I mean their sounds. For example kur , kur2 , kur4,... I'm assuming these are different characters that sound different? or there's no way to know the sounds? The notation of the words also confuse me. for example in [enter] there's an entry kurx(LIL) (kux(LIL)) , what do the () mean?
Ahh! I understand. Let’s see if I can break down a few of the most common quirks of Sumerian transliteration:
— If you see multiple words with a number after each, they’re different words, written with different cuneiform signs, but all pronounced identically. Sumerian has a lot of homophony, and the same process exists in English — think “pare, pair, pear” or “there, their, they’re”. In spoken language, you have the context to help distinguish which word is meant, and sometimes other clues — some words in Sumerian have different meanings as nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
In the example you gave, kur means “mountain” or “east”; kur2 means “stranger, enemy, foreign, to be different”; kur3 is an alternate reading of gur; kur4 is an alternate reading of gur4; kur5 is an alternate reading of gud; kur6-7 are alternate readings of kurum6-7; kur9 means “to enter”; and kur12 is an alternate reading of guru5. All of these examples are pronounced identically, as /kur/.
— If you see a root with a lowercase portion and then an uppercase portion in parentheses, like hir(KESHDA), that means that the word is pronounced “hir” and written with the sign for “keshda”. In this case, hir means “to squeeze” as opposed to keshda “to bind, wrap, tie”, but both are written identically in Sumerian. This is similar to how in English “tear” and “tear” are written identically but pronounced differently and have different meanings (“I tear the paper” vs “A tear fell from my eye”).
— A similar thing occurs if you see a small superscript before or after a root, like (ngish)gana-ur (where the “ngish” is in superscript). In this case, the word would be pronounced gana-ur but would have the ngish sign written before it in cuneiform in order to distinguish its meaning. The special superscript sign is called a determiner, and there isn’t a good equivalent to them in English. A video on determiners is on my list, but will probably be a few months in the future.
Hope that was helpful!
