Conference thebay::joyoflex

158.0. "Dead language dictionary a hot seller" by TLE::SAVAGE (Neil, @Spit Brook) Wed Mar 19 1986 11:18

Associated Press Tue 18-MAR-1986 23:52                    Sumerian Dictionary

                                                                         
    PHILADELPHIA (AP) - The first volume of the first modern dictionary of
    Sumerian, the world's oldest written language but dead for 4,000 years,
    has sold out in its first printing, four years earlier than expected. 
    
    The first of 18 planned volumes the dictionary was published in 1984 by
    the University of Pennsylvania's University Museum. The first volume is
    in its second printing after the first 750 copies sold out in 10
    months. 
    
    "It's fantastic," one of the editors, Ake Sjoberg, said Tuesday. "Many
    people outside the field bought it, probably out of curiosity." 
    
    Sjoberg and Erle Leichty lead a team of scholars who are producing the
    dictionary, with 17 more volumes planned over the next 25 years. They
    expected it would take five years to sell the first volume, of the
    dictionary that began in 1976 with an $800,000 federal grant and
    private donations. 
    
    The researchers, working from excavated clay tablets, began with volume
    "B" because it was simpler, Sjoberg said. The next volume, "A," is
    scheduled for publication in 1987. 
    
    "When volume `A' comes out, I don't think there will be so many copies
    sold," he said. It may even be two books, because it will include big
    verbs. Translating and explaining the verbs "to do" and "to make" will
    alone take 50 to 60 pages. 
    
    Sumerians lived between the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys in what
    is now Iraq. Their language, etched on moist clay tablets from roughly
    5000 B.C. to 2000 B.C., disappeared with their domination by
    Babylonians.