Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 December 18

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December 18

Closest language to Sumerian

What is the closest language to Sumerian — Preceding unsigned comment added by J2088 (talk • contribs) 17:55, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

None. As our article on Sumerian language states (with multiple references), it's a language isolate – for all we can tell, whatever relatives it had have vanishedd without leaving a trace. The article also lists a round dozen of modern language families that have tentatively been claimed to be possible relatives, but none of these hypotheses is more than speculation. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:03, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Well, it does say that it may have formed a Sprachbund with Akkadian. I think it would be fair to say the "closest (known) language" to Sumerian was Akkadian. My general feeling, admittedly as an outsider to academic linguistics, is that there's an over-emphasis on "genetic" relationships between languages (the so-called "tree model", I think). Related is related, whether the relationship is genetic or a result of proximity. --Trovatore (talk) 23:16, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Trovatore -- what you say is factual in its own way, but it's not what linguists usually mean when they say "closest language"... AnonMoos (talk) 02:18, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

As I misunderstand it, members of a sprachbund may converge in how they use the accusative case, say, but their accusative forms don't converge; so that's a difference between tree-kinship and neighborship. —Tamfang (talk) 22:11, 25 December 2018 (UTC)