On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Ziko van Dijk <[email protected]> wrote: > The Encarta people were very unprecise about what they are going to do in > future... > So, this means that there remains no big encyclopedia but ours? Except > Britannica? And what about the situation in French, Italian etc., has anyone > an overview about that? > Then I also ask myself in how far this evolution is to be credited mainly to > Wikipedia, or has it been "the Internet" in general that killed the > dead-tree-encyclopedias. I remember that in 1999 or 2000 I already did not > buy a paper encyclopedia because of the Internet.
As a young student of linguistics I was interested in Sumerian language. In 1996 I went to the National library of Serbia and took Britannica's 1995 edition. So, I've got the next references: * Arno Poebel, Grundzüge der sumerischen Grammatik (1923), partly out of date, but still the only full grammar of Sumerian in all its stages; * Adam Falkenstein, Grammatik der Sprache Gudeas von Lagaš, 2 vol. (1949–50), a very thorough grammar of the New Sumerian dialect, * Das Sumerische (1959), a very brief but comprehensive survey of the Sumerian language; * Cyril J. Gadd, Sumerian Reading Book (1924), outdated but the only grammatical tool in English; * Samuel N. Kramer, The Sumerians (1963), provides a general introduction to Sumerian civilization. Anecdote around this is that I was very confident in my linguistic knowledge and that I thought that I am able to understand linguistically German from 1923 (Arno Poebel's book). So, I went to the Library of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and asked them to make an inter-library borrowing from some German library. With a lot of enthusiasm I've started to read it... Of course, it was a complete disaster: I wasn't able to take any information. Copy of that book is still somewhere in my library. One year later, in 1997, I tried to find something about Sumerian language at the net. Hm. I found at least two sites with full grammars of Sumerian dialects. So, I've finished with [traditional] encyclopedias. BTW, the list of references above is from Britannica's [present] online edition [1]. Nothing was changed since 1995 edition. I remember well the list. References from the English Wikipedia's article [2] are: * Edzard, Dietz Otto (2003). Sumerian Grammar. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-12608-2. (grammar treatment for the advanced student) * Thomsen, Marie-Louise (2001) [1984]. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. ISBN 87-500-3654-8. (Well-organized with over 800 translated text excerpts.) * Diakonoff, I. M. (1976). "Ancient Writing and Ancient Written Language: Pitfalls and Peculiarities in the Study of Sumerian". Assyriological Studies 20 (Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jakobsen): 99–121. * Rubio, Gonzalo (2007). "Sumerian Morphology." In Morphologies of Asia and Africa, vol. 2, pp. 1327-1379. Edited by Alan S. Kaye.. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 1-57506-109-0. * Attinger, Pascal (1993). Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du11/e/di. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht. ISBN 37-2780-869-1. * Volk, Konrad (1997). A Sumerian Reader. Rome: Pontificio Istituto Biblico. ISBN 88-7653-610-8. (collection of Sumerian texts) * Michalowski, Piotr, 'Sumerian as an Ergative Language', Journal of Cuneiform Studies 32 (1980), 86-103. [1] - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/573229/Sumerian-language [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
