I was wondering if you knew of any taboo or 'in poor taste' names in Sumerian? For example you couldn't name a kid Judas or Lucifer today really even though the literal meaning of the name isn't negative. Would you be cursing your kid if you named them Huwawa?
What an interesting question! I don't really know of a great way to answer it, since there isn't a great resource out there on Sumerian onomastics generally.
That said, I doubt anyone would name a child Huwawa - in part because it's not really a "Sumerian" name. The w sound doesn't exist in Sumerian, and Huwawa's name is intended to sound foreign and/or onomatopoeic (like the bellowing of a monster).
If anyone has any further thoughts (or resources) on Sumerian onomastics, I'm always all ears!
So if that's the case (and apologies if this is a stupid question or I'm missing something obvious), then
a) how is the name written in Sumerian, if 'w' isn't a valid part of the language? Is there a method to render non-Sumerian loanwords/sounds in Sumerian cuneiform? (Kind of like katakana in modern Japanese, for example)
b) assuming 'w' has a unique symbol not used elsewhere, how do we know it maps to a 'w' sound? I would have assumed that came from comparison with later Akkadian variants of the story, but then wasn't the name more like 'Humbaba'? Or am I getting mixed up with something else?
I realise there's probably not an easy answer to this, so any attempt at an explanation is appreciated. It blows my mind sometimes that we can know as much as we do about a language so old!
Not a stupid question at all! Any given name in Sumerian had several cuneiform spellings, and any given cuneiform sign can have several readings. The spelling corresponding to Huwawa is 𒄷𒉿𒉿. 𒄷 is hu here, while 𒉿 is usually listed as corresponding to the sound pi, though can also be read as ngeshtug ("ear", "to think"), bariga (a unit of measure), and, in this case, as wa. The name can thus be read several ways, including Huppipi (apparently the pronunciation in northern Mesopotamia, influencing the potential Hittite reading Hupipi or Huwiwi) and Hubaba (maybe source of Akkadian Humbaba), but we know that (southern) Sumerian pronounced it Huwawa based on subsequent Akkadian texts interpreting Sumerian versions of the myth. I recommend George 2003 pp. 144+ if you want all the details!
There was no standard way to write 'w' in Sumerian, and no standard way to render 'non-Sumerian' sounds, simply because Sumerians were inventing writing out of whole cloth - basically the short answer for any "why is cuneiform like this??" question. The choice of the 𒉿 pi sign may have been from northern Sumerian, or just arbitrary, as many comparable cuneiform choices were.
As far as I know, the usual spelling in Hittite is d^Ḫo-wa-wa, as we see here:
(KBo VI.1)
Hittite did have a W sound, and used the wa sign only for /wa/, never for /pi/, so this probably indicates a pronunciation like /xowawa/. (In Hittite, ḫu was always pronounced as ḫo.)
But, the next sign after the name here (in the two places where it survives; the first one is broken) is iš, which is probably a Hittite nominative case ending. And if the name actually ended with -a, we would expect the nominative ending to be -aš. A name ending in -aiš is odd. Not unheard of, but not super common either. That's why George interprets it as a logogram d^ḪU.WA.WA-iš, read as Ḫoppipiš /xoppipis/.
I don't find that especially convincing, though. Hittite had a different sign to write /pi/, and I'm not aware of any certain cases of the WA sign being read that way outside of heterograms. Personally, I think an -ai-stem noun Ḫowawaiš /xowawais/ is most likely.
As for the asker's original question, though, George notes that Huwawa was a fairly common personal name in the third millennium, so it seems there was no taboo around it! In fact, as best I can tell, Huwawa's gorgon-like face was often used as a sort of apotropaic symbol to ward away evil—people would put it on amulets and hang it over their doors and such—and being born with "the face of Huwawa" (IGI d^Ḫu-wa-wa, with huge eyes and a bulbous nose) was a good omen.
If you really want to curse your kid, name them something like "more beautiful than Inana" instead!
