THE PRONOUNS AND VERBS OF SUMERIAN. 



By J. DYNELEY PRINCE. 



{Read April 23, 191 5.) 



The pronouns of a language are relics of its earliest demonstra- 

 tives. The first desire of the primitive speaker must have been to 

 indicate objects. So soon as nouns had evolved themselves in his 

 mind, the next step was the development of an abbreviated form 

 vv^hich could indicate substantives without repeating the noun itself, 

 and these abbreviations or indicators were nothing more than pro- 

 nouns. It is possible that there existed originally in primitive 

 speech only a single impersonal element of this character, which 

 was at first used, supplemented by gestures, to indicate objects of 

 all three persons. Subsequently, the same syllable may have been 

 tonally differentiated to indicate the ' I, thou, that ' idea and still 

 later, additional syllables were called into play to aid in differen- 

 tiating the first, second and third persons. It is interesting to ob- 

 serve that in the very evidently extremely primitive system of 

 Sumerian pronouns, all the personal particles contain the common 

 demonstrative element e, which appears most prominently in the 

 third personal ene. 



The object of the present paper is to present in a concise form 

 the results of grammatical investigations regarding the Sumerian 

 pronominal particles and also to weigh these theories and conclu- 

 sions from a philological point of view, especially in connection with 

 the incorporation of the pronominal elements in the verbal struc- 

 ture. It is interesting to note that the distinction between the 

 nearer and farther subject-object, herein noted in connection re- 

 spectively with the b and n particles, is a most natural linguistic 

 phenomenon which would have followed almost arbitrarily the evo- 

 lution of the general demonstrative idea. 



The material used in this treatise has been taken partly from the 



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