You know you're a language nerd when the most surprising thing to you in this thread is that Dravidian is agglutinative. I was also stunned that cuneiform came from an agglutinative language, so I poked around some.
I already knew that Jeremiah was reliable. :-)
That is, that the grammatical and vocabulary flow was from the Sa'ami to the newcomers, and not the other way around as had been supposed for several centuries.
Although you continue to see the Sa'ami languages (11 of them still spoken) being part of some sort of Finno-Ughric subgroup, not all linguistic researchers agree. Sure, all those languages are agglutinative, but when you subtract the Sa'ami loanwords into Finnish or Estonian, showing their closer connection to Hungarian and Tibetan, Sa'ami begins to look more and more like it has a reasonably close relative in ancient Sumerian.
There are even ancient Sumerian texts that make sense only if you imagine these people wandering about among glaciers and polar bears.
With those understandings, the next closest language group to this hypothetical Summerian/Sa'ami isolate would be the Dravidian languages.
The word matches aren't all that great but the similar grammatical characteristics can be rationally argued as being related.
None of this was convincing to me until I saw the miniature multi-thousand year old pre-Biblical clay Santa Claus dug out of the mud in the upper Euphrates Valley. There were also miniature reindeer. These items are on display at the Indiana art musem on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington.
“You know you’re a language nerd when the most surprising thing to you in this thread is that Dravidian is agglutinative. I was also stunned that cuneiform came from an agglutinative language, so I poked around some.
I already knew that Jeremiah was reliable. :-)”
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I recently read a book by the late Samuel Noah Kramer on the Sumerian culture. It was a fascinating culture. According to Kramer, the Sumerians prior to the Akkadian era referred to themselves as “the black heads”.