ina šumēlim

Philology, music (by which I mean Chumbawamba), anti-authoritarian socialism. Bronze age kinda person.

[ina-shumelim]

I’m an Assyriologist and ancient Mesopotamia is pretty much all I want to talk about, so this is my outlet. It is fascinating to me, the glances that sometimes just one text will allow us at the lives of individuals thousands of years ago, and I want to share those here, alongside whatever other oddities I tend to stumble upon. My current obsession is confinement in ancient Mesopotamia. Also Chumbawamba.

My name, ina šumēlim, is Akkadian for “on the left” because I intended for that to be my starting point in interpreting and presenting my sources here. For me, this means highlighting the lives and struggles of those disadvantaged by society and investigating the sources of these disadvantages. I think I still have a lot to learn about how to do that properly, though, because in my heart I’m just a philologist who gets really excited about verbal forms and etymologies.

Ancient West Asia

The cruel fate of Lamassāni: The sale of daughters at Bronze Age Nuzi (June 2024)

Feet of clay: Ba‘la-be’a and her siblings: The sale of children at Bronze Age Emar (August 2024)

Sweet Home Zalpuwa: An Old Hittite story featuring mules and maybe incest (September 2024)

Akkulenni is a d*ck: Censoring dead languages: Rejection and profanity at Bronze Age Nuzi (November 2024)

Storks, frogs, and pussy: Babylonian euphemisms: Two ambiguous Akkadian animal names (April 2025)

Ancient Mesopotamian prisons

Bēlšunu in the “house of hardship”: A letter sent from an Old Babylonian prison (August 2024)

A Hittite saying: A curious little sidenote in a Late Bronze Age letter (September 2024)

Escaping from prison in the sixth century BC: Two Neo-Babylonian legal texts about unsuccessful prison breaks (December 2024)

Life goes on outside: Figuring out life during and after prison (July 2025)

Meme-sopotamia

Šāpik-zēri and one of his more questionable decisions (July 2024)

Calling people daddy (August 2024)

Barbie, Ken, and my Hittite homework (September 2024)

Hittites and beastiality (November 2024)

Song translations

lūtalak dādī: Bella Ciao in Old Babylonian (July 2024)

mūšu nēḫu: Silent Night in Middle Babylonian (December 2024)

innâ ūmātu: Brecht’s Song of the Vltava in Middle Babylonian (August 2025)

Language(s)

I’m sick so here’s grammar: The Kalaallisut dual confused me (January 2025)

Gunierung: A niche grammatical term in Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform studies (July 2026)

Chumbawamba

You know I hate every pop star that I ever met: Chumbawamba and “pop stars” (October 2023)

Hi, boys and girls, I’m Danbert Nobacon, I’m the inside joke of the group: References to Danbert in Chumbawamba songs (April 2024)

Raging against the dying of the light: Chumbawamba don’t want to fade away: Associations on Chumbawamba’s Fade Away (December 2024; content note: HIV, suicide)

[ina-shumelim]

Translating Akkadian into German and inventing new j-causatives for the Š-stem and el-verbs for the tan-stems

[ina-shumelim]

And

Akkadian rakābu–šurkubu and English fare–ferry!!

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[agentofdeterioration]

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is, to a modern audiences, what classicists have called “boring as hell,” but I can’t help but think that if you were watching Homer recite it it would have been more like when comedians go, “anybody here tonight from Chicago?” and the Chicagoans in the back start cheering

Homer’s like, “and there were forty black ships from… LOCRIS” and the Locrians in the crowd start going absolutely nuts

[thoodleoo]

been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before

[thoodleoo]

had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes

[lobotomyscars]

sorry can you repeat that. i was busy trying to make eye contact and act normal and didn't hear you

[ina-shumelim]

It’s kinda funny to me that both Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform studies have a niche and unrelated (German) term Gunierung. In Indo-European linguistics, the term was apparently introduced by Franz Bopp to refer to the formation of what is now called full ablaut grade. He takes the word from Sanskrit guṇa “virtue”, used already in this way by the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini in his Aṣṭādhyāyī. The earliest usage of the term in German (spelled gunirung) I can find is in Bopp's Vergleichende Grammatik (1833).

The usage of Gunierung in cuneiform studies is younger and seems to go back to Friedrich Delitzsch's Die Entstehung des ältesten Schriftsystems (1897). Here, Gunierung means the addition, usually of three or four horizontal wedges to one cuneiform sign to create a new one. Delitzsch took the word from Akkadian gunû, itself borrowed from a Sumerian word (perhaps gun₃(-na) “speckled”, cf. Yushu Gong 2000, Die Namen der Keilschriftzeichen: 31–32) used already by ancient Mesopotamian scholars to refer to that very process.

Thus, in both cases, modern researchers adopted and continue to use a term coined by native ones. That the two words are today identical is of course of no significance, but still rather neat.

[ina-shumelim]

Also, a French scholar annoyed at the word:

(Louis Havet, “Mémoire sur le système primitif de voyelles”, 1879, reproduced in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 32, 1976: 115.)

“The same word guna went down in history; it seemed so indispensable that the German scholars felt they had to create derivations: gunieren, to affect with guna, gunierung, the act of affecting with guna. Even in some books written in French, one occasionally encounters the noun gounation and the verb je goune, tu gounes, il goune. Without gouner, it seems, and without displaying that it gounait, the science of language could not live. That is how, a hundred years ago, chemists phlogistiquaient, déphlogistiquaient, and rephlogistiquaient.”

[ina-shumelim]

It’s kinda funny to me that both Indo-European linguistics and cuneiform studies have a niche and unrelated (German) term Gunierung. In Indo-European linguistics, the term was apparently introduced by Franz Bopp to refer to the formation of what is now called full ablaut grade. He takes the word from Sanskrit guṇa “virtue”, used already in this way by the ancient Indian grammarian Pāṇini in his Aṣṭādhyāyī. The earliest usage of the term in German (spelled gunirung) I can find is in Bopp's Vergleichende Grammatik (1833).

The usage of Gunierung in cuneiform studies is younger and seems to go back to Friedrich Delitzsch's Die Entstehung des ältesten Schriftsystems (1897). Here, Gunierung means the addition, usually of three or four horizontal wedges to one cuneiform sign to create a new one. Delitzsch took the word from Akkadian gunû, itself borrowed from a Sumerian word (perhaps gun₃(-na) “speckled”, cf. Yushu Gong 2000, Die Namen der Keilschriftzeichen: 31–32) used already by ancient Mesopotamian scholars to refer to that very process.

Thus, in both cases, modern researchers adopted and continue to use a term coined by native ones. That the two words are today identical is of course of no significance, but still rather neat.

[ina-shumelim]

Translating Akkadian into German and inventing new j-causatives for the Š-stem and el-verbs for the tan-stems

[shinraalpha]

titanic Wreckage perfec t size for put trillionaire in to n\ap! inside very Cool and Meme trillionaire look so sick put trillionaore in Titanic Wreckage. Put Trillionaore In Titanic Wreckage. no problems ever in titanicc wreckage because good Shape and Support for trillionaire ti visit in little snubmarine. Thetitanic Wreckage yes a place for a trillionaire put trillionaire in titanic wreckage can trust Mad Catz xbox controller for giveing good submarine control to trillionaire. friend titanic wreckage

[real-language-facts]

what are phonetics and how are they related to languag

some bullshit, and 2. the relationship is strictly sexual

[standard-text-editor]

Hey! Coming from outside Indo-European or Etruscan linguistics, what's the tea with Giuliano Bonfante?

Giuliano Bonfante lived to be 101 years old and I'm not aware that he was ever on the right side of a debate even once in all that time.

I think the last three times I came across him were:

When he claimed the Etruscans must have had close contacts with Germany before the Romans came along because German Erz 'ore' is derived from the name of the city of Arrētium in Etruria (it is not).

When fellow dipshit Szemerényi praised him in one of his own dogshit books (possibly Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics) for rejecting laryngeal theory. Laryngeal theory is the reconstruction of three PIE consonants, *h₁, *h₂, and *h₃ (so written because their most likely phonetic realisation is considerably more contentious than the fact of their existence—they're called laryngeals mainly because they colour vowels similarly to laryngeals in some Semitic languages, including Akkadian), that, at the time it was formulated (1897), were not known to have survived as consonants in any IE language, but that resolve a host of issues with vowel behaviour. Between consonants the laryngeals were preserved as vowels, typically a (almost all languages) or i (Indo-Iranian), but Greek and Greek alone has separate outcomes for each of them: Gk. γενέτωρ, Lat. genitor < *genator, Skt. जनिता janitā < PIE *g̑enh₁tōr 'begetter'; Gk. πατήρ, Lat. pater, Skt. पिता pitā < PIE ph₂tēr 'father'; Gk. δοτός, Lat. datus < PIE dh₃tos 'given' (and Skt. अदित adita 'he was given' < *h₁e-dh₃-to). The decipherment of Hittite in the early 20th century led to the realisation that Hittite preserves at least consonantal *h₂ as ḫ, and by, say, the 1950s you would have had to be a real dumbass to still reject laryngeal theory.

When he claimed the Philistines were "obviously" Illyrian on the basis that Παλαιστῖνοι kind of looks like Palaeste, a city in Epirus, and he couldn't be bothered to look at the Semitic data. In the same article he suggests Mitinti, the name of three separate Philistine kings, shows "the pre-Hellenic -νθο- suffix", which he thinks is Illyrian (Mitinti is a perfectly normal Semitic word meaning 'gift'), and—actually, just read it. The whole thing is shocking. Some of it is because it's from 1946, but it's abysmal even for 1946.

This is how Bonfante always seems to work: he throws out a bunch of wild, obviously unsupportable claims, badly misrepresents the state of the field and accuses everyone else in it of missing obvious points, promises to treat if not the actual thesis statement of his paper then at least an extremely load-bearing point in it in some future work, and then just ignores any responses.

His contribution to the festschrift I mentioned earlier (p. 460)—a review of a chapter of a book that came out fourteen years earlier, mind—is pretty typical. Note that his position that the Indo-European homeland is on the Baltic coast isn't even in the top three mainstream positions (Pontic-Caspian steppe, Anatolia, Armenia).

It's the behaviour of an established scholar who has gone senile eccentric in his retirement but is basically humoured by his colleagues (very common!), except Bonfante was like that his entire life. Part of the reason he gets away with it, I think, is because he often cites hard-to-find, often non-English publications for his more ridiculous claims (Szemerényi was fond of doing the same thing) and he often refers to his own work in Italian, so editors and peer reviewers who don't already know him don't bother to track anything down and wrongly assume he must be at least base-line credible. By the end, though, I'm convinced that he mostly got published so more serious people would have something to publish refutations about in slow years.

[catboybiologist]

After some years of HRT I've been left with this deep, low simmering rage. Because what do you mean it was always this easy to be happy

[catboybiologist]

I take a shot once a week, and even if that was too much, I could do it as pills, and so many of my problems just evaporated overnight.

And not one person thought to bring it up.

When I was talking about how horrifying puberty felt. When I was cutting myself. When I was in inpatient care. When I attempted suicide. When I talked for YEARS in therapy about how dissociated and trapped I felt in my body. When I felt like I never truly fixed something that was deeply wrong about me that started at puberty.

Not one person said it was a possibility. No one thought "hey, maybe this kid should go to someone trained to identify dysphoria". No one mentioned that trans people weren't some weird other group of people. It didn't have to be pressure. It didn't have to be "forcing" me. Just mentioning that trans people exist and it could be me. That it was possible and it was easy. No pushing, just laying the option out there.

HRT is treated like this last ditch option. This horrific, mutilating thing that I GUESS we can give to you if you have NO OTHER options. Because did you know it's permanent? Did you know you'll be on it for the rest of your life? Did you know the health risks? Did you know it'll make you infertile? Did you know that it's deviant? Did you know that it's an alternative lifestyle for other people?

No one said it was okay to WANT it to be permanent. Or noted that most people are reliant on the medical system in one way or the other anyways (and it's not even necessary for HRT). Or that the health risks are the normal parts of having that hormone, even in cis people of your gender. Or said it was okay to not want kids, or mention that you can just freeze gametes. Or acknowledged that the "deviant" people are just people, living their lives, that have been violently pushed out of "normal" society.

I grew up in an area that Republicans mock for being a kind of "woke central". And even then it's just. Not treated as an easy option. It was never on the table if you don't specifically already know you're going through gender stuff, and no one will help you get to that point. At which point, it's still treated like the last ditch option. Did you know you can be a feminine man? Did you know you can slap a "she/her" in your twitter bio and be done with it? Did you know that you're oh-so-valid without it? Did you know that you shouldn't take HRT? Maybe don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't take HRT? Don't ta-

When you've been in it a while, HRT is the easiest, most casual thing in the world. Just pop a shot on a Saturday as part of your "everything shower" routine and you're done.

Anyways. Support trans kids always and forever.

[ina-shumelim]

(Benno Landsberger 1965, “Tin and lead: The adventures of two vocables”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24: 285.)

[ina-shumelim]

(Landsberger 1953 in a letter to his former student Fritz Kraus, cited and translated by Erica Reiner 2002, An adventure of great dimension: The launching of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: 3.)

[ina-shumelim]

(Markham J. Geller 2021, review of Ludĕk Vacín’s “The unknown Benno Landsberger”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 84: 148.)

[ina-shumelim]

(Benno Landsberger 1965, “Tin and lead: The adventures of two vocables”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24: 285.)

[ina-shumelim]

(Landsberger 1953 in a letter to his former student Fritz Kraus, cited and translated by Erica Reiner 2002, An adventure of great dimension: The launching of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: 3.)

[ina-shumelim]

(Benno Landsberger 1965, “Tin and lead: The adventures of two vocables”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 24: 285.)

[standard-text-editor]

Isaiah 19:7:

עָרוֹת עַל־יְא֖וֹר עַל־פִּי יְא֑וֹר וְכֹל מִזְרַע יְא֔וֹר יִיבַשׁ נִדַּ֖ף וְאֵינֶנּוּ׃ ʕārôt ʕal-yəʔôr, ʕal-pî yəʔôr; wəkōl mizraʕ yəʔôr, yîbaš niddap, wəʔênennû. also the plants along the Nile, at the mouth of the river. Every sown field along the Nile will become parched, will blow away and be no more.

Translation is from the NIV, not because it's good but because it shows that traditionally פִּי יְאוֹר pî yəʔôr has been taken to mean 'the mouth of the Nile', which is certainly perfectly reasonable. It doesn't make a ton of sense in the context of the verse, though, and the Septuagint understandably just omits it (and the NRSVue follows the Septuagint here, which is why I couldn't use that translation instead).

However! יְאוֹר yəʔôr 'Nile' is well-known to be a loan from Egyptian ı͗trw (Wiktionary has /ˈjaʔɾ/ for an 8th-century realisation, which is also when Isaiah lived and First Isaiah was written—something went slightly wrong with the vocalisation but as these things go it's pretty good), but Egyptian ı͗trw, without any further qualifications, really just means 'river' or 'canal'; to specify you're talking about the Nile in particular, you would generally add an adjective like ꜥꜣ 'great' (ı͗trw-ꜥꜣ was loaned into 7th-century Neo-Assyrian as ia-ru-ʾu-u₂) and/or the definite article pꜣ /pə/. The author of First Isaiah seems to have been at least somewhat familiar with Egyptian, so it's possible this is actually what he was doing here with פי יאור and it's not 'the mouth of the Nile' but pꜣ ı͗trw, just to show off that he does know Egyptian.

I'm not aware of any translation, ancient or modern, that actually reads it that way, but for my money it does make the verse make more sense and I like the idea.