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To: SunkenCiv
I believe that Sumerian was an agglutinative language. So far as I know no one has established a relationship between Sumerian and any other known language (of course it may have had relatives that went extinct without ever being recorded in writing).

Some people think that Elamite may have been related to the Dravidian languages, but as far as I know that hasn't been proven.

21 posted on 09/22/2008 7:09:40 PM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus

That does ring a bell — seems like some folks have thought they discern agglutinative structure in the very fragmentary surviving Elamite inscriptions. And you’re right, Sumerian was agglutinative. The Sumerians (who called themselves “the black headed people”, if memory serves) gave us cuneiform (possibly as a consequence of the agglutinative nature of their language) which really caught on as a medium for international relations in ancient times, peaking long centuries after the Sumerian and the Sumerians had vanished. There are no known relatives, living or dead, although it one looks around, there are some fringe thinkers who claim otherwise. :’)


25 posted on 09/23/2008 5:59:59 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_______Profile hasn't been updated since Friday, May 30, 2008)
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