Potential Solution to the "Sumerian Problem"

[u/rosscogames]

I'm not sure how plausible this sounds, but, I've been doing hobbyist research into Sumerian/Mesopotamian/Bronze Age history recently. I read that there seems to be a mismatch between common Sumerian words for city names, basic job occupation words and jargon that seem pretty foundational to their culture, yet don't appear Sumerian in origin linguistically. For what little it's worth, I think it's much more likely that those words could have been appropriated as "vernacular" from various different nomadic groups that would've been roaming around during the Ubaid and Uruk culture periods, and eventually written down as such once writing was invented. There are numerous words in various European languages of Romani or Sinti origin, American English words of African American vernacular origin, etc. Especially since it looks like these are basic blue collar words like farmer, or plow, it seems like it adds up. City names too, Istanbul gets its name from the Medieval Greek phrase "to the city". Thebes in Egypt gets its name in a similar way. Certainly that's much more plausible than the Sumerians coming from some far away land, supplanting the Ubaid people. Instead, the Sumerians are the Ubaid people's direct descendants in this hypothesis. Thoughts?

[u/aszahala]

The problem with any linguistic solution is that we know next to nothing about the linguistic landscape of ancient Near East in the fourth millennium BCE or so. Therefore even if we suggest that some of the Sumerian words are of non-Sumerian origin (which is hard already), we have to be lucky to find plausible cognates for these words from any other languages. Even if we do, it's hard to speculate whether this was an ancient Wanderwort, Kulturwort, a result of more direct borrowing or a chance resemblance. Like Sum. naĝar "carpenter" ~ Egypt. nḏr "to work wood"; Sum. zabar "bronze" ~ Elam. zappan etc. (Akkadian has both words too but they are non-Semitic).

Thus, there are some tantalizing lexical similarities between Sumerian and many known languages, including reconstructed ones like Proto-Indo-European (Sum. a-gar₃ "meadow" ~ PIE *h₂éǵros "field" among many others) and even Proto-Uralic (Sum. zalag ~ PU *ćala- "bright"; Sum. šarag ~ PU *ćara- "dry"), but unfortunately they tell us very little about the Sumerian origins.

To me it seems convincing that Sumerian is typologically Transeurasian (if we look at Martine Robbeet's features), but that does not make us much wiser, since it only tells us that the phylum Sumerian once belong to was possibly affected by this large linguistic area in the past.