Trinity College Dublin reports World’s first film in ancient Sumerian released by Trinity filmmakers:
The world’s first film shot entirely in the ancient Sumerian language is today available to audiences worldwide to view on YouTube [4th December, 2025].
Dumuzi’s Dream and Dumuzi’s Demons, performed by Trinity students entirely in the dead language of Sumerian, tells the story of how Dumuzi, a Sumerian shepherd god, repeatedly escapes from underworld demons, until they finally catch him for good. The short film is a dramatization of the mythological poem known today as Dumuzi’s Dream. The script of the film follows, word for word, the text of this poem, which is preserved on cuneiform clay tablets excavated in modern-day Iraq and housed in Museums all over the world.
The 20-minute film stars Trinity students Olivia Romao (4th year Music) and Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys (4th year English/Classics) and was directed and produced by Professor Martin Worthington (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies). The film is now freely available on YouTube with subtitles in over twenty languages, including Irish, Arabic, Mandarin and Hungarian. […]
Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys, who played Dumuzi, said: “Viewers don’t need to feel too sorry for Dumuzi being led to the underworld. There is another Sumerian story where he gets to escape for part of every year—we might do that one next time! And people interested in the history of religion may be interested to learn that Sumerian culture included a god who died and came back to life.”
Now that’s what I call a movie! You can watch it at the link, and I hope ə de vivre will show up with a critique. (Via MetaFilter.)
This gives me a chance to write “ə bait”, a phrase which has possibly never previously appeared in English.
I wonder where Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys is from? (I’d spell it with a small f in ferch*, and I suspect she does too: someone has evidently mistaken the word for a middle name. An Irish outlet should know better. But, come to think of it, Ní seems to get written with a capital. There are Hatters who will Know.)
* Italics, for the benefit of the few Hatters unfamiliar with the Language of Heaven. Sometimes, we have to make compromises in this sad sublunar sphere.
I taught myself Russian in the 1980s over the summer before junior year from a textbook and I had no access to tapes or recordings. The first day of third year Russian at college was interesting. For a lot of the sounds I had used Italian analogies, I had not fully grasped how unstressed vowels sound, or the was palatalized consonants effect surrounding vowels. I also had assumed syntax was freer than it was, and I still had to learn how colloquial intonation worked. I could immediately tell my self taught Russian was very odd for native speakers. I can only imagine how much more bizarre the „Sumerian“ in this film would appear to native Sumerian speakers.
The Sumerian pronunciation in the film probably bears the same resemblance to the original that Vina in the Star Trek TOS episode „The Menagerie“ has to a normal human. „They rebuilt me. Everything works, but they had never seen a human. They had no guide for putting me back together.“
I suppose the counterpoint is that we routinely perform Shakespeare or Goethe with accents that the original authors would have found bizarre so maybe this is isn’t that different.
I suppose the counterpoint is that we routinely perform Shakespeare or Goethe with accents that the original authors would have found bizarre so maybe this is isn’t that different.
I think it’s actually very different really: I have absolutely no doubt that the people who made this movie made every possible effort to achieve the most accurate Sumerian pronunciation that they could. The same is, alas, not at all true for the vast majority of modern-day performances of Shakespeare.
i dunno. i don’t generally expect time-of-writing chronolects from theater, and especially not time-of-writing theater chronolects*, which would make almost anything from before around 1930 sound profoundly odd to contemporary anglophone theater-goers used to a theater of “naturalism”. but i do think that an attempt to reconstruct “period-accurate pronunciation” for shakespeare has a lot in common with the reconstruction of a speakable sumerian – and the difference in likely accuracy (as judged by a time-traveling witness) is more about degree (of surviving texts and testimonies) than kind.
.
* what languages have maintained a properly distinct theatrical lect? u.s. english has only a residual one left, in the circus/sideshow/midway zone, and it’s about lexicon, rhythm, and register-deployment rather than pronunciation. what’s let of the yiddish theater world (aside from hasidish purimshpiln) still more-or-less considers voliner pronunciation to be the standard, but with younger performers coming mainly from either YIVOish or hasidish backgrounds, i don’t know how consistent that actually is.
I have absolutely no doubt that the people who made this movie made every possible effort to achieve the most accurate Sumerian pronunciation that they could.
But even our best efforts are hampered by profound gaps of knowledge compared to what we know of early 17th century London English. What we do know about Sumerian phonology is partly filtered through Akkadian, another language no one has heard in the wild for several thousand years. So any attempts to have a correct accent are at best an educated guess.
Of course, given that Sumerian survived for two millennia as a cultural language after the last native speakers had vanished, you can argue that Sumerian already enjoys a very long tradition of being spoken artificially for performance and story telling. Much like „church Latin“ is not necessarily „wrong“. So I do find this effort worthwhile, to be clear.
To be properly authentic (though modernised for practicality), the film should obviously be in Arabic. Or Neo-Aramaic, if they’re up to it, I suppose.
Of course, given that Sumerian survived for two millennia as a cultural language after the last native speakers had vanished, you can argue that Sumerian already enjoys a very long tradition of being spoken artificially for performance and story telling. Much like „church Latin“ is not necessarily „wrong“. So I do find this effort worthwhile, to be clear.
Good point, and of course I too find the effort worthwhile. The more awareness of Sumerian, the better! (And we can pronounce it a lot better than Egyptian; I’d guess an actual Sumerian would recognize what was being said, even if the pronunciation was laughably off.)
And we can pronounce it a lot better than Egyptian
This surprises me. Is it true about anything that predates Coptic, or just about Archaic and Old Egyptian?
I was under the impression that although the absence of vowels in Egyptian writing makes phonological reconstruction more difficult than in Sumerian with its syllabic script, this is more than counterbalanced by the evidence from Coptic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, something that Sumerian lacks.
Overall, the pronunciation seems to incorporate the most widely accepted features of Sumerian pronunciation. They don’t go down any of the more daring roads that people have proposed, some of which might be more accurate, but often incompletely so.
Some things that aren’t incorporated into the video’s pronunciation: It’s almost certain, for example, that Sumerian had a length distinction in its vowels, but no one has been able to reconstruct this system in its entirety. So any attempt to incorporate vowel length into contemporary pronunciation would be a half-measure where it’s sometimes respected and sometimes not. Likewise, many (but not all) Sumerologists believe that there are more phonemic vowels in Sumerian than the traditional a/e/i/u (which just so happens to be the same as Akkadian’s typologically unusual inventory). There was also probably more vowel syncope within the phonological word than the spelling suggests. For example, there is a personal name “nam-ha-ne” that appears to reflect the underlying phrase “nam-mah=ane” (his/her greatness). This syncope appears to be spelled out in verbal prefix chains, but only left implicit elsewhere. Trying to incorporate this into pronunciation would involve a lot of guesswork.
You can read along with the video here. I’m at work, so I’m not able to look stuff up, but some initial observations about the pronunciation:
Everyone makes a voicing distinction between the p/t/k series and b/d/g as opposed to aspirated and unaspirated, respectively. Fair enough, that’s a hard one for native English speakers.
The narrator pronounces written ‘z’ as the more accurate [ts], while Dumuzid pronounces it [z].
They consistently pronounce all auslaut consonants. Something happens to Sumerian stops and affricates in syllable codas, but there probably isn’t enough evidence to falsifiably say what. They say [ud] for “day” rather than [u]. They don’t do this for Dumuzid’s name, however (dumu = “child, youth,” zid = “virtuous, good’; zi would be “life, breath”).
Everyone seems to be following their anglophone gut in assigning stress. Stress in Sumerian was probably word final, since Sumerian loans into Akkadian are invariably spelled to attract word-final stress (assuming our understanding of Akkadian stress is accurate). How that interacts with the various case enclitics is anyone’s guess.
They adopt a slightly more recent reading of vowel quality. They pronounce the word for “word” [enim] rather than [inim], for example. Pascal Attinger (with, I think Catherine Mittermayer) have a whole system of alternate readings that differ mostly in vowel quality that stick closer to readings in Old Babylonian lexical lists, as opposed to later lexical texts that influenced the initial transliteration conventions.I’m not sure if they use all the Attinger/Mittermayer readings or if it’s just the more accepted reconstructions. They also pronounce the third-person human possessive enclitic [ane] rather than the older [ani].
Narrator and Dumuzid both seem to sometimes add long vowels or glottal stops based on written conventions: pronouncing “i-im” as [i:m] or “nu-un” as [nu’un]. There are proposals for phonemic and allophonic long vowels and glottal stops in Sumerian, but I don’t think they follow those here.
The narrator seems to roll his “r”s for dramatic effect. It’s pretty sure the the Sumerian rhotic was a tap, since dV and tV signs are often replaced by rV signs when the consonant would occur between vowels.
I want to listen later for occurrences of verbs with an ergative first or second person agent in the perfective aspect. Lots of people think that something should happen in the position right before the verb root. I wonder if they do anything in particular.
“Fair enough, that’s a hard one for native English speakers.”
Depends on the speaker. At least word-initially, my own distinction (like that of many others) is one of aspiration rather than voicing. Though such categorical statements aren’t always very useful, since where the VOT (especially) boundary between “voiceless” and “aspirated” is can vary a great deal from language to language.
Or even vary within a given sound-system from segment to segment: the “degree of aspiration” in [pʰ] need not be the same as in [kʰ], even if they get written with the same IPA transcription.
I was under the impression that although the absence of vowels in Egyptian writing makes phonological reconstruction more difficult than in Sumerian with its syllabic script, this is more than counterbalanced by the evidence from Coptic and other Afro-Asiatic languages, something that Sumerian lacks.
Not really.
Afroasiatic is not really any help: the time-depth is too great, and the uncertainties in reconstruction of AA itself are huge. It’s not at all like the case of Semitic and Akkadian, for example.
Coptic has lost a lot of earlier phonemic distinctions and a lot of earlier vocabulary too; moreover, it’s not much use for the vocalisation of verbs prior to Late Egyptian, when the system changed quite profoundly from synthetic to largely analytic. (Though Allen’s latest proposals basically posit only one sd̠m.f form, which would help if true. I haven’t seen his ideas fully laid out: what I can glean from the latest edition of his Middle Egyptian grammar seems to me to involve some rather questionable assumptions, like root-consonant gemination always being simply a matter of derivational rather than flexional morphology.)
So it’s rather like proposing to reconstruct Classical Latin pronunciation based on just the evidence of modern French (with some help from Nostratic.)
It depends rather on the period, though: a Copticising attempt at Ptolemaic-era Demotic would probably work quite well. But it would be a very different matter for Middle Egyptian.
German. All upscale theaters from sea to shining mountains use the exact same very tightly defined Bühnenaussprache, developed by an actual linguist at the end of the 19th century. Half of its features are very northern (like… coastal), the other half is consciously made up to improve how it works with theater acoustics.
Here’s a thorough attempt (…though set to a tune that completely ignores the carefully reconstructed vowel lengths & stresses), and here’s all the reasoning behind it. 🙂 (…It does actually feature Proto-Afro-Asiatic… along with everything else.)
Yersss …
Actually, the best attempt I’ve seen at consistently vowelling a (very nearly) consonant-only script plausibly is in John Huehnergard’s nice Ugaritic grammar, where he explicitly says he’s doing that so that readers will appreciate that Ugaritic was a real language that people actually spoke, rather than some sort of cipher.
Of course, this is a vastly easier proposition than with Middle Egyptian, and Huehnergard is admirably clear about the pitfalls of trying to reconstruct the vowels from comparative Semitic evidence (he gives actual examples of cases where such reconstructions are actually shown to be invalid by Akkadian-style cuneiform transcriptions.)
Clearly a rip-off of Dumézil’s Dream, the Prote-Indo-European blockbuster.
he explicitly says he’s doing that so that readers will appreciate that Ugaritic was a real language that people actually spoke, rather than some sort of cipher.
And an excellent reason that is; I know there are people who don’t mind working with symbols that can’t be pronounced, but most of us like studying languages that look like languages and that we can pronounce, however badly.
I am always annnoyed by grammars of (especially African) tone languages that don’t mark the tones in the syntactic examples, for that very reason. It’s as bad as not writing the vowels: you don’t have the information you need to read the words aloud (even badly.)
I think I’ve mentioned before my rage at a textbook of Ancient Greek that didn’t use accents.
When did readers of Classical Latin relearn its system of vowel length? Although Medieval and Ecclesiastical Latin lost the length distinction, surely later readers of Roman poetry must have figured it pretty early, perhaps more than once.
The Ruodlieb is in hexameter; as far as I’ve noticed (trust that as far as you can throw it), the lengths are all correct. I guess a few people simply kept reading the grammarians to the end. It must have helped, though, that OHG & MHG had phonemic vowel (and consonant) lengths themselves!
I think I’ve mentioned before my rage at a textbook of Ancient Greek that didn’t use accents.
C. S. Lewis learned Greek that way and apologized for it forever.
DM: I should rephrase my question: who was the last one to rediscover Classical Latin vowel length?
What does that even mean? How could there have been a last one?
There can be a last one to rediscover it if everyone (maybe with insignificant exceptions) studying Latin is now taught it when they start on verse and doesn’t have to rediscover it on their own.
I guess, but how could we know who that was?
Just like Columbus was the last one to discover America.
Keil’s edition of the Grammatici Latini has seven volumes (plus one supplemental volume). They all mention that vowels are short or long. They all survive in medieval manuscripts. One whole volume of Keil’s edition is even dedicated to Scriptores Artis Metricae. So you can’t really say that medieval scholars were not aware of Latin vowel length.
Yeah, I’d be very surprised if that had been the case. The Romans didn’t exactly hide vowel length under a bushel.
Thanks, ulr. I guess my question would be then, when did beginning students and ordinary users of Latin start being taught about vowel length? Was Milton aware of Latin vowel length but Newton, not?
Columbus was the last one to discover America.
Columbus was the last to discover only some islands in the Caribbean.
So Brazil doesn’t (or didn’t) count as America?
who was the last one to rediscover Classical Latin vowel length?
Just like Columbus was the last one to discover America.
Bathtub Thoughts
(c. 500 – c. 1950)
Hail, future friend, whose present I
With gratitude now prophesy,
Kind first to whom it shall occur
My past existence to infer.
Brief salutation best beseems
Two nameless ordinal extremes;
Hail and farewell! Chance only knows
The length of our respective rows,
But our numeric bond is such,
As gods nor love nor death can touch.
So thought, I thought, the last Romano-Briton
To take his last hot bath.
Well. My textbooks spelled the lengths out, and the teachers mentioned a few contrastive occurrences (notably nom. sg. -a vs. abl. sg. -ā and os, ossis “bone” vs. ōs, ōris “mouth”), but that was pretty much it. It did not sink in that the whole system was completely independent of stress, that short stressed syllables existed (i.e. short vowels in stressed open syllables), or that coda consonants count towards syllable length, and as a result we never quite grasped how to deal with poetic meters. That was 30 years ago and probably hasn’t changed.
Columbus did eventually reach the unequivocal mainland of the Americas on his fourth and final voyage, on the coast of what is now Honduras, before working his way down the coasts of what are now Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. But by then it was already 1502 and someone else may have beaten him to it,* although probably not Cabot given that Newfoundland is rather famously also, like Hispaniola etc., an island.
*Possibly, for example, the Senhor Lavrador whose name is preserved in the toponym Labrador.
The entire Caribbean, all the way up to the Bahamas, had been reached by canoe and populated from mainland South America. That makes it America enough for me.
(As far as I know, there is no evidence, ethnographic, linguistic, or genetic, for prehistoric contact across the Florida Straits. Huh.)
DM: I learned Latin from Wheelock, who marks vowel length throughout. I wonder if British and U.S. Latin instruction was freer to do so by not being tied to Church Latin.
[Latin] the teachers mentioned a few contrastive occurrences (notably nom. sg. -a vs. abl. sg. -ā and os, ossis “bone” vs. ōs, ōris “mouth”), but that was pretty much it.
Same for me. We weren’t encouraged to think Latin was something to be spoken. After all, the ‘O’ level didn’t include an oral exam, unlike the dreaded French. And the syllabus included only Histories, not Poetry.
(As far as I know, there is no evidence, ethnographic, linguistic, or genetic, for prehistoric contact across the Florida Straits. Huh.)
Linguistically at least, I’ve certainly seen it posited. Somebody has connected Timucua, I think, with Chibchan, which would imply a pretty remote migration. But I don’t know how plausible that is.
Julian Granberry, who wrote the first modern grammar of Timucua, theorized about it being a creole based on a bunch of South American language families. That didn’t catch on.
As to what Columbus discovered: Columbus was the first European to reach South America, in 1498 on his third voyage. Moreover, he correctly reasoned that it must be a continent and not just another island, because the Orinoco River was so large. On the other hand, he kept on claiming that Cuba was the mainland of Asia, and said South America was the “Earthly Paradise” and was in the Orient. That makes it disputable whether what he did should be called “discovery”.
[Latin] the teachers mentioned a few contrastive occurrences (notably nom. sg. -a vs. abl. sg. -ā and os, ossis “bone” vs. ōs, ōris “mouth”), but that was pretty much it.
Interesting. We were taught to distinguish long from short vowels and the stress rules from the start, and never were allowed to forget. So when we started to handle verse, we only needed to learn about stuff like elision, and the meters.
Oh, we were taught the stress rule. It just didn’t help a lot without knowing which vowels exactly counted as short…
I did omit one distinction we were taught, though: 2nd (ē) conjugation -ḗre vs. 3rd (consonantic) conjugation -́ere.
As to what Columbus discovered
I recently found out that he might also have been the first discoverer of what is now the Cayman Islands; or, at least, if any Native Americans have found them, their tales had not came down to us, and there is no evidence of precolonial habitation.
(Weirdly enough, the name of the islands is of Native American origin – the islands were named for an abundance of crocodiles.)
I have previously discussed how Columbus, despite his initial discoveries all being islands, still seems to have been the first to reach both of the actual continents. But my research had missed the Lavrador expedition – thanks for the information!