
Analysing Literary Sumerian
Corpus-based Approaches
Equinox Publishing Ltd
1st Edition
Published on 15. January 2007
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-84553-229-1 (ISBN)
Description
This book brings together pioneering studies on the world’s oldest literature, composed in the extinct language Sumerian and written on clay in the cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script. All the contributions are based on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University whose focus is on the best documented period of Sumerian literature, compositions recorded some 4,000 years ago in southern Iraq. The ETCSL consists of transliterations and translations of nearly 400 compositions and is accessible via the Internet. It is the only linguistically annotated and translated corpus of an ancient Near Eastern language.
Each of the main chapters in the book uses the ETCSL to approach a specific question relating to one or more compositions in the corpus, exploiting the possibilities the corpus offers for quantitative research and statistical analysis. In addition to these case studies, the book includes introductions to Sumerian literary language and corpus-linguistic approaches to research, as well as a catalogue of compositions. The material, methods, and results will appeal to those interested in Sumerian, ancient literature, and the analysis of languages using a corpus.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
804 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84553-229-1 (9781845532291)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
both University of Oxford
Content
1. Introduction 2. Sumerian literature 3. Corpus-based approaches to the study of Sumerian 4. Fear (ni2) and its collocates in the ETCSL corpus Graham Cunningham 5. Preverbal /n/: function and distribution Paul Delnero ( University of Pennsylvania) 6. ak nu-ak (to do or not to do) Jarle Ebeling 7. Bull imagery in Sumerian religious literature Laura Feldt ( Aarhus University) 8. Eme-sal in Old Babylonian literary texts: a corpus-based approach Alhena Gadotti (University of California, Berkeley) 9. The conjugation prefixes in the proverb collection Fumi Karahashi (University of Pennsylvania) 10. Lexical variety and curricular grouping in House F Eleanor Robson (University of Cambridge) 11. The polysemy and productivity of the derivative element nam- in OB literary Sumerian Balint Tanos (L. Eotvos University, Budapest) 12. A quantitative analysis of the Sumerian proverb collections Jon Taylor (British Museum) 13. The multi-word construction igi bar in the Old Babylonian Period Gabor Zolyomi (L. Eotvos University, Budapest) 14. Catalogue of literary compositions in the ETCSL with reference to print publications