Talk:Der (Sumer)

Alternative spelling of the name

^ALUDi-e-ir

This has been unsourced since 2020 and should be sourced before it's included again. It is absent in the ePSD, which does give the other spelling for Der given in the lede (as well as a couple of other alternatives, none resembling this one). Also, I don't remember ever having heard of a determinative ALU, and it appears to be an alternative transliteration of the URU/IRI sign, which usually means 'city' (obviously a far more relevant meaning here). If there is also a determinative ALU, I suppose it would mean 'drum', but even words for actual drums don't take such a determinative. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 21:37, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Well a good catch since that dates back for at least 15 years ago. :-) PS Supposedly the rule followers of Wikipedia want one to use a template for that ie

Template:Lang-sux . I do not. Ploversegg (talk) 23:51, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I've got it now, the determinative had just been transliterated based on the Akkadian word ālu instead of the Sumerian equivalent uru. Definitely not the standard practice even for transliterations of Akkadian these days (or decades; or half-century), but I suppose it occurred in older literature: I find transliterations like ^âldi-ru in Reallexikon der Assyriologie (begun in 1927), but not anywhere else I've checked. (It also uses a circumflex instead of a macron in this word, which would seem to be wrong by modern standards, too.) The syllabic/phonetic spellings of the name of Der with DI, IR and the like do occur, but I only find them in Akkadian texts, so it does not seem to be a 'Sumerian' spelling as it had been labelled. I find ^URUde-e-er in the Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia corpus (an inscription by Nebuchadnezzar I), and also a few occurrences in publications indexed by Google, sometimes with an added determinative ^ki: ^URUde-er^ki. The Sumerian-style logographic spellings like ^uruBAD₃.AN^ki do occur in Akkadian texts as well. So I suppose some updated syllabic version can be kept as an Akkadian (variant) spelling, but the problem, as with names in many ancient languages, is that so many variant spellings occur in various periods (^URUde-e-er, ^URUdi-ru^ki etc.) that it is hard to choose which one to pick as 'the standard', when our sources haven't. --62.73.69.121 (talk) 15:42, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Just the Archival texts of the Assyrian Empire corpus lists the following spellings: BÀD.DINGIR.KI; URU.de-e-re; URU.de-e-ri; URU.de-e-ru; URU.de-re; de-ri; URU.de-ri.KI; URU.de-ri-ma; URU.de-ru. Leaving aside the logogram (BÀD.DINGIR.KI = BÀD.AN.KI), the base form (nominative) with the phonetically most elaborate spelling (expression of the long vowel) should be URU.de-e-ru, i.e. ^urude-e-ru. If I'm not missing something, there should also be final mimation in what usually passes for the classical form of Akkadian (the Old Babylonian version), but I can't find such a variant. Judging from the Old Babylonian volume of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, the logographic spelling of the name was preferred at the time when mimation was still current, so a mimated version might be unattested. A variant without mimation can probably be counted at least as 'Standard Babylonian' (Huehnergaard 2011: 596).--62.73.69.121 (talk) 17:22, 12 July 2024 (UTC)