., acc., voc.) – are in evidence in most of the proposed loans, although these are
often eroded over time. Unfortunately, Rubio’s emotional and mocking tone too often gets in the way of his
scholarly judgement, and sweeping denunciations take the place of polite and reasoned argumentation. By way
of example, I am portrayed in his current article as a “practitioner” of “fictional linguistics” with “intellectual
anxieties,” obsessing over a “ghostly substratum” on my quest for the “Grail of primordial Indo-European-ness”!

132
‘stork’) and in Indic (in the name of a wading bird). The Euphratic term has merely replaced
the word-class or gender suffix -(o)s with -ah2. Here, too, we see regular reduction of the me-
dial cluster. NS za-ra-ah (CAD 9: 102).
A further colour adjective is preserved in the Sumerian word lugud ‘pus.’ This is a prob-
able loan from IE *leuk-o-s ‘clear, white.’ It is written BLOOD+WHITE and is exactly parallel to
adama ~ adamu, an Akkadian loan written BLOOD+BLACK ‘black blood’ (< Akk. adamu
‘blood’; cf. adamatu ‘black blood’). The correspondence of IE final *s to (Neo-)Sumerian d (a
flap alternating in spellings with r) is regular, as mentioned above in connection with semed,
and many instances of this preserved affix are cited in previous publications (Whittaker 1998;
2001; 2004). The one exception with final s unchanged is us5 for ‘ewe’ (OS u3-wi, as in the
Ebla text cited earlier, from h2ow-i-s), and this is because it is protected non-finally in the
compound usduha ‘sheep and goats, small cattle’ (Whittaker 2001: 23). NS lu-gud ~ lu-
gu-ud (CAD 1/I: 94; 17/II: 63-64).
Let us now come back to the wayward adjective kug ‘shining; pure; holy,’ which, alone
among Sumerian adjectives, can precede nouns, specifically divine names. The term lends
itself to comparison with Old Indic śúci- ‘shining bright, gleaming; pure’ from an earlier
*ceuk-i-s ‘glowing bright, white,’ related to śuklá- ‘light, white; pure’ from *cuk-ló-s. We see
this IE root again in Grk. κύκνoς ‘swan,’ from *cuk-no-s ‘the shining white one’ (IEW 597;
Watkins 2000: 41; LIV 294-295). Accordingly, kug in the meaning ‘metal; silver’ is to be
seen as a nominalized adjective, ‘the shiny (material),’ a view commonly held in Assyriology
(see, e.g., SLOBA 410). NS kug-g(a) > ku-u2 (CAD 4: 102-103; 8: 245; SLOBA 410).
A discussion of the entire range of evidence for IE adjectival loans in Sumerian, among
which dimensional adjectives figure prominently, would be too lengthy for inclusion here.
This will have to be taken up in detail elsewhere. As a small indicator of the kinds of corre-
spondences involved, the following list will suffice for the moment:

lubi (written lu-bi/be2) ‘beloved’ (a IE *leuB-e (voc. masc.) ‘oh beloved’

term of address in Sumerian love poetry)
subi ‘shining (in heavenly contexts)’ *s(e)up-i-s ‘pure; reserved for sacred use’
hamun ‘joining together (of birds, *h2ar-mön ‘joining together’
whirlwinds); harmonious (of languages)’
d/telmun ‘weighty, important; (topon.)’ *telh2-mön ‘weighty’
dugud ~ tukur ‘heavy, dense’ *tNG-ú-s ‘heavy’
gurud (OS, wr. gu-ru12-ud) > gur4 *FRh2-ú-s ‘heavy’
‘heavy, thick’

133
huluh ‘frightening, terrifying,’ *h3olh1-o-wo-s ‘destructive,’
cf. hul ‘destroy’ from *h3olh1- ‘destroy’
ukur (wr. uku2-r) ‘poor (person); (class *N-cuh2-ro-s ‘lacking authority/rights,
of society)’ powerless’
dug3(u) ‘sweet; good’ *dLk-ú-s (or *dluk-ú-s) ‘sweet’
gig ‘bitter’ *gif-ú-s ‘bitter; rancid, sour’
mah ‘great, big; full-grown; much’ *mefh2(-ó)-s ‘great, big,’ cf. Skt. mahä-;
(cf. Akk. magal ‘very much, greatly’) *mefh2-l- ‘greatly’
gal ~ gul-a ‘great, big’ *golh-ó-s ‘powerful, great’
tur ‘small; ill; young’ *tRh2-ú-s ‘gentle; weak; young’
s(a)kar ‘pointed’ (sk- if compounded) *skor-ó-s ‘pointed, cut’
cakar ‘pure, holy’ *sH2k-ró-s ‘sacred’

To conclude: at least four IE colour adjectives are preserved as loanwords in Sumerian,

three of them as adjectives (huc, dara(h)4, kug) and one in nominalized form (lugud).
Furthermore, one adjective occurs in Sumerian in the exceptional order ADJECTIVE + NOUN

(kug), reminiscent of the practice in the proto-cuneiform Cattle List and, of course, in Indo-
European. This, together with the fact that a numeral value (semed) is also attested in the
inherited writing system, suggests strongly that the latter’s predecessor, the proto-cuneiform
script with its un-Sumerian sign order, was employed first as a tool for writing administrative
documents in an Indo-European language, or, to be more precise, in Euphratic.

Abbreviations

AHw von Soden, Wolfram. 1965-1981. Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. Wiesbaden: Otto

Harrassowitz.
CAD Oppenheim, A. Leo et al. (eds.), 1956 – . The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental In-
stitute of the University of Chicago. Chicago: Oriental Institute / Glückstadt: J. J. Au-
gustin Verlagsbuchhandlung.
IEW Pokorny, Julius. 1959. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bd. 1. Bern/
München: Francke Verlag.
LIV Rix, Helmut et al. (eds.), 1998. LIV: Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. Die Wur-
zeln und ihre Primärstammbildungen. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag.
SLOBA Lieberman, Stephen J. 1977. The Sumerian Loanwords in Old Babylonian Akkadian.
Vol. 1. Missoula: Scholars Press.

134
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