Observations on Grammatical Variation in Sumerian Literary Texts

Abstract

Standing in the way of a grammatical investigation of Sumerian based on the literary texts from the OB period is the problem of the myriads of variants involving grammatical elements, particularly -nand -b-, in pre-verb-stem position. This article attempts to determine whether there are any patterns or regularities involved in these variants, and whether criteria can be evolved for evaluating attested variants. To this end a measure of the relative stability of grammatical elements in the OB Sumerian texts is developed (I), a general picture is given of variation in the sample corpus (II), and a number of factors possibly influencing variation are discussed (III). The existence of a relatively stable, grammatically informed tradition is concluded.