How do you say hello in Sumerian?
Conversational Sumerian Lesson 1: Greetings & Introductions - YouTube
How did the Sumerians greet each other? Hi there! The basic greeting is silim, which means “health” — it's partly borrowed from Akkadian, and is thus related to similar Semitic words meaning “hello”, and partly from the original Sumerian verb sil “to be fit, healthy”.
The Sumerians didn't have a set phrase for “thank you”; instead they'd say something positive about the action or person being thanked. This is similar to the lack of “sorry” in Sumerian.
THE SUMERIAN QUESTION: REVIEWING THE ISSUES Gordon Whittaker, Göttingen1 The Sumerian Question, also known as the Sumerian Problem, revolves around the oft all too emotional debate with regard to the make-up of the ethnic landscape in Southern Mesopotamia during the 4th millennium B.C. The juiciest bones of contention, ...
After around 2000 B.C., ancient Sumerian gradually died off as a spoken language in the region. For the next 2,000 years, the tongue lingered on as a dead written language, similar to Latin in the Middle Ages, but has been completely extinct since then, Konfirst said.
Still Spoken: No
Eventually, Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as the commonly spoken language in southern Mesopotamia (c. 2000 BCE). However, Sumerian was still used in sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language until about 100 AD.
Sumerian (Cuneiform: 𒅴𒂠 Emegir "native tongue") is the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 3500 BC. It is believed to be a language isolate and to have been spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (also known as the Fertile Crescent), in the area that is modern-day Iraq.
The traditional route to learning Sumerian is to learn Akkadian first. This helps overcome the first major hurdle in acquiring the language, namely, the cuneiform writing system. So, for a student interested in following this path, a book such as J. Huegneghard's A Grammar of Akkadian [Scholars Press; Ref 4 PJ3251 .
Cuneiform is a system of writing first developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia c. 3500-3000 BCE. It is considered the most significant among the many cultural contributions of the Sumerians and the greatest among those of the Sumerian city of Uruk which advanced the writing of cuneiform c.
So you can use inu as an independent sentence, meaning “it isn't”, but it's also generalized as the word for “no”. So heam “yes” and inu (or nu) “no” do exist in Sumerian, but, like nearly all the shortest Sumerian utterances, they're actually verbs!
How do you pronounce the Sumerian alphabet?
Mini-Lesson: Sounds of Sumerian - YouTube
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Hello in many languages.
Language | Hello / general greetings |
---|---|
Akkadian | (allû) (šulmu) |
Aklan | Kamusta Hay Hello |

The only reference to Sumer in the Bible is to `the Land of Shinar' (Genesis 10:10 and elsewhere), which people interpreted to most likely mean the land surrounding Babylon, until the Assyriologist Jules Oppert (1825-1905 CE) identified the biblical reference with the region of southern Mesopotamia known as Sumer and, ...
Sumerian language, language isolate and the oldest written language in existence. First attested about 3100 bce in southern Mesopotamia, it flourished during the 3rd millennium bce.
Most historians have suggested that Sumer was first permanently settled between c. 5500 and 4000 BC by a West Asian people who spoke the Sumerian language (pointing to the names of cities, rivers, basic occupations, etc., as evidence), a non-Semitic and non-Indo-European agglutinative language isolate.
Haai (inf) Hallo. Goeie dag (frm) Akkadian.
Dingir (𒀭, usually transliterated DIĜIR, Sumerian pronunciation: [tiŋiɾ]) is a Sumerian word for "god" or "goddess".
Sumerian (Cuneiform: 𒅴𒂠 Emegir "native tongue") is the language of ancient Sumer. It is one of the oldest attested languages, dating back to at least 3500 BC. It is believed to be a language isolate and to have been spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (also known as the Fertile Crescent), in the area that is modern-day Iraq.
The Sumerians called themselves “the black headed people” and their land, in cuneiform script, was simply “the land” or “the land of the black headed people”and, in the biblical Book of Genesis, Sumer is known as Shinar.