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123-562: This list includes notable historic, standardized and common-use dictionaries of the German language . The beginnings of German dictionaries date back to a series of glossaries from the 8th century CE. The first comprehensive German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB), was begun by the Brothers Grimm in 1838. The Duden dictionary, begun in 1880 and now in its 25th edition,

246-554: A business dictionary ), a single-field dictionary narrowly covers one particular subject field (e.g. law), and a sub-field dictionary covers a more specialized field (e.g. constitutional law). For example, the 23-language Inter-Active Terminology for Europe is a multi-field dictionary, the American National Biography is a single-field, and the African American National Biography Project

369-486: A logosyllabic script comprising several hundred signs. Rosengarten (1967) lists 468 signs used in Sumerian (pre- Sargonian ) Lagash . The cuneiform script was adapted to Akkadian writing beginning in the mid-third millennium. Over the long period of bi-lingual overlap of active Sumerian and Akkadian usage the two languages influenced each other, as reflected in numerous loanwords and even word order changes. Depending on

492-792: A nationalistic flavour. Attempts have been made without success to link Sumerian with a range of widely disparate groups such as Indo-European languages , the Austroasiatic languages , Dravidian languages , Uralic languages such as Hungarian and Finnish , Sino-Tibetan languages and Turkic languages (the last being promoted by Turkish nationalists as part of the Sun language theory ). Additionally, long-range proposals have attempted to include Sumerian in broad macrofamilies . Such proposals enjoy virtually no support among modern linguists, Sumerologists and Assyriologists and are typically seen as fringe theories . It has also been suggested that

615-521: A specialized dictionary , also referred to as a technical dictionary, is a dictionary that focuses upon a specific subject field, as opposed to a dictionary that comprehensively contains words from the lexicon of a specific language or languages. Following the description in The Bilingual LSP Dictionary , lexicographers categorize specialized dictionaries into three types: A multi-field dictionary broadly covers several subject fields (e.g.

738-401: A "dictionary", although modern scholarship considers it a calligraphic compendium of Chinese characters from Zhou dynasty bronzes. Philitas of Cos (fl. 4th century BCE) wrote a pioneering vocabulary Disorderly Words (Ἄτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Átaktoi glôssai ) which explained the meanings of rare Homeric and other literary words, words from local dialects, and technical terms. Apollonius

861-520: A 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography , and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta . The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, with the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of having an "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection. The oldest known dictionaries were cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian – Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria ) and dated to roughly 2300 BCE,

984-405: A General Dictionary" which boldly plagiarized Blount's work, and the two criticised each other. This created more interest in the dictionaries. John Wilkins ' 1668 essay on philosophical language contains a list of 11,500 words with careful distinctions, compiled by William Lloyd . Elisha Coles published his "English Dictionary" in 1676. It was not until Samuel Johnson 's A Dictionary of

1107-430: A detailed and readable summary of the decipherment of Sumerian in his Sumerian Mythology . Friedrich Delitzsch published a learned Sumerian dictionary and grammar in the form of his Sumerisches Glossar and Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik , both appearing in 1914. Delitzsch's student, Arno Poebel , published a grammar with the same title, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik , in 1923, and for 50 years it would be

1230-435: A detour in understanding the language – a Paris -based orientalist , Joseph Halévy , argued from 1874 onward that Sumerian was not a natural language, but rather a secret code (a cryptolect ), and for over a decade the leading Assyriologists battled over this issue. For a dozen years, starting in 1885, Friedrich Delitzsch accepted Halévy's arguments, not renouncing Halévy until 1897. François Thureau-Dangin working at

1353-530: A dictionary between Oghuz Turkish, Arabic and Persian. But it is not clear who wrote the dictionary or in which century exactly it was published. It was written in old Anatolian Turkish from the Seljuk period and not the late medieval Ottoman period. In India around 1320, Amir Khusro compiled the Khaliq-e-bari, which mainly dealt with Hindustani and Persian words. Arabic dictionaries were compiled between

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1476-403: A few common graphic forms out of many that may occur. Spelling practices have also changed significantly in the course of the history of Sumerian: the examples in the article will use the most phonetically explicit spellings attested, which usually means Old Babylonian or Ur III period spellings. except where an authentic example from another period is used. Modern knowledge of Sumerian phonology

1599-522: A non-Semitic language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that speakers of this language had developed the cuneiform script. In 1855 Rawlinson announced the discovery of non-Semitic inscriptions at the southern Babylonian sites of Nippur , Larsa , and Uruk . In 1856, Hincks argued that the untranslated language was agglutinative in character. The language was called "Scythic" by some, and, confusingly, "Akkadian" by others. In 1869, Oppert proposed

1722-453: A number of suffixes and enclitics consisting of /e/ or beginning in /e/ are also assimilated and reduced. In earlier scholarship, somewhat different views were expressed and attempts were made to formulate detailed rules for the effect of grammatical morphemes and compounding on stress, but with inconclusive results. Based predominantly on patterns of vowel elision, Adam Falkenstein argued that stress in monomorphemic words tended to be on

1845-465: A number of sign lists, which were apparently used for the training of scribes. The next period, Archaic Sumerian (3000 BC – 2500 BC), is the first stage of inscriptions that indicate grammatical elements, so the identification of the language is certain. It includes some administrative texts and sign lists from Ur (c. 2800 BC). Texts from Shuruppak and Abu Salabikh from 2600 to 2500 BC (the so-called Fara period or Early Dynastic Period IIIa) are

1968-461: A number of websites which operate as online dictionaries, usually with a specialized focus. Some of them have exclusively user driven content, often consisting of neologisms . Some of the more notable examples are given in List of online dictionaries and Category:Online dictionaries . Sumerian language Akkadian , a Semitic language , gradually replaced Sumerian as the primary spoken language in

2091-467: A published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer , Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced spellings that became American English , replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", which did not appear in British dictionaries. At

2214-480: A relation to the Sumerian language. Around 2600 BC, cuneiform symbols were developed using a wedge-shaped stylus to impress the shapes into wet clay. This cuneiform ("wedge-shaped") mode of writing co-existed with the proto-cuneiform archaic mode. Deimel (1922) lists 870 signs used in the Early Dynastic IIIa period (26th century). In the same period the large set of logographic signs had been simplified into

2337-514: A richer vowel inventory by some researchers. For example, we find forms like 𒂵𒁽 g a -kaš 4 "let me run", but, from the Neo-Sumerian period onwards, occasional spellings like 𒄘𒈬𒊏𒀊𒋧 g u 2 -mu-ra-ab-šum 2 "let me give it to you". According to Jagersma, these assimilations are limited to open syllables and, as with vowel harmony, Jagersma interprets their absence as the result of vowel length or of stress in at least some cases. There

2460-408: A second vowel harmony rule. There also appear to be many cases of partial or complete assimilation of the vowel of certain prefixes and suffixes to one in the adjacent syllable reflected in writing in some of the later periods, and there is a noticeable, albeit not absolute, tendency for disyllabic stems to have the same vowel in both syllables. These patterns, too, are interpreted as evidence for

2583-638: A significant impact on the languages of the area. The cuneiform script , originally used for Sumerian, was widely adopted by numerous regional languages such as Akkadian , Elamite , Eblaite , Hittite , Hurrian , Luwian and Urartian ; it similarly inspired the Old Persian alphabet which was used to write the eponymous language . The impact was perhaps the greatest on Akkadian, whose grammar and vocabulary were significantly influenced by Sumerian. The history of written Sumerian can be divided into several periods: The pictographic writing system used during

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2706-460: A spoken language in nearly all of its original territory, whereas Sumerian continued its existence as a liturgical and classical language for religious, artistic and scholarly purposes. In addition, it has been argued that Sumerian persisted as a spoken language at least in a small part of Southern Mesopotamia ( Nippur and its surroundings) at least until about 1900 BC and possibly until as late as 1700 BC. Nonetheless, it seems clear that by far

2829-585: A survey of the field could not be considered complete. The primary institutional lexical effort in Sumerian is the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project, begun in 1974. In 2004, the PSD was released on the Web as the ePSD. The project is currently supervised by Steve Tinney. It has not been updated online since 2006, but Tinney and colleagues are working on a new edition of the ePSD, a working draft of which

2952-407: A text may not even have been meant to be read in Sumerian; instead, it may have functioned as a prestigious way of "encoding" Akkadian via Sumerograms (cf. Japanese kanbun ). Nonetheless, the study of Sumerian and copying of Sumerian texts remained an integral part of scribal education and literary culture of Mesopotamia and surrounding societies influenced by it and it retained that role until

3075-454: A vowel quality opposite to the one that would have been expected according to this rule, which has been variously interpreted as an indication either of the existence of additional vowel phonemes in Sumerian or simply of incorrectly reconstructed readings of individual lexemes. The 3rd person plural dimensional prefix 𒉈 -ne- is also unaffected, which Jagersma believes to be caused by the length of its vowel. In addition, some have argued for

3198-596: Is a human being but the direct user is a program. Such a dictionary does not need to be able to be printed on paper. The structure of the content is not linear, ordered entry by entry but has the form of a complex network (see Diathesis alternation ). Because most of these dictionaries are used to control machine translations or cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) the content is usually multilingual and usually of huge size. In order to allow formalized exchange and merging of dictionaries, an ISO standard called Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) has been defined and used among

3321-401: Is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages , often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for logographic languages), which may include information on definitions , usage, etymologies , pronunciations , translation , etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among

3444-489: Is a sub-field dictionary. In terms of the coverage distinction between "minimizing dictionaries" and "maximizing dictionaries", multi-field dictionaries tend to minimize coverage across subject fields (for instance, Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and Yadgar Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms ) whereas single-field and sub-field dictionaries tend to maximize coverage within a limited subject field ( The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology ). Another variant

3567-417: Is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries; the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications (e.g. "informal" or "vulgar") in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive. The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE, in

3690-466: Is also relevant in this context that, as explained above , many morpheme-final consonants seem to have been elided unless followed by a vowel at various stages in the history of Sumerian. These are traditionally termed Auslauts in Sumerology and may or may not be expressed in transliteration: e.g. the logogram 𒊮 for /šag/ > /ša(g)/ "heart" may be transliterated as šag 4 or as ša 3 . Thus, when

3813-581: Is also the Old Akkadian period (c. 2350 BC – c. 2200 BC), during which Mesopotamia, including Sumer, was united under the rule of the Akkadian Empire . At this time Akkadian functioned as the primary official language, but texts in Sumerian (primarily administrative) did continue to be produced as well. The first phase of the Neo-Sumerian period corresponds to the time of Gutian rule in Mesopotamia ;

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3936-459: Is available online. Assumed phonological and morphological forms will be between slashes // and curly brackets {}, respectively, with plain text used for the standard Assyriological transcription of Sumerian. Most of the following examples are unattested. Note also that, not unlike most other pre-modern orthographies, Sumerian cuneiform spelling is highly variable, so the transcriptions and the cuneiform examples will generally show only one or at most

4059-585: Is considered the first dictionary of Arabic . The oldest existing Japanese dictionary, the c.  835 CE Tenrei Banshō Meigi , was also a glossary of written Chinese. In Frahang-i Pahlavig , Aramaic heterograms are listed together with their translation in the Middle Persian language and phonetic transcription in the Pazend alphabet. A 9th-century CE Irish dictionary, Sanas Cormaic , contained etymologies and explanations of over 1,400 Irish words. In

4182-474: Is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of Standard German. The official dictionary for Austrian Standard German , the Österreichisches Wörterbuch (ÖWB), is published by the Austrian Federal Government. The list contains the (more or less) "recent", regional and multi-volume dictionaries that have been compiled using "scholarly" principles. Dictionary A dictionary

4305-434: Is evidence of various cases of elision of vowels, apparently in unstressed syllables; in particular an initial vowel in a word of more than two syllables seems to have been elided in many cases. What appears to be vowel contraction in hiatus (*/aa/, */ia/, */ua/ > a , */ae/ > a , */ie/ > i or e , */ue/ > u or e , etc.) is also very common. There is some uncertainty and variance of opinion as to whether

4428-475: Is flawed and incomplete because of the lack of speakers, the transmission through the filter of Akkadian phonology and the difficulties posed by the cuneiform script. As I. M. Diakonoff observes, "when we try to find out the morphophonological structure of the Sumerian language, we must constantly bear in mind that we are not dealing with a language directly but are reconstructing it from a very imperfect mnemonic writing system which had not been basically aimed at

4551-468: Is little speculation as to the affinities of this hypothetical substratum language, or these languages, and it is thus best treated as unclassified . Other researchers disagree with the assumption of a single substratum language and argue that several languages are involved. A related proposal by Gordon Whittaker is that the language of the proto-literary texts from the Late Uruk period ( c. 3350–3100 BC)

4674-466: Is more prescriptive, offering warnings and admonitions against the use of certain words considered by many to be offensive or illiterate, such as, "an offensive term for..." or "a taboo term meaning...". Because of the widespread use of dictionaries in schools, and their acceptance by many as language authorities, their treatment of the language does affect usage to some degree, with even the most descriptive dictionaries providing conservative continuity. In

4797-490: Is really an early extinct branch of Indo-European language which he terms "Euphratic" which somehow emerged long prior to the accepted timeline for the spread of Indo-European into West Asia, though this is rejected by mainstream opinion which accepts Sumerian as a language isolate . Pictographic proto-writing was used starting in c. 3300 BC. It is unclear what underlying language it encoded, if any. By c. 2800 BC, some tablets began using syllabic elements that clearly indicated

4920-546: Is respelled as "dĭk ′ shə-nĕr′ē" in the American Heritage Dictionary . The IPA is more commonly used within the British Commonwealth countries. Yet others use their own pronunciation respelling systems without diacritics: for example, dictionary may be respelled as DIK -shə-nerr-ee . Some online or electronic dictionaries provide audio recordings of words being spoken. Histories and descriptions of

5043-492: Is the glossary , an alphabetical list of defined terms in a specialized field, such as medicine ( medical dictionary ). The simplest dictionary, a defining dictionary , provides a core glossary of the simplest meanings of the simplest concepts. From these, other concepts can be explained and defined, in particular for those who are first learning a language. In English, the commercial defining dictionaries typically include only one or two meanings of under 2000 words. With these,

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5166-581: Is the first one from which well-understood texts survive. It corresponds mostly to the last part of the Early Dynastic period (ED IIIb) and specifically to the First Dynasty of Lagash , from where the overwhelming majority of surviving texts come. The sources include important royal inscriptions with historical content as well as extensive administrative records. Sometimes included in the Old Sumerian stage

5289-481: Is the king's house" (compare liaison in French). Jagersma believes that the lack of expression of word-final consonants was originally mostly a graphic convention, but that in the late 3rd millennium voiceless aspirated stops and affricates ( /pʰ/ , /tʰ/ , /kʰ/ and /tsʰ/ were, indeed, gradually lost in syllable-final position, as were the unaspirated stops /d/ and /ɡ/ . The vowels that are clearly distinguished by

5412-414: Is widely accepted to be a local language isolate . Sumerian was at one time widely held to be an Indo-European language , but that view has been universally rejected. Since its decipherment in the early 20th century, scholars have tried to relate Sumerian to a wide variety of languages. Because Sumerian has prestige as the first attested written language, proposals for linguistic affinity sometimes have

5535-573: The Proto-literate period (3200 BC – 3000 BC), corresponding to the Uruk III and Uruk IV periods in archeology, was still so rudimentary that there remains some scholarly disagreement about whether the language written with it is Sumerian at all, although it has been argued that there are some, albeit still very rare, cases of phonetic indicators and spelling that show this to be the case. The texts from this period are mostly administrative; there are also

5658-521: The Behistun inscription , a trilingual cuneiform inscription written in Old Persian , Elamite and Akkadian . (In a similar manner, the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs was the bilingual [Greek and Egyptian with the Egyptian text in two scripts] Rosetta stone and Jean-François Champollion's transcription in 1822.) In 1838 Henry Rawlinson , building on the 1802 work of Georg Friedrich Grotefend ,

5781-465: The Leiden Glossary ). The Catholicon (1287) by Johannes Balbus , a large grammatical work with an alphabetical lexicon, was widely adopted. It served as the basis for several bilingual dictionaries and was one of the earliest books (in 1460) to be printed. In 1502 Ambrogio Calepino 's Dictionarium was published, originally a monolingual Latin dictionary, which over the course of the 16th century

5904-694: The Lisan al-`Arab (13th century, still the best-known large-scale dictionary of Arabic) and al-Qamus al-Muhit (14th century) listed words in the alphabetical order of the radicals. The Qamus al-Muhit is the first handy dictionary in Arabic, which includes only words and their definitions, eliminating the supporting examples used in such dictionaries as the Lisan and the Oxford English Dictionary . In medieval Europe, glossaries with equivalents for Latin words in vernacular or simpler Latin were in use (e.g.

6027-520: The Semitic Akkadian language , which were duly deciphered. By 1850, however, Edward Hincks came to suspect a non-Semitic origin for cuneiform. Semitic languages are structured according to consonantal forms , whereas cuneiform, when functioning phonetically, was a syllabary , binding consonants to particular vowels. Furthermore, no Semitic words could be found to explain the syllabic values given to particular signs. Julius Oppert suggested that

6150-592: The undeclined or unconjugated form appears as the headword in most dictionaries. Dictionaries are most commonly found in the form of a book, but some newer dictionaries, like StarDict and the New Oxford American Dictionary are dictionary software running on PDAs or computers . There are also many online dictionaries accessible via the Internet . According to the Manual of Specialized Lexicographies ,

6273-519: The 12th century, The Karakhanid - Turkic scholar Mahmud Kashgari finished his work " Divan-u Lügat'it Türk ", a dictionary about the Turkic dialects, but especially Karakhanid Turkic . His work contains about 7500 to 8000 words and it was written to teach non Turkic Muslims, especially the Abbasid Arabs, the Turkic language. Al-Zamakhshari wrote a small Arabic dictionary called "Muḳaddimetü'l-edeb" for

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6396-479: The 1969 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language , the first dictionary to use corpus linguistics . In a general dictionary, each word may have multiple meanings. Some dictionaries include each separate meaning in the order of most common usage while others list definitions in historical order, with the oldest usage first. In many languages, words can appear in many different forms, but only

6519-510: The 2004 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages has also been recognized as a good modern grammatical sketch. There is relatively little consensus, even among reasonable Sumerologists, in comparison to the state of most modern or classical languages. Verbal morphology, in particular, is hotly disputed. In addition to the general grammars, there are many monographs and articles about particular areas of Sumerian grammar, without which

6642-428: The 21st century have switched to using readings from them. There is also variation in the degree to which so-called "Auslauts" or "amissable consonants" (morpheme-final consonants that stopped being pronounced at one point or another in the history of Sumerian) are reflected in the transliterations. This article generally used the versions with expressed Auslauts. The key to reading logosyllabic cuneiform came from

6765-450: The 8th and 14th centuries, organizing words in rhyme order (by the last syllable), by alphabetical order of the radicals , or according to the alphabetical order of the first letter (the system used in modern European language dictionaries). The modern system was mainly used in specialist dictionaries, such as those of terms from the Qur'an and hadith , while most general use dictionaries, such as

6888-529: The Dutch and the Germans call theirs, word-books, than dictionaries in the superior sense of that title." In 1616, John Bullokar described the history of the dictionary with his "English Expositor". Glossographia by Thomas Blount , published in 1656, contains more than 10,000 words along with their etymologies or histories. Edward Phillips wrote another dictionary in 1658, entitled " The New World of English Words : Or

7011-482: The English Language (1755) that a more reliable English dictionary was produced. Many people today mistakenly believe that Johnson wrote the first English dictionary: a testimony to this legacy. By this stage, dictionaries had evolved to contain textual references for most words, and were arranged alphabetically, rather than by topic (a previously popular form of arrangement, which meant all animals would be grouped together, etc.). Johnson's masterwork could be judged as

7134-567: The English Language; it took twenty-seven years to complete. To evaluate the etymology of words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit . Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge . His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in

7257-558: The English language were glossaries of French, Spanish or Latin words along with their definitions in English. The word "dictionary" was invented by an Englishman called John of Garland in 1220 – he had written a book Dictionarius to help with Latin "diction". An early non-alphabetical list of 8000 English words was the Elementarie , created by Richard Mulcaster in 1582. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary

7380-661: The Louvre in Paris also made significant contributions to deciphering Sumerian with publications from 1898 to 1938, such as his 1905 publication of Les inscriptions de Sumer et d'Akkad . Charles Fossey at the Collège de France in Paris was another prolific and reliable scholar. His pioneering Contribution au Dictionnaire sumérien–assyrien , Paris 1905–1907, turns out to provide the foundation for P. Anton Deimel's 1934 Sumerisch-Akkadisches Glossar (vol. III of Deimel's 4-volume Sumerisches Lexikon ). In 1908, Stephen Herbert Langdon summarized

7503-592: The Neo-Sumerian and especially in the Old Babylonian period. Conversely, an intervocalic consonant, especially at the end of a morpheme followed by a vowel-initial morpheme, was usually "repeated" by the use of a CV sign for the same consonant; e.g. 𒊬 sar "write" - 𒊬𒊏 sar-ra "written". This results in orthographic gemination that is usually reflected in Sumerological transliteration, but does not actually designate any phonological phenomenon such as length. It

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7626-587: The Sophist ( fl. 1st century CE) wrote the oldest surviving Homeric lexicon. The first Sanskrit dictionary, the Amarakośa , was written by Amarasimha c.  4th century CE . Written in verse, it listed around 10,000 words. According to the Nihon Shoki , the first Japanese dictionary was the long-lost 682 CE Niina glossary of Chinese characters. Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi's 8th century Kitab al-'Ayn

7749-522: The Sumerian language descended from a late prehistoric creole language (Høyrup 1992). However, no conclusive evidence, only some typological features, can be found to support Høyrup's view. A more widespread hypothesis posits a Proto-Euphratean language family that preceded Sumerian in Mesopotamia and exerted an areal influence on it, especially in the form of polysyllabic words that appear "un-Sumerian"—making them suspect of being loanwords —and are not traceable to any other known language family. There

7872-444: The Sumerian site of Tello (ancient Girsu, capital of the state of Lagash ) in 1877, and published the first part of Découvertes en Chaldée with transcriptions of Sumerian tablets in 1884. The University of Pennsylvania began excavating Sumerian Nippur in 1888. A Classified List of Sumerian Ideographs by R. Brünnow appeared in 1889. The bewildering number and variety of phonetic values that signs could have in Sumerian led to

7995-809: The Turkic-Khwarazm ruler Atsiz . In the 14th century, the Codex Cumanicus was finished and it served as a dictionary about the Cuman -Turkic language. While in Mamluk Egypt , Ebû Hayyân el-Endelüsî finished his work "Kitâbü'l-İdrâk li-lisâni'l-Etrâk", a dictionary about the Kipchak and Turcoman languages spoken in Egypt and the Levant . A dictionary called "Bahşayiş Lügati", which is written in old Anatolian Turkish, served also as

8118-459: The above cases, another stress often seemed to be present as well: on the stem to which the suffixes/enclitics were added, on the second compound member in compounds, and possibly on the verbal stem that prefixes were added to or on following syllables. He also did not agree that the stress of monomorphemic words was typically initial and believed to have found evidence of words with initial as well as with final stress; in fact, he did not even exclude

8241-568: The actual use of words. Most dictionaries of English now apply the descriptive method to a word's definition, and then, outside of the definition itself, provide information alerting readers to attitudes which may influence their choices on words often considered vulgar, offensive, erroneous, or easily confused. Merriam-Webster is subtle, only adding italicized notations such as, sometimes offensive or stand (nonstandard). American Heritage goes further, discussing issues separately in numerous "usage notes." Encarta provides similar notes, but

8364-399: The adaptation of Akkadian words of Sumerian origin seems to suggest that Sumerian stress tended to be on the last syllable of the word, at least in its citation form. The treatment of forms with grammatical morphemes is less clear. Many cases of apheresis in forms with enclitics have been interpreted as entailing that the same rule was true of the phonological word on many occasions, i.e. that

8487-477: The age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828; it sold 2500 copies. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. Webster's dictionary was acquired by G & C Merriam Co. in 1843, after his death, and has since been published in many revised editions. Merriam-Webster was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1964. Controversy over the lack of usage advice in the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary spurred publication of

8610-586: The area c.  2000 BC (the exact date is debated), but Sumerian continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial, literary, and scientific language in Akkadian-speaking Mesopotamian states such as Assyria and Babylonia until the 1st century AD. Thereafter, it seems to have fallen into obscurity until the 19th century, when Assyriologists began deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions and excavated tablets that had been left by its speakers. In spite of its extinction, Sumerian exerted

8733-604: The car). Whereas hi taharóg otí , literally 'she will kill me', is colloquial, me (a variant of ma 'what') is archaic, resulting in a combination that is unutterable in real life. A historical dictionary is a specific kind of descriptive dictionary which describes the development of words and senses over time, usually using citations to original source material to support its conclusions. In contrast to traditional dictionaries, which are designed to be used by human beings, dictionaries for natural language processing (NLP) are built to be used by computer programs. The final user

8856-437: The context, a cuneiform sign can be read either as one of several possible logograms , each of which corresponds to a word in the Sumerian spoken language, as a phonetic syllable (V, VC, CV, or CVC), or as a determinative (a marker of semantic category, such as occupation or place). (See the article Cuneiform .) Some Sumerian logograms were written with multiple cuneiform signs. These logograms are called diri -spellings, after

8979-537: The critiques put forward by Pascal Attinger in his 1993 Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du 11 /e/di 'dire ' ) is the starting point of most recent academic discussions of Sumerian grammar. More recent monograph-length grammars of Sumerian include Dietz-Otto Edzard 's 2003 Sumerian Grammar and Bram Jagersma's 2010 A Descriptive Grammar of Sumerian (currently digital, but soon to be printed in revised form by Oxford University Press). Piotr Michalowski's essay (entitled, simply, "Sumerian") in

9102-401: The cuneiform script are /a/ , /e/ , /i/ , and /u/ . Various researchers have posited the existence of more vowel phonemes such as /o/ and even /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ , which would have been concealed by the transmission through Akkadian, as that language does not distinguish them. That would explain the seeming existence of numerous homophones in transliterated Sumerian, as well as some details of

9225-634: The data. A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries . Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a comprehensive range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed to be semasiological , mapping word to definition , while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological , first identifying concepts and then establishing

9348-534: The dictionaries of other languages on Misplaced Pages include: The age of the Internet brought online dictionaries to the desktop and, more recently, to the smart phone. David Skinner in 2013 noted that "Among the top ten lookups on Merriam-Webster Online at this moment are holistic, pragmatic, caveat, esoteric and bourgeois. Teaching users about words they don't already know has been, historically, an aim of lexicography, and modern dictionaries do this well." There exist

9471-542: The eclipse of the tradition of cuneiform literacy itself in the beginning of the Common Era . The most popular genres for Sumerian texts after the Old Babylonian period were incantations, liturgical texts and proverbs; among longer texts, the classics Lugal-e and An-gim were most commonly copied. Of the 29 royal inscriptions of the late second millennium BC 2nd dynasty of Isin about half were in Sumerian, described as "hypersophisticated classroom Sumerian". Sumerian

9594-467: The extremely detailed and meticulous administrative records, there are numerous royal inscriptions, legal documents, letters and incantations. In spite of the dominant position of written Sumerian during the Ur III dynasty, it is controversial to what extent it was actually spoken or had already gone extinct in most parts of its empire. Some facts have been interpreted as suggesting that many scribes and even

9717-726: The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca , for Italian , was published. It served as the model for similar works in French and English. In 1690 in Rotterdam was published, posthumously, the Dictionnaire Universel by Antoine Furetière for French . In 1694 appeared the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (still published, with the ninth edition not complete as of 2021 ). Between 1712 and 1721

9840-426: The first syllable and that there was generally stress on the syllable preceding a (final) suffix/enclitic, on the penultimate syllable of a polysyllabic enclitic such as -/ani/, -/zunene/ etc., on the last syllable of the first member of a compound, and on the first syllable in a sequence of verbal prefixes. However, he found that single verbal prefixes received the stress just as prefix sequences did, and that in most of

9963-411: The first syllable, and that the same applied without exception to reduplicated stems, but that the stress shifted onto the last syllable in a first member of a compound or idiomatic phrase, onto the syllable preceding a (final) suffix/enclitic, and onto the first syllable of the possessive enclitic /-ani/. In his view, single verbal prefixes were unstressed, but longer sequences of verbal prefixes attracted

10086-555: The first to bring all these elements together, creating the first "modern" dictionary. Johnson's dictionary remained the English-language standard for over 150 years, until the Oxford University Press began writing and releasing the Oxford English Dictionary in short fascicles from 1884 onwards. A complete ten-volume first edition was not released until 1928. One of the main contributors to this modern dictionary

10209-461: The first to span a greater variety of genres, including not only administrative texts and sign lists, but also incantations , legal and literary texts (including proverbs and early versions of the famous works The Instructions of Shuruppak and The Kesh temple hymn ). However, the spelling of grammatical elements remains optional, making the interpretation and linguistic analysis of these texts difficult. The Old Sumerian period (2500-2350 BC)

10332-684: The first volume of the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal which was completed in 1998. Also in 1863 Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl published the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language . The Duden dictionary dates back to 1880, and is currently the prescriptive source for the spelling of German. The decision to start work on the Svenska Akademiens ordbok was taken in 1787. The earliest dictionaries in

10455-470: The form of bilingual dictionaries, and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c.  3rd century BCE . The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall , written in 1604, and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time. The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as

10578-502: The glottal stop even serving as the first-person pronominal prefix. However, these unwritten consonants had been lost by the Ur III period according to Jagersma. Very often, a word-final consonant was not expressed in writing—and was possibly omitted in pronunciation—so it surfaced only when followed by a vowel: for example the /k/ of the genitive case ending -ak does not appear in 𒂍𒈗𒆷 e 2 lugal-la "the king's house", but it becomes obvious in 𒂍𒈗𒆷𒄰 e 2 lugal-la-kam "(it)

10701-801: The industrial and academic community. In many languages, such as the English language, the pronunciation of some words is not consistently apparent from their spelling. In these languages, dictionaries usually provide the pronunciation. For example, the definition for the word dictionary might be followed by the International Phonetic Alphabet spelling / ˈ d ɪ k ʃ ə n ər i / (in British English) or / ˈ d ɪ k ʃ ə n ɛr i / (in American English). American English dictionaries often use their own pronunciation respelling systems with diacritics , for example dictionary

10824-447: The late Middle Babylonian period) and there are also grammatical texts - essentially bilingual paradigms listing Sumerian grammatical forms and their postulated Akkadian equivalents. After the Old Babylonian period or, according to some, as early as 1700 BC, the active use of Sumerian declined. Scribes did continue to produce texts in Sumerian at a more modest scale, but generally with interlinear Akkadian translations and only part of

10947-667: The length of the vowels in most Sumerian words. During the Old Sumerian period, the southern dialects (those used in the cities of Lagash , Umma , Ur and Uruk ), which also provide the overwhelming majority of material from that stage, exhibited a vowel harmony rule based on vowel height or advanced tongue root . Essentially, prefixes containing /e/ or /i/ appear to alternate between /e/ in front of syllables containing open vowels and /i/ in front of syllables containing close vowels; e.g. 𒂊𒁽 e-kaš 4 "he runs", but 𒉌𒁺 i 3 -gub "he stands". Certain verbs with stem vowels spelt with /u/ and /e/, however, seem to take prefixes with

11070-598: The literature known in the Old Babylonian period continued to be copied after its end around 1600 BC. During the Middle Babylonian period, approximately from 1600 to 1000 BC, the Kassite rulers continued to use Sumerian in many of their inscriptions, but Akkadian seems to have taken the place of Sumerian as the primary language of texts used for the training of scribes and their Sumerian itself acquires an increasingly artificial and Akkadian-influenced form. In some cases

11193-514: The logogram 𒋛𒀀 DIRI which is written with the signs 𒋛 SI and 𒀀 A . The text transliteration of a tablet will show just the logogram, such as the word dirig , not the separate component signs. Not all epigraphists are equally reliable, and before publication of an important treatment of a text, scholars will often arrange to collate the published transliteration against the actual tablet, to see if any signs, especially broken or damaged signs, should be represented differently. Our knowledge of

11316-416: The long run, however, the meanings of words in English are primarily determined by usage, and the language is being changed and created every day. As Jorge Luis Borges says in the prologue to "El otro, el mismo": " It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature. " Sometimes

11439-401: The majority of scribes writing in Sumerian in this point were not native speakers and errors resulting from their Akkadian mother tongue become apparent. For this reason, this period as well as the remaining time during which Sumerian was written are sometimes referred to as the "Post-Sumerian" period. The written language of administration, law and royal inscriptions continued to be Sumerian in

11562-513: The most important sources come from the autonomous Second Dynasty of Lagash, especially from the rule of Gudea , which has produced extensive royal inscriptions. The second phase corresponds to the unification of Mesopotamia under the Third Dynasty of Ur , which oversaw a "renaissance" in the use of Sumerian throughout Mesopotamia, using it as its sole official written language. There is a wealth of texts greater than from any preceding time – besides

11685-472: The name "Sumerian", based on the known title "King of Sumer and Akkad", reasoning that if Akkad signified the Semitic portion of the kingdom, Sumer might describe the non-Semitic annex. Credit for being first to scientifically treat a bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text belongs to Paul Haupt , who published Die sumerischen Familiengesetze (The Sumerian family laws) in 1879. Ernest de Sarzec began excavating

11808-611: The overwhelming majority of surviving manuscripts of Sumerian literary texts in general can be dated to that time, and it is often seen as the "classical age" of Sumerian literature. Conversely, far more literary texts on tablets surviving from the Old Babylonian period are in Sumerian than in Akkadian, even though that time is viewed as the classical period of Babylonian culture and language. However, it has sometimes been suggested that many or most of these "Old Babylonian Sumerian" texts may be copies of works that were originally composed in

11931-444: The phenomena mentioned in the next paragraph. These hypotheses are not yet generally accepted. Phonemic vowel length has also been posited by many scholars based on vowel length in Sumerian loanwords in Akkadian, occasional so-called plene spellings with extra vowel signs, and some internal evidence from alternations. However, scholars who believe in the existence of phonemic vowel length do not consider it possible to reconstruct

12054-480: The place of stress. Sumerian writing expressed pronunciation only roughly. It was often morphophonemic , so much of the allomorphic variation could be ignored. Especially in earlier Sumerian, coda consonants were also often ignored in spelling; e.g. /mung̃areš/ 'they put it here' could be written 𒈬𒃻𒌷 mu-g̃ar-re 2 . The use of VC signs for that purpose, producing more elaborate spellings such as 𒈬𒌦𒃻𒌷𒌍 mu-un-g̃ar-re 2 -eš 3 , became more common only in

12177-412: The possibility that stress was normally stem-final. Pascal Attinger has partly concurred with Krecher, but doubts that the stress was always on the syllable preceding a suffix/enclitic and argues that in a prefix sequence, the stressed syllable wasn't the first one, but rather the last one if heavy and the next-to-the-last one in other cases. Attinger has also remarked that the patterns observed may be

12300-399: The preceding Ur III period or earlier, and some copies or fragments of known compositions or literary genres have indeed been found in tablets of Neo-Sumerian and Old Sumerian provenance. In addition, some of the first bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian lexical lists are preserved from that time (although the lists were still usually monolingual and Akkadian translations did not become common until

12423-507: The rapid expansion in knowledge of Sumerian and Akkadian vocabulary in the pages of Babyloniaca , a journal edited by Charles Virolleaud , in an article "Sumerian-Assyrian Vocabularies", which reviewed a valuable new book on rare logograms by Bruno Meissner. Subsequent scholars have found Langdon's work, including his tablet transcriptions, to be not entirely reliable. In 1944, the Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer provided

12546-526: The readings of Sumerian signs is based, to a great extent, on lexical lists made for Akkadian speakers, where they are expressed by means of syllabic signs. The established readings were originally based on lexical lists from the Neo-Babylonian Period , which were found in the 19th century; in the 20th century, earlier lists from the Old Babylonian Period were published and some researchers in

12669-586: The rendering of morphophonemics". Early Sumerian is conjectured to have had at least the consonants listed in the table below. The consonants in parentheses are reconstructed by some scholars based on indirect evidence; if they existed, they were lost around the Ur III period in the late 3rd millennium BC. The existence of various other consonants has been hypothesized based on graphic alternations and loans, though none have found wide acceptance. For example, Diakonoff lists evidence for two lateral phonemes, two rhotics, two back fricatives, and two g-sounds (excluding

12792-469: The rest of English, and even the 4000 most common English idioms and metaphors , can be defined. Lexicographers apply two basic philosophies to the defining of words: prescriptive or descriptive . Noah Webster , intent on forging a distinct identity for the American language, altered spellings and accentuated differences in meaning and pronunciation of some words. This is why American English now uses

12915-482: The result in each specific case is a long vowel or whether a vowel is simply replaced/deleted. Syllables could have any of the following structures: V, CV, VC, CVC. More complex syllables, if Sumerian had them, are not expressed as such by the cuneiform script. Sumerian stress is usually presumed to have been dynamic, since it seems to have caused vowel elisions on many occasions. Opinions vary on its placement. As argued by Bram Jagersma and confirmed by other scholars,

13038-400: The result of Akkadian influence - either due to linguistic convergence while Sumerian was still a living language or, since the data comes from the Old Babylonian period, a feature of Sumerian as pronounced by native speakers of Akkadian. The latter has also been pointed out by Jagersma, who is, in addition, sceptical about the very assumptions underlying the method used by Krecher to establish

13161-526: The royal court actually used Akkadian as their main spoken and native language. On the other hand, evidence has been adduced to the effect that Sumerian continued to be spoken natively and even remained dominant as an everyday language in Southern Babylonia, including Nippur and the area to its south By the Old Babylonian period (c. 2000 – c. 1600 BC), Akkadian had clearly supplanted Sumerian as

13284-557: The same dictionary can be descriptive in some domains and prescriptive in others. For example, according to Ghil'ad Zuckermann , the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary is "at war with itself": whereas its coverage (lexical items) and glosses (definitions) are descriptive and colloquial, its vocalization is prescriptive. This internal conflict results in absurd sentences such as hi taharóg otí kshetiré me asíti lamkhonít (she'll tear me apart when she sees what I've done to

13407-473: The spelling color while the rest of the English-speaking world prefers colour . (Similarly, British English subsequently underwent a few spelling changes that did not affect American English; see further at American and British English spelling differences .) Large 20th-century dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Webster's Third are descriptive, and attempt to describe

13530-564: The standard for students studying Sumerian. Another highly influential figure in Sumerology during much of the 20th century was Adam Falkenstein , who produced a grammar of the language of Gudea 's inscriptions. Poebel's grammar was finally superseded in 1984 on the publication of The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure , by Marie-Louise Thomsen . While there are various points in Sumerian grammar on which Thomsen's views are not shared by most Sumerologists today, Thomsen's grammar (often with express mention of

13653-431: The stress could be shifted onto the enclitics; however, the fact that many of these same enclitics have allomorphs with apocopated final vowels (e.g. / ‑ še/ ~ /-š/) suggests that they were, on the contrary, unstressed when these allomorphs arose. It has also been conjectured that the frequent assimilation of the vowels of non-final syllables to the vowel of the final syllable of the word may be due to stress on it. However,

13776-531: The stress to their first syllable. Jagersma has objected that many of Falkenstein's examples of elision are medial and so, while the stress was obviously not on the medial syllable in question, the examples do not show where it was . Joachim Krecher attempted to find more clues in texts written phonetically by assuming that geminations, plene spellings and unexpected "stronger" consonant qualities were clues to stress placement. Using this method, he confirmed Falkenstein's views that reduplicated forms were stressed on

13899-423: The terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types. There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries , dictionaries of synonyms ( thesauri ), and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary . There

14022-458: The time of the Akkadian Empire . The early 2nd millennium BCE Urra=hubullu glossary is the canonical Babylonian version of such bilingual Sumerian wordlists. A Chinese dictionary , the c.  3rd century BCE Erya , is the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary; and some sources cite the Shizhoupian (probably compiled sometime between 700 BCE to 200 BCE, possibly earlier) as

14145-503: The undoubtedly Semitic-speaking successor states of Ur III during the so-called Isin-Larsa period (c. 2000 BC – c. 1750 BC). The Old Babylonian Empire , however, mostly used Akkadian in inscriptions, sometimes adding Sumerian versions. The Old Babylonian period, especially its early part, has produced extremely numerous and varied Sumerian literary texts: myths, epics, hymns, prayers, wisdom literature and letters. In fact, nearly all preserved Sumerian religious and wisdom literature and

14268-597: The velar nasal), and assumes a phonemic difference between consonants that are dropped word-finally (such as the g in 𒍠 zag > za 3 ) and consonants that remain (such as the g in 𒆷𒀝 lag ). Other "hidden" consonant phonemes that have been suggested include semivowels such as /j/ and /w/ , and a glottal fricative /h/ or a glottal stop that could explain the absence of vowel contraction in some words —though objections have been raised against that as well. A recent descriptive grammar by Bram Jagersma includes /j/ , /h/ , and /ʔ/ as unwritten consonants, with

14391-461: The work was completed in 1961. Between 1861 and 1874 was published the Dizionario della lingua italiana by Niccolò Tommaseo . Between 1862 and 1874 was published the six volumes of A magyar nyelv szótára (Dictionary of Hungarian Language) by Gergely Czuczor and János Fogarasi. Émile Littré published the Dictionnaire de la langue française between 1863 and 1872. In the same year 1863 appeared

14514-661: Was A Table Alphabeticall , written by English schoolteacher Robert Cawdrey in 1604. The only surviving copy is found at the Bodleian Library in Oxford . This dictionary, and the many imitators which followed it, was seen as unreliable and nowhere near definitive. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield was still lamenting in 1754, 150 years after Cawdrey's publication, that it is "a sort of disgrace to our nation, that hitherto we have had no… standard of our language; our dictionaries at present being more properly what our neighbors

14637-575: Was able to decipher the Old Persian section of the Behistun inscriptions, using his knowledge of modern Persian. When he recovered the rest of the text in 1843, he and others were gradually able to translate the Elamite and Akkadian sections of it, starting with the 37 signs he had deciphered for the Old Persian. Meanwhile, many more cuneiform texts were coming to light from archaeological excavations, mostly in

14760-523: Was an ex-army surgeon, William Chester Minor , a convicted murderer who was confined to an asylum for the criminally insane. The OED remains the most comprehensive and trusted English language dictionary to this day, with revisions and updates added by a dedicated team every three months. In 1806, American Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language . In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded and fully comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of

14883-590: Was enlarged to become a multilingual glossary. In 1532 Robert Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae latinae and in 1572 his son Henri Estienne published the Thesaurus linguae graecae , which served up to the 19th century as the basis of Greek lexicography. The first monolingual Spanish dictionary written was Sebastián Covarrubias 's Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española , published in 1611 in Madrid, Spain. In 1612

15006-465: Was firstly published in 1777; it has formed the basis of all similar works that have since been published. The first edition of A Greek-English Lexicon by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott appeared in 1843; this work remained the basic dictionary of Greek until the end of the 20th century. And in 1858 was published the first volume of the Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Brothers Grimm ;

15129-514: Was published the Vocabulario portughez e latino written by Raphael Bluteau. The Royal Spanish Academy published the first edition of the Diccionario de la lengua española (still published, with a new edition about every decade) in 1780; their Diccionario de Autoridades , which included quotes taken from literary works, was published in 1726. The Totius Latinitatis lexicon by Egidio Forcellini

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