I9I5.] PRINCE— PRONOUNS AND VERBS OF SUMERIAN. 45 



ing such as ' so, sow ' and ' sew ' ; ' low ' = ' below ' and the verb 

 ' low,' etc. Similarly, the Babylonian priest to whom Sumerian was, 

 if not in later times actually a living tongue, at least a pronounced 

 idiom, would never have thought of indicating the tonal differentia- 

 tion of the grammatical verbal elements. The very poverty of 

 Sumerian phonetically and the apparent monotony of its consonantal 

 elements go to show the necessity of supposing some special unindi- 

 cated means of differentiation. There seems to be every reason to 

 suppose that such elements cited above as ba-, im-, in-, mi-, mu- in- 

 dicating the first, second and third persons in the verbal scheme 

 must have been tonally differentiated. 



There are only about eleven distinguishing consonantal elements 

 in the language; viz., h, probably = near object and near demon- 

 strative; fif ^ partitive ; locative; means; ^ = precative and inten- 

 tional; hence, future (=also ng^n) ; g = pnre precative optative, 

 indicated herein by x ; / (rare)^ n; w = demonstrative and relating ; 

 n, probably = remote object and demonstrative; r = ethical dative; 

 motion, direction towards, and perhaps rhotacism for 2 in the second 

 person -ra; indirection towards, similar to r, with which it may be 

 connected etymologically ; ^ = ' in ' or ' out of ' ; location in general ; 3 

 = pure second person, the only fixed consonontal grammatical value. 

 Combine with these elements the vowels a = direction and i (^) = 

 completed action, past and future, having a force like the Slavonic 

 *' perfective " forms, not forgetting that i may be the harmonic 

 equivalent of e and u of a, and we get a reasonable explanation of 

 most of the prefixes and suffixes of the language, particularly of 

 the verbal prefixes treated above. See for a full discussion of these 

 points, Prince AJSL. XXIV. pp. 354-365, and also in Encyclo- 

 paedia Britannica, XXVI, p. yy. 



Poebel's infixes (pp. 70 ff), all which are, of course, well known, 

 I will amplify by the following examples for the sake of clearness: 

 na, ' to him ' ; in-na-an-ba-e = uqassu, ' he gives to him ' = na, ' to 

 him' -{-11, 'it' remote; in-ne-la-e, 'he will pay to them' {-ne) ; cf. 

 mii-ne-gen, ' he went to him ' ; note that sin = ' them,' ht., p. 46, 

 25 ; in-si-in-se, ' he gave to them ' ; ma-Ia-e, ' he will pay me ' ; here 

 the m stands for the i p. + the directive a; mu-ra-la-e, ' he will pay 

 thee ' ; the mu contains the demonstrative m -f the tonal vowel of the 



