Irving Finkel

Now, the first thing is this, that the Babylonian language is a Semitic tongue, which, although it's extinct,

is connected to or related to Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ethiopic, Syriac, all that family of Semitic languages which are still alive.

It's an early example of one of those.

So that when the decipherment came along, it was the Semitic dictionary that they fell back on to identify words, nouns, and roots.

The other language, which is Sumerian, the one when you stick bits in the beginning and stick bits at the end, is not only not Semitic, it's not related to any other known language.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

This is a bewitching thing.

It's a bewitching thing to me.

And this is how to understand it.

Because the languages that we study in the world today, linguists study, they more or less...

all fall into a language group.

So you have Indo-European with Spanish, Italian, Latin, Hittite, and so forth.

So that's French, that's one group, and you have Germanic, and you have Slavonic.

And most languages, even the far-flung ones, fall into what can be seen to be maybe big and airy groups, their family, like that.

There's not one for Sumerian.

So this means that the truth that languages do not exist in a vacuum, but they're part of a big family, must always have been true.

So that when writing arrives about 3000, say 300 BC,

to write properly, it means that Sumerian was recorded just in time.

But the big languages, maybe in China, in Russia, somewhere else in Asia, that were related to Sumerian are all gone.