Tomorrow is April 1st .......
On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@googlemail.com wrote:
The Encarta people were very unprecise about what they are going to do in future... So, this means that there remains no big encyclopedia but ours? Except Britannica? And what about the situation in French, Italian etc., has anyone an overview about that? Then I also ask myself in how far this evolution is to be credited mainly to Wikipedia, or has it been "the Internet" in general that killed the dead-tree-encyclopedias. I remember that in 1999 or 2000 I already did not buy a paper encyclopedia because of the Internet.
As a young student of linguistics I was interested in Sumerian language. In 1996 I went to the National library of Serbia and took Britannica's 1995 edition. So, I've got the next references:
- Arno Poebel, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik (1923), partly out
of date, but still the only full grammar of Sumerian in all its stages;
- Adam Falkenstein, Grammatik der Sprache Gudeas von Lagaš, 2 vol.
(1949–50), a very thorough grammar of the New Sumerian dialect,
- Das Sumerische (1959), a very brief but comprehensive survey of the
Sumerian language;
- Cyril J. Gadd, Sumerian Reading Book (1924), outdated but the only
grammatical tool in English;
- Samuel N. Kramer, The Sumerians (1963), provides a general
introduction to Sumerian civilization.
Anecdote around this is that I was very confident in my linguistic knowledge and that I thought that I am able to understand linguistically German from 1923 (Arno Poebel's book). So, I went to the Library of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and asked them to make an inter-library borrowing from some German library. With a lot of enthusiasm I've started to read it... Of course, it was a complete disaster: I wasn't able to take any information. Copy of that book is still somewhere in my library.
One year later, in 1997, I tried to find something about Sumerian language at the net. Hm. I found at least two sites with full grammars of Sumerian dialects. So, I've finished with [traditional] encyclopedias.
BTW, the list of references above is from Britannica's [present] online edition [1]. Nothing was changed since 1995 edition. I remember well the list.
References from the English Wikipedia's article [2] are:
- Edzard, Dietz Otto (2003). Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. ISBN
90-04-12608-2. (grammar treatment for the advanced student)
- Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An
Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8. (Well-organized with over 800 translated text excerpts.)
- Diakonoff, I. M. (1976). "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written
Language: Pitfalls and Peculiarities in the Study of Sumerian". Assyriological Studies 20 (Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jakobsen): 99–121.
- Rubio, Gonzalo (2007). "Sumerian Morphology." In Morphologies of
Asia and Africa, vol. 2, pp. 1327-1379. Edited by Alan S. Kaye.. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-109-0.
- Attinger, Pascal (1993). Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La
construction de du11/e/di. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht. ISBN 37-2780-869-1.
- Volk, Konrad (1997). A Sumerian Reader. Rome: Pontificio Istituto
Biblico. ISBN 88-7653-610-8. (collection of Sumerian texts)
- Michalowski, Piotr, 'Sumerian as an Ergative Language', Journal of
Cuneiform Studies 32 (1980), 86-103.
[1] - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/573229/Sumerian-language [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language
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