the irregular come/go verb with multiple roots reminds me of the etymology of the is/was/are/am/be verb (because english has so many different influences)— do you know if anyone's suggested that sumerian might have been a creole of multiple earlier languages? i know samuel n kramer pointed out that the sumerian nouns for farmer, fisherman, carpenter, etc seem to date from an earlier, unrelated language, but i haven't read anything about grammar
Following Kramer, Høyrup and a few others have argued that Sumerian was formed as a creole language, of a superstrate and substrate, in the pre-literate period. They argue this is the source of Sumerian features like the large amount of homophony, the clear distinction between mono- and polysyllabic words, the irregular-root verbs (of which there are a small but significant number, like ngen “to go”), reduplication (which is very common in modern creole languages), and the subordination suffix -a.
I myself am not convinced of this hypothesis, especially the argument that this creolization occurred shortly before the development of writing — most of the features seem to have calcified pretty strongly, and would thus imply this creolization had to have occurred a millenium or more before the earliest cuneiform. I also take it with a grain of salt since both the superstrate and substrate languages would be unclassified, still seemingly unrelated to the contemporary languages of sixth-fifth millennium BCE West Asia.
If new evidence comes to light (e.g. comparative reconstruction of (part of) Sumerian with a similar protolanguage, or insights from the decipherment of the Indus Valley Script) I’ll re-evaluate my thoughts on the creolization theory, and on Sumerian classification more broadly.
If you’re interested in more on this topic, I recommend Høyrup 1992 as a primer. Thanks for your question!
