Today I tried to see how good I was at translating the Sumerian language into English. I've done a few simple translations before but was not sure how accurate they were. So I took a small line in Sumerian from the ancient cuneiform epic Enmerkar and the king of Aratta and tried to see what it said without going to the English translation until I was done.

It was a short line from the epic, line 510 and went as follows:

igi mu-un-il aratta ki - ac ba tej

The middle was the easiest part, aratta ki-ac, aratta being a name, ki meaning place, and ac (or ak) being a possessive term. Thus "King of Aratta"

So now I had:

igi mu-un-il {king of Aratta} ba tej

Then I went to the first part, igi mu-un-il. igi = eye and il means to observe, thus putting the two together would create igi-il, the Sumerian word for Look. Then there was the mu-un in between. un means "high" and mu acts as a ventive verbal marker, which means the word is directed at the speaker. Therefore, igi mu-un-il literally means "he looked up".

Now:

{He looked up at the King of Aratta} ba tej

This was where I got confused. Ba is a term meaning "its" (also represented as bi or bia) and tej (or teg) means "approach".

So my very first real translation of Sumerian came out as:


{He looked up at the king of Aratta its approach}

I thought I'd done something wrong, so I went to the English translation and behold, line 510!

"He lifted his eyes as he approached Aratta"

Aratta being a place, pretty close though!
Sorry if this seems boring or whatever but I was so excited that I had to take it down somewhere.