Sumerian and its closest relatives

**Proto-Shaman** · 10-22-2014, 09:53 AM

TÓTH, Alfréd : Sumerian and its closest relatives.
Mikes International. Hungarian Periodical for Art, Literature and Science.
Volume VIII., Issue 1. 2008. január – március / January – March 2008.

1. Sumerian + another language (family):
The comparisons of Sumerian with other languages made in “Etymological Dictionary of Hungarian”, in “Hungarian Mesopotamian Dictionary” and in other books and articles can be summarized with the following percentages indicating the respective genetic affiliations: Hungarian (100%) > Chinese (61%) > Indo-European (58.3%) > Turkish (55%) > Mongolian (54%) > Tibeto-Burman (ca. 50%) > Egyptian (36.7%) > Dravidian (36%) > Munda (33%) > Etruscan (31%, 14% of which with Hunnic cognates) > Hebrew (28%) > Uralic (24.5%) > Japanese (23%) > Basque (16%) > Penutian (14%) > Mayan (11%) > Bantu (8%) > Caucasian (7%) > Austronesian (incl. Mon Khmer, Australian and Tasmanian) (3%) > Vietnamese (2%).

2. Semitic and Indo-European:
The “Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch” of Pokorny (1959) contains 2222 roots and there can be reconstructed 2923 Proto-Semitic roots (Militarev 2006). Therefore, the 1030 common Semitic-Indo-European roots of Brunner (1969) share 46% with Indo-European and 35% with Semitic and thus almost exactly as many cognates like my comparison of Sumerian-Hungarian-Indo-European-Semitic in EDH-4, namely 33.4%. This strongly points for a Sumerian presence also in both the Indo-European and the Semitic languages and thus supports the theory that probably most of the European substrate originates from Sumerian on the one side and from Akkadian via Rhaetic on the other side.

3. Finno-Ugric, Uralic and Altaic:
While the first comparative Finno-Ugric dictionary (Budenz 1873-81) contains 996 cognates, the first Uralic dictionary (Lakó/Rédei 1967ss.) has 677 and the most recent Uralic dictionary (Rédei 1986ss.) 1874 cognates and thus almost three times as many etymologies as the former dictionary compiled by the same author hardly twenty years ago. On the other side, the first Altaic dictionary, including Korean but excluding Japanese (Starostin/Dybo/Mudrak 2003) has 2800 roots. From Kazár (1980) we get in addition 594 Japanese-Uralic word-equations. The comparative Tibeto-Burman dictionary of Peiros and Starostin (1996) has 2637 roots and thus about as many as the Altaic dictionary. Therefore, the question arises, why Lakó-Rédei (1967ss.) has only about a quarter of common Uralic roots. Because the Uralic languages were so primitive or because they do not form a language family?

4. Nostratic, Na-Dene and other macrofamilies:
Bomhard/Kerns (1994) contains 601 Nostratic etymologies (including Sumerian, Etruscan, but excluding Sino-Tibetan). Ruhlen (1994) shows 324 Na-Dene etymologies. Greenberg (2000) presents 437 Eurasiatic roots, whereby he considers Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Japanese, Korean, Ainu, and Paleo-Siberian. Ruhlen (1994) also listed 58 Nostratic/Eurasiatic-Amerind etymologies.

5. Language evolution tree:
In the following I present a tree-like model with the first written accounts for each language (family) indicated in parenthesis. There are only such languages and families mentioned that have been treated in my former studies and thus the tree is “incomplete”. The tree indicates from the left to the right the genetic distance away from Sumerian and Akkadian/Rhaetic and from top to bottom the percentage of shared cognates between the languages according to the introduction above.

As pointed out in the introduction, the “starting point” of this tree is about 3450 B.C. when the first Sumerian writings appear and not decades of thousands of years B.C. While it has been proven in the past that the calculations based on the Swadesh list do not give appropriate times frames for the dissolution of languages, one can easily see already from the introduction that the percentage of affiliation between Sumerian and an other language diminishes more or less with increasing geographical distance from Mesopotamia. This turns the tree from top to the bottom almost into a geographical word-map.