Cuneiform 102 · Chapter 02
Warm-up · 6 quick retrievals from earlier chapters
rope — draw it, then check
𒂠 [še] · EŠ2 · rope; the terminative -še3 ↩
The case that hides
Three signs bought you the sentence’s skeleton — verb last, tags on the nouns, a doer that can be marked. This chapter’s grammar bite is smaller and sneakier: the tag that means “belonging to,” which is everywhere in real texts and which likes to vanish from the spelling the moment you stop watching it.
Three new signs
| Sign | Name | Key | Reads | Means | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 𒊏 | RA | toward | [ra] | [ra]; "to, for" (a person) — the dative tag | origin opaque — a grammar workhorse from its first appearance |
| 𒂵 | GA | milk | [ga] | milk; [ga] | the sign lists tie it to the milk jug |
| 𒀝 | AK | do | [ak] | to do, to make | origin unclear; ak is the case's sound |
Five times each, aloud as you write: ra, ga, ak.
The genitive — the case that hides
English marks possession by changing the possessor: the king → the king’s. Sumerian does something else entirely. It leaves the possessor alone and tags it, and — this is the part worth slowing down for — it puts the possessed thing first:
X Y-ak = “Y’s X” (literally “X of-Y”)
House, king-of: 𒂍 𒈗 e2 lugal(-ak), “the king’s house.” The possessed noun (e2, “house”) leads; the possessor (lugal, “king”) follows, carrying the genitive tag. Now count the signs: two — and the transliteration shows a tag the clay does not. That mismatch is not a typo; it is this chapter’s whole lesson, coming right up.
Now the honest part. Say that phrase aloud and you will notice the /k/ barely wants to exist: e2 lugal-ak tends to surface, and get written, as something closer to e2 lugal-a, or even just e2 lugal, with no genitive tag visible at all. The rule of thumb from the standard grammars is that the /k/ of -ak mostly surfaces only when another vowel follows it and gives it something to lean on; standing at the end of a phrase, alone, it routinely hides in the spelling. You will meet e2 lugal-ak far more often looking like e2 lugal-a than looking like its full form. Learn the pattern (possessed first, possessor-plus-tag second) and expect the tag itself to be shy.
Contrast that with a case you can now write in full, no hiding at all — the dative, -ra, marking the person something is done for:
The dative says its whole name every time. The genitive, notoriously, does not. But when the shy /k/ does step into the open — when a vowel follows and gives it footing — the syllable it forms is exactly what your new sign 𒀝 writes. Keep that pairing: the case is /ak/; the sign is 𒀝; the clay shows it only when the sound has somewhere to stand. (𒀝 also works a plainer day job as the verb “to do, to make” — and it has one more surprise waiting for you at the end of chapter 05.)
Reading: milk names from Fara
The same Early Dynastic IIIa name lists that gave 101 and chapter 00 their readings include a small run of children’s names built squarely on this chapter’s new sign. Two neighboring entries:
urn:nabu:cdli:p010652 · license:
attribution. Name translations are approximate by nature.
Look closely at the doubled signs and you will recognize old friends: 𒅥 and 𒅘 are 101’s sign-workshop compounds, built on the mouth — “eat” and “drink” doubled here the way Sumerian doubles a verb for repeated or ongoing action. The mouth eats and drinks again, twice over, and somebody’s baby got a name out of it. Hold the milk loosely, though: 𒂵 has a second, grammatical job waiting in chapter 09, and when you own it, these same two names will open a second — and better — reading. The clay keeps; the course will come back.
Reading: a name with a hidden genitive
One more Fara name, and it puts this chapter’s grammar bite to work without a single spelled-out -ak:
urn:nabu:cdli:p010772 · license:
attribution. Name translations are approximate by nature.
e2-gal, “big house” — the palace — is 101 chapter 07’s word, and here it sits as the possessed thing a man belongs to: not ur e2-gal-ak spelled in full, but ur e2-gal — “Ur,” of the “palace,” tag hidden exactly the way this chapter warned you it would be. Ur, the classic 101 sign for “dog” doing service as “man/servant” in names, plus palace, plus a genitive you have to supply yourself. That is the whole game from here on: knowing a tag is there even when the clay declines to write it.
Drill before you go on
- Write 𒊏, 𒂵, 𒀝 from memory; say ra, ga, ak.
- Compose in transliteration, then in signs: lugal-ra (“for the king,” dative, fully spelled), and e2 lugal-ak (“the king’s house,” genitive — then say it again the way the clay usually would, with the /k/ dropped).
- In the two milk-names above, name which sign is doubled for repetition and which two 101 compounds are hiding inside them.
Next: say it twice — doubling, and the abstract nam-.
Read it cold
This chapter's last reading, once more — script only. Read it aloud before you unfold.
Check yourself
urn:nabu:cdli:p010772 · license:
attribution. Name translations are approximate by nature.