From: PASAlist@aol.com
Date: Fri Nov 08 2002 - 18:25:09 EST
Lucien wrote,
<< I don't know much about Semitic grammar, and nothing about Sumerian, but
its
still quite possible to do with out tense, persons, and cases. Chinese for
example has some other grammar but none of these, and its quite common for
pidgin languages to have only sparse grammar. Yet these languages are still
quite capable of poetic narrative.
Here's my attempt to render your quote with minimal grammatical content:
"Now serpent be subtle over all field beast Jehovah God make. And he say
woman, 'Yea, God say, Ye eat of no garden tree, or no?'"
If someone were used to reading English without the more grammatical words
and morphemes, they could probably adjust atleast as well as if you took out
all whitespace and punctuation. >>
I did not intend to be exhaustive when I mentioned the lack of tense,
persons, and cases in Archaic Sumerian (3200 to 3000). There seems to also be
a very limited number of verbs and ideograms (like where a picture of the sun
means "light"). Gen 3:1 would have no "_he_ say" and no "_ye_ eat" probably
no "subtle" and maybe no "over." Whatever might be the case, Gen 1-4 would
look a lot different than it does and not be nearly as clear.
Since the information I have on Archaic Sumerian is only that which is
reasonably available, I thought it worthwhile to query a Sumerian/Akkadian
expert myself. So I emailed Dr. Robert Englund at the U of Calif and
specifically asked him about Genesis:
"Dear Dr. Englund,
I understand you are an expert in Sumerian, and I hope you can answer a
question I have about Archaic Sumerian, the pictographs usually dated c. 3200
to 3000 B.C. I know that no narrative has been found that early and that they
are largely just accounting records. But, if someone wanted to write
narrative with them, could they have done so? Could Genesis 1-3, for example,
have been written using the proto-cuneiform of that period?"
He replied,
" Paul,
We are not well positioned to judge the capability of proto-cuneiform
to write involved narratives. I would guess that as a primarily
logographic script this stage of cuneiform would not have been able
to express the syntactical subtleties of Genesis, but there was a
text favored in the latter 3rd millennium we call "Tribute List" that
might represent the earliest example of literature known. The second
half of that text consists almost entirely of signs with no
logographic referents and therefore might represent narrative
language. We hope that further work on these texts will aid in better
answering your interesting question. By the way, we also cannot say
with certainly whether these earlier texts were in Sumerian; my view
is that they were probably not, but represented a language entirely
unknown to us."
Until more concrete information is forthcoming, I will leave it at that.
Paul
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