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Book
Analysing Literary Sumerian
Graham Cunningham, Jarle Ebeling
This book brings together pioneering studies on the world's oldest literature, composed in the extinct language Sumerian and written on clay in the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script. All the contributions are based on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the Faculty... Read more
Published: 2007
Pages: 427
eBook: 9781845532291
This book brings together pioneering studies on the world's oldest literature, composed in the extinct language Sumerian and written on clay in the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script. All the contributions are based on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University whose focus is on the best documented period of Sumerian literature, compositions recorded some 4,000 years ago in southern Iraq. The ETCSL consists of transliterations and translations of nearly 400 compositions and is accessible via the Internet. It is the only linguistically annotated and translated corpus of an ancient Near Eastern language. Each of the main chapters in the book uses the ETCSL to approach a specific question relating to one or more compositions in the corpus, exploiting the possibilities the corpus offers for quantitative research and statistical analysis. In addition to these case studies, the book includes introductions to Sumerian literary language and corpus-linguistic approaches to research, as well as a catalogue of compositions. The material, methods, and results will appeal to those interested in Sumerian, ancient literature, and the analysis of languages using a corpus.
| Cover | Cover | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Contents | v | ||
| Preface | vii | ||
| Contributors | x | ||
| Abbreviations | xi | ||
| Symbols and conventions | xiii | ||
| Chronological table | xiv | ||
| Introduction | 1 | ||
| Corpora, corpus linguistics and the ETCSL | 33 | ||
| The vocabulary of literary Sumerian: a corpus-driven investigation | 51 | ||
| In the company of ni2 'self' and 'fear(someness)' | 70 | ||
| Pre-verbal /n/: function, distribution, and stability | 105 | ||
| The meaning and function of multiword-verb combinations with and without ak 'to do' | 144 | ||
| On divine-referent bull metaphors in the ETCSL corpus | 184 | ||
| Gendered literacy and numeracy in the Sumerian literary corpus | 215 | ||
| The polysemy and productivity of the formative element nam | 250 | ||
| A quantitative analysis of the Sumerian proverb collection | 273 | ||
| Variation in the multiword expression igi bar | 316 | ||
| A catalogue of Sumerian literature | 351 |