ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 59: Elamite Elamite is an ancient language spoken between 2
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 59: Elamite Elamite is an ancient language spoken between 2800-300 BCE in what is now Iran. It is a language isolate, with no known sisters or daughters, likely supplanted by Old Persian when the Achaemenid Empire conquered the region. One of the most unusual features Elamite is the way it marks it’s nouns. Not so much in the manner, which is just by use of suffixes, but by what it chooses to mark for. Elamite marks its nouns to show number (standard singular vs plural distinction), gender (animate vs. inanimate, also common) and person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd, not common). What this means is that the word “sunki-”, meaning “king” becomes “sunkik” for “I, the king”, “sunkit” for “king, that you are”, and “sunkir” for “a/the king” I am personally not aware of any other language that does such a thing. Elamite was written in two scripts; a not fully deciphered Linear Elamite and Cuneiform, which they inherited from the Akkadians. The Elamite version of Cuneiform has much fewer logograms, symbols with a determined meaning and pronunciation that must be known beforehand like Chinese characters, and made more use of Cuneiform function as a syllabary. Unlike most syllabaries which primarily account only for open syllables (ones without any consonants after the vowel) Cuneiform has sets for both open syllables and ones with only post-vowel consonants. So to spell the name of the king “Inšušinak” you would use the symbols for “in”, “šu”, “ši”, “na” and “ak”. -- source link