dteleki (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dteleki) wrote,@ 2005-10-30 20:18:00 |
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They Don't Make Dictionaries Of Sumerian Like They Used To
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One of the happiest memories of my life is the afternoon when my grandmother, Suzanne Teleki, explained to me Why They Don't Make Dictionaries Of Sumerian Like They Used To And Why Decades-Old Sumerian Dictionaries Are So Vastly Much Better. It was a very long, very detailed, and very abstract explanation. I was fascinated. In hindsight, I am amazed that at that age I was even able to follow her explanation, and able to enjoy it so much. As I understood it, The Problem With Newfangled Sumerian Dictionaries goes something like this....
Older dictionaries of Sumerian tend to contain vast quantities of hand-drawn illustrations of Sumerian cuneiform script -- symbols formed from triangle-shaped dents of various sizes and shapes, dents made by pushing a wedge-shaped stylus into the surface of a wet clay tablet. Newer dictionaries, by contrast, tend to reduce or even eliminate the hand-drawn illustrations in favor of phonetic Roman-alphabet transliterations; in effect, the writers of newer dictionaries pre-digest everything for you, making all sorts of judgments for you on your behalf about what things mean, in the process destroying the evidence so you cannot see what assumptions they made or why, and you have no way to second-guess those assumptions or to decide for yourself.
This is a problem, Grandma explained, because the Sumerian writing system contains all sorts of ambiguities; the compilers of newer Sumerian dictionaries would have you believe that everything is now understood and resolved, and Sumerian documents can be read and understood and translated with confidence; but she contended that this is dangerously misleading, and that as a result, many translations of Sumerian documents that are presented with complacent confidence are in fact wildly wrong.
Sumerian cuneiform writing is basically ideograms, except that it is also a syllabary, with many of the ideogram symbols doing double-duty as syllable symbols, and the only way to tell which role a particular symbol is playing is to figure it out from the context. But of course the context is also ambiguous, in exactly the same way. Two additional problems make the ambiguities even worse: the Sumerian language contains vast numbers of words that sound exactly the same even though they have completely unrelated meanings (i.e. homophones), and the standards for drawing the symbols drifted considerably over the centuries.
Imagine that the English language has a similar writing system. (The specifics here are a simplified example that I invented, not Grandma’s original explanation, which was more abstract and general, with many books and essays and dictionaries and photographs of cuneiform tablets waved about.)
Suppose, then, that a stylized picture of a bee represents either the insect "bee", or the sound of the syllable /bee/, or the word that sounds like /bee/ that means "to exist" (to be). And a stylized picture of a deer represents either the animal "deer", or the sound of the syllable /deer/, or the word that sounds like /deer/ that means "precious" (dear). The symbols [deer] [bee] put together also represent the similar-sounding word "Derby", which can be a place in England "Derby", the horse-racing contest held there "the Derby", a style of small round men’s hat that originated there "a Derby" or a particular hat in this style, or a racing contest in general e.g. "roller derby", "demolition derby". Or [deer] [bee] might represent the name of a "deer-bee", an insect that likes to bother and sting the animal.
While we are at it, over the centuries (in my example) the stylized picture of the bee has evolved into a square with stripes across it and two lines sticking diagonally out of the top like a rabbit-ear antenna to represent the bee’s wings; at the same time that a symbol representing a stylized picture of a prison cell window has turned into a square with the stripes without the rabbit-ears antenna, and it represents the concept "bar" or "bars" meaning "rod" or "rods", and also "chocolate bar", and the syllables /bar/ and /barz/, and by extension the words "barbarian" and "barbaric". And sometimes a scribe drawing the [bee] symbol accidentally leaves off the rabbit-ears antenna, or draws it badly so it is hard to recognize, or the inscription has become damaged; so that the [bee] symbol more or less looks like a [barred-window] symbol, even though that is not what the scribe intended. And sometimes the [barred-window] symbol grows a decoration that looks vaguely like the rabbit-ears, due to style drift. And sometimes the symbol for "television", a square with rabbit-ears and no stripes, grows one or more stripes after all, or acquires damage that looks like stripes, and sometimes the [bee] and [barred-window] symbols lose some or all of their stripes due to style drift, or the stripes become damaged so it is hard to tell if they are stripes or not.
And on and on and on.
So (in my simplified example) an inscription that looks more or less like this:
. [human-eye] [grabbing-hand] [deer] [bee]
might with equal plausibility mean any of the following:
. I’m grabbing a Derby hat.
. Look at convenient precious existence ("convenient" = "handy").
. I captured a deer-barbarian (barbarian of the Deer tribe).
. Search by feeling around for (i.e. look-grabbing) a Deer-brand chocolate bar.
. I own (i.e. have) a deer-bee (insect that pesters the animal).
. I operate (i.e. have) a Dior-brand liquor-serving restaurant (i.e. a bar, tee-hee).
And more, and worse.
Wikipedia gives an example of a line from a real Sumerian tablet describing how to make beer: the excitingly highfalutin initial translation of
. "thou real producer of the lightning, exalted functionary, mighty one!"
is now believed to really mean the mundane but much more practical
. "you are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat (to cool)."
The fancier translation does not reflect a gross incompetence on the part of the original translator; it is the end result of a small amount of ignorance due to the primitive state of the art of Sumerian translations at the time, but horribly compounded by an entirely understandable series of mistakes caused by the ambiguities of the writing system itself.
But newfangled Sumerian dictionaries recklessly tell you with great certainty what everything is supposed to mean, as if everything were now understood, and as if no significant ambiguities remained.
If this sort of thing interests you, Wikipedia has some good articles about it:
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliter
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_l
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumeri
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcript
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliter
My "deer bee" example should help you in understanding all the technicalities that Wikipedia throws at you. Note that Wikipedia uses the word "transcription" with two completely different meanings, without emphasizing that it is doing so: "transcription" (re Sumerian in particular), meaning making supposedly-accurate line drawings of cuneiform symbols; and "transcription" (re linguistics in general), meaning creating a written document from a spoken or written source that might be in a different language or writing system. Wikipedia also describes a similar problem involving transliteration versus transcription-(re linguistics in general); a problem that is distinct from Grandma’s problem with transliteration versus transcription-(re Sumerian in particular)-of-tablets-by-making-accurat
Grandma never actually wrote up an explanation like my "deer bee" example -- because, she said, the argument had already been won decades ago somehow (she never explained how) by the Newfangled Hubristically Overconfident People (my phrase, not hers); so there was no point arguing the general principle guiding the dictionaries, and her effort was best spent arguing about specific mistranslations, such as mistranslations of lines from the Epic Of Gilgamesh (one of her specialties).
Grandma’s native language was Hungarian; although she claimed that her writing style in French was quite clear, her writing style in English was very clumsy indeed. When I was in high school, Grandma would often bring papers-in-progress with her when she visited, and she would ask me for help with copy-editing them for style. She did the same when she visited my cousins. Some of these papers, worked on by several of us in succession, were later published (in very obscure journals) or presented at conferences of Orientalist societies. My cousins and I have many happy memories of discussing "coo-nay-ee-form" with Grandma.
Years later, when I read Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel Snow Crash, which has Sumerian language and culture as one of its themes, I tripped over a throwaway line to the effect that only about 50 people in the world (the futuristic world of the novel) can read Sumerian. And I knew...
One of the 50, in all the world, was Grandma.
###
.
One of the happiest memories of my life is the afternoon when my grandmother, Suzanne Teleki, explained to me Why They Don't Make Dictionaries Of Sumerian Like They Used To And Why Decades-Old Sumerian Dictionaries Are So Vastly Much Better. It was a very long, very detailed, and very abstract explanation. I was fascinated. In hindsight, I am amazed that at that age I was even able to follow her explanation, and able to enjoy it so much. As I understood it, The Problem With Newfangled Sumerian Dictionaries goes something like this....
Older dictionaries of Sumerian tend to contain vast quantities of hand-drawn illustrations of Sumerian cuneiform script -- symbols formed from triangle-shaped dents of various sizes and shapes, dents made by pushing a wedge-shaped stylus into the surface of a wet clay tablet. Newer dictionaries, by contrast, tend to reduce or even eliminate the hand-drawn illustrations in favor of phonetic Roman-alphabet transliterations; in effect, the writers of newer dictionaries pre-digest everything for you, making all sorts of judgments for you on your behalf about what things mean, in the process destroying the evidence so you cannot see what assumptions they made or why, and you have no way to second-guess those assumptions or to decide for yourself.
This is a problem, Grandma explained, because the Sumerian writing system contains all sorts of ambiguities; the compilers of newer Sumerian dictionaries would have you believe that everything is now understood and resolved, and Sumerian documents can be read and understood and translated with confidence; but she contended that this is dangerously misleading, and that as a result, many translations of Sumerian documents that are presented with complacent confidence are in fact wildly wrong.
Sumerian cuneiform writing is basically ideograms, except that it is also a syllabary, with many of the ideogram symbols doing double-duty as syllable symbols, and the only way to tell which role a particular symbol is playing is to figure it out from the context. But of course the context is also ambiguous, in exactly the same way. Two additional problems make the ambiguities even worse: the Sumerian language contains vast numbers of words that sound exactly the same even though they have completely unrelated meanings (i.e. homophones), and the standards for drawing the symbols drifted considerably over the centuries.
Imagine that the English language has a similar writing system. (The specifics here are a simplified example that I invented, not Grandma’s original explanation, which was more abstract and general, with many books and essays and dictionaries and photographs of cuneiform tablets waved about.)
Suppose, then, that a stylized picture of a bee represents either the insect "bee", or the sound of the syllable /bee/, or the word that sounds like /bee/ that means "to exist" (to be). And a stylized picture of a deer represents either the animal "deer", or the sound of the syllable /deer/, or the word that sounds like /deer/ that means "precious" (dear). The symbols [deer] [bee] put together also represent the similar-sounding word "Derby", which can be a place in England "Derby", the horse-racing contest held there "the Derby", a style of small round men’s hat that originated there "a Derby" or a particular hat in this style, or a racing contest in general e.g. "roller derby", "demolition derby". Or [deer] [bee] might represent the name of a "deer-bee", an insect that likes to bother and sting the animal.
While we are at it, over the centuries (in my example) the stylized picture of the bee has evolved into a square with stripes across it and two lines sticking diagonally out of the top like a rabbit-ear antenna to represent the bee’s wings; at the same time that a symbol representing a stylized picture of a prison cell window has turned into a square with the stripes without the rabbit-ears antenna, and it represents the concept "bar" or "bars" meaning "rod" or "rods", and also "chocolate bar", and the syllables /bar/ and /barz/, and by extension the words "barbarian" and "barbaric". And sometimes a scribe drawing the [bee] symbol accidentally leaves off the rabbit-ears antenna, or draws it badly so it is hard to recognize, or the inscription has become damaged; so that the [bee] symbol more or less looks like a [barred-window] symbol, even though that is not what the scribe intended. And sometimes the [barred-window] symbol grows a decoration that looks vaguely like the rabbit-ears, due to style drift. And sometimes the symbol for "television", a square with rabbit-ears and no stripes, grows one or more stripes after all, or acquires damage that looks like stripes, and sometimes the [bee] and [barred-window] symbols lose some or all of their stripes due to style drift, or the stripes become damaged so it is hard to tell if they are stripes or not.
And on and on and on.
So (in my simplified example) an inscription that looks more or less like this:
. [human-eye] [grabbing-hand] [deer] [bee]
might with equal plausibility mean any of the following:
. I’m grabbing a Derby hat.
. Look at convenient precious existence ("convenient" = "handy").
. I captured a deer-barbarian (barbarian of the Deer tribe).
. Search by feeling around for (i.e. look-grabbing) a Deer-brand chocolate bar.
. I own (i.e. have) a deer-bee (insect that pesters the animal).
. I operate (i.e. have) a Dior-brand liquor-serving restaurant (i.e. a bar, tee-hee).
And more, and worse.
Wikipedia gives an example of a line from a real Sumerian tablet describing how to make beer: the excitingly highfalutin initial translation of
. "thou real producer of the lightning, exalted functionary, mighty one!"
is now believed to really mean the mundane but much more practical
. "you are the one who spreads the roasted malt on a large mat (to cool)."
The fancier translation does not reflect a gross incompetence on the part of the original translator; it is the end result of a small amount of ignorance due to the primitive state of the art of Sumerian translations at the time, but horribly compounded by an entirely understandable series of mistakes caused by the ambiguities of the writing system itself.
But newfangled Sumerian dictionaries recklessly tell you with great certainty what everything is supposed to mean, as if everything were now understood, and as if no significant ambiguities remained.
If this sort of thing interests you, Wikipedia has some good articles about it:
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform_
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliter
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_l
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumeri
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcript
. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliter
My "deer bee" example should help you in understanding all the technicalities that Wikipedia throws at you. Note that Wikipedia uses the word "transcription" with two completely different meanings, without emphasizing that it is doing so: "transcription" (re Sumerian in particular), meaning making supposedly-accurate line drawings of cuneiform symbols; and "transcription" (re linguistics in general), meaning creating a written document from a spoken or written source that might be in a different language or writing system. Wikipedia also describes a similar problem involving transliteration versus transcription-(re linguistics in general); a problem that is distinct from Grandma’s problem with transliteration versus transcription-(re Sumerian in particular)-of-tablets-by-making-accurat
Grandma never actually wrote up an explanation like my "deer bee" example -- because, she said, the argument had already been won decades ago somehow (she never explained how) by the Newfangled Hubristically Overconfident People (my phrase, not hers); so there was no point arguing the general principle guiding the dictionaries, and her effort was best spent arguing about specific mistranslations, such as mistranslations of lines from the Epic Of Gilgamesh (one of her specialties).
Grandma’s native language was Hungarian; although she claimed that her writing style in French was quite clear, her writing style in English was very clumsy indeed. When I was in high school, Grandma would often bring papers-in-progress with her when she visited, and she would ask me for help with copy-editing them for style. She did the same when she visited my cousins. Some of these papers, worked on by several of us in succession, were later published (in very obscure journals) or presented at conferences of Orientalist societies. My cousins and I have many happy memories of discussing "coo-nay-ee-form" with Grandma.
Years later, when I read Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel Snow Crash, which has Sumerian language and culture as one of its themes, I tripped over a throwaway line to the effect that only about 50 people in the world (the futuristic world of the novel) can read Sumerian. And I knew...
One of the 50, in all the world, was Grandma.
###
