Comment by thaumasiotes a day ago
> reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it
We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.
> I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?
I would also be interested in material on this. The pronunciation is clearly not obvious; our first attempt at reading the name "Gilgamesh" came out "Izdubar". But it's also not just gone the way, say, Old Chinese pronunciation information is.
Note that our knowledge of Akkadian pronunciation is quite a bit better than our knowledge of other old Afroasiatic languages, because Akkadian is written with vowels.
A fun example is that we know the vowel in the name of the Egyptian god conventionally called "Ra" because he is mentioned in an Akkadian text. (That "a" in the English version of the name represents an Egyptian consonant, not a vowel.)
That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred.
Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian and later Akkadian or Babylonian.
I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?