“My father’s brothers loved the hills” - Semitic in Sumerian before and after Akkad

Abstract

The life and deeds of Sargon of Akkad represent the epitome of the political rise of Semitic peoples in the regions once controlled by Sumer (Zettler 2003). While theories of socio-ethnic conflict between Sumerians and Semites have long since been abandoned (Jacobsen 1939a), in the studies of Sumerian‒ Semitic linguistic contact, the perception of the ‘conquest’ attracts the scholarly attention toward the legacy of the Sumerian substratum in the Semitic superstratum (Woods 2006). While the absorption of lexical, morphological, and syntactic features from Sumerian into East and West Semitic languages has been extensively documented and studied (Zólyomi 2012), Semitic influences in Sumerian have received less attention, especially regarding West Semitic. Here I propose some possible West Semitic lexical borrowings in Sumerian, also discussing those previously offered by other authors (Emelianov 2009, 2010, 2011; Rubio 1999). This study is not comprehensive; it is based on sample observations conducted on the corpus of the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. Keywords: Sumerian, Semitic, West Semitic, Arabic, language contact