Reopening the book on the lost language of civilisation's cradle

HAGUE LETTER:The Sumerian language vanished from use in around 2000 BC, but Dutch linguist Bram Jagersma is breathing new life into it

IT’S probably not the question uppermost in the minds of most people in Ireland at the moment, but what are the chances of the Irish language surviving into the 22nd century? Not great, according to Dutch linguist, Dr Bram Jagersma, one of the world’s leading experts on Sumerian grammar, whose 750-page PhD thesis – a full 20 years in the writing – will be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.

“There are around 6,000 spoken languages in the world at the moment, of which 5,000 probably won’t make it into the next century – and Irish is likely to be one of those lost forever,” says Jagersma, whose own study-of-choice, Sumerian, disappeared in around 2000 BC.

"People simply shifted gradually to another language, much as has happened in modern Ireland with the Irish language", Jagersma (55), a librarian at the University of Leiden, who finally received his doctorate last month, told The Irish Times.

“Sumerian was replaced by a Semitic language, though the culture remained for another two thousand years. I suppose it was similar to the disappearance of Latin in the Middle Ages.”

Now all that's left for most of us is the Sumerian allegedly spoken by Buffy The Vampire Slayerin the kids' TV series – and a long-forgotten guest appearance by the Sumerian demon Gozer in the hit 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Sumerian culture reached its prime in around 3,500 BC, broadly in the region occupied by modern-day Iraq.

Sumerians were perhaps the first urban civilisation. They were among the first astronomers; the first people to record their laws in writing; with a sophisticated numeric system which was both decimal and sexagesimal – the latter of which gave us 60 seconds in a minute and the 360 degrees of a circle.

But it was the language and its cuneiform script, using a system of wedge-shaped strokes, which captured the imagination of Bram Jagersma – from the age of 15.

“It started in high school when I began reading library books about ancient scripts and how to decipher them.

“Of course there were probably other students with the same curiosity – but maybe not as obsessive as I was.

“And then when I realised there were 60,000 to perhaps 100,000 Sumerian texts in existence – mainly inscribed on clay tablets – I became convinced that with so much data available, much more could be understood.”

As it happens, the Institute for the Ancient Near East at Leiden University and Holland’s National Museum of Antiquities, also in Leiden, between them hold around 2,000 Sumerian texts – a treasure trove for the quietly spoken Jagersma, a latter-day Indiana Jones of ancient Mesopotamia.

“Because the Sumerians were one of the first urbanised cultures, their script was invented to help them administer their huge and complex temple estates. It was about management. Then over a number of centuries it came to be used for narrative texts, legal documents, letters, poetry, and inscriptions describing the achievements of kings for posterity – pretty much everything.”

Jagersma’s doctoral thesis – which he began in 1990 and which now places him arguably among the top five experts on Sumerian in the world – goes back to the very building blocks of the language.

“In that sense it’s all very mundane,” he says, taking a break from the mammoth task of revising his sprawling thesis – which he wrote in English – for the editors at Oxford University Press.

“It’s about describing the regularities of the language, uncovering its structure, establishing the rules of its grammar. Knowing individual words is not enough. You have to be able to distinguish the past tense from the present tense. Or you have to know that a text is saying ‘he calls him’ not ‘him calls he’. Otherwise meaning is lost.”

Has Jagersma’s 40-year-long intellectual odyssey been worth it? “It’s been worth it because from early on I began to make little discoveries.

“I have to admit there were many times I was doubtful I would ever finish it. But I never actually reached the point of deciding to stop, to give up.”

And as the archetypal ivory tower academic, a specialist virtually without peers, does he never feel cut off from the world around him – the everyday world of iPads, winter freezes and global economic downturns? “Yes, absolutely”, he replies with enthusiasm. “That’s exactly why I do it, to be cut off. It’s my own time and space . . .

“For me, being a librarian is about the real world, my job and my social life.

“When I need a break, I go to my study and enter the world of Sumerian grammar. For me it’s just like a holiday.”