Perhaps a look at the basic elements of language and how that would effect cognition, and specifically as that would have effected the Sumerians.
The two components of language are expressive and lexical, and it was up until recently believed that languages with compound features were unique to human beings. This is likely very far from the truth, as even other apes can learn human sign language, and bacteria are found to respond to compound signalling with unique responses. One protein induces one behaviour, another induces a different behaviour. When these combine, rather than being incomprehensible or triggering one behaviour or the other, they instead induce a third response all together.
Yes…like T, H, and TH. Yes that’s human compound language. They have even established recently that the living genetic code/lexicon can be diversified even if they haven’t done it smoothly or effectively yet.
Could you explain expressive and lexical? If a dog growls at you, that is expressive language where as something giving the same signal every time it detects the same thing would be lexical language, like the language of ground squirrels.
It’s widely accepted now that humans developed their own language from a tendency to imitate other species, both the rhythms and tones of birds as well and the guttural expressive gestures of predators and other apes. Vocally, other apes use what would be classified as expressive language, even the singing of monkeys is more expressive than it is lexical. The sequencing of their calls varies very little.
There are people in the northwest who claim to have recorded Bigfoot language. It sounds like very rapid almost musical grunting. It’s very strange to listen to.
Dolphin and whale song would be both expressive and lexical though we haven’t decoded it very well yet. It might be what proto-hominid speech was like.
You could say that our own music is both expressive and lexical. Yes.
Sumerian script being lexical as a rule, their thinking would have been more concrete and literal than most modern thinking, elemental in a way perhaps, and their descriptions would have been more geometrical or spacial than mathematical as today’s language is mostly. This would have effected their problem solving ability.
How would it effect their problem solving ability? Their planning and problem solving would have been more procedural, mechanical in a way, rather than oblique and introspective, individualistic as it is today.
Perhaps why past cultures had such feats of engineering? Yes. Like the legendary hanging gardens, many modern UFO contact reports, even sometimes things that are almost like possession phenomena (lacking better descriptive terminology) have the individual speaking Sumerian. Strange, no?
We do know what Sumerian would have sounded like, at least to some degree, as we could reconstruct it from it’s later forms of script. With the greater inclusion of strictly phonetic characters, the original characters of Sumerian cuneiform would have been graphemes, characters that stand in for whole words, but later they did include some phonemes, characters that stand in for sounds. All characters of the English alphabet are phonemes. Their syntax was subject oriented, another cognitive difference that would be significant by comparison to today’s language.
If you think about it, a word is like a grapheme, made up of many phonemes especially cursive, or a logo. True.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~