Sumerian and Akkadian

I'm in E Portland, by Division & SE 26th

Reach me at curtpw((at))gmail.com

I’m trying to organize a Sumerian and Akkadian language study group. I need to site read Sumerian (and speak it, to the extent such things are possible) cuneiform for a personal project. I’m great at building things but very bad at languages, so this has been on the back burner for several months. I’m very flexible about the subject material if people are more interested in reading about Sumerian art/history/religion - any of that would help me get motivated with Sumerian grammar.

I’m really hoping to find other people interested in organizing such a group, or even better, someone with an legit background in Assyriology. I’m willing to put quite a bit of effort into this.

Akkadian was the lingua franca of mesopotamia for thousands of years. Babylonian and Assyrian are dialects of Akkadian.

Sumerian is more than just the founding language of mesopotamia. Long after the fall of Ur it continued to fulfill a crucial religious and spiritual role. Sumerian is the language spoken before the flood when divinity still walked the earth.

Sumerian → Akkadian → Phoenician (alphabet) → ancient Greek → Latin → Norman French → English you are reading now. This is a simplified chronology of influence, these languages are very different from one another. That being said, if you chase the history of Western Civ back in time as far as possible you will find yourself in ancient Sumer.

selected publications

PhysRev

Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?

A. Einstein^*†, B. Podolsky^*, and N. Rosen^*

Phys. Rev., New Jersey. More Information can be found here , May 1935

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In a complete theory there is an element corresponding to each element of reality. A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing the system. In quantum mechanics in the case of two physical quantities described by non-commuting operators, the knowledge of one precludes the knowledge of the other. Then either (1) the description of reality given by the wave function in quantum mechanics is not complete or (2) these two quantities cannot have simultaneous reality. Consideration of the problem of making predictions concerning a system on the basis of measurements made on another system that had previously interacted with it leads to the result that if (1) is false then (2) is also false. One is thus led to conclude that the description of reality as given by a wave function is not complete.