Talk:Dingir

The section on the pantheon is a contents fork from Mesopotamian_mythology - I have integrated the material there. This article should focus on the Sumerian/Akkadian determinative since this is the meaning ot the ^Dsuperscript from which it should be linked. Enki H. (talk) 14:43, 2 May 2009 (UTC)Reply

Tengri (in Old Turkic) > Tanrı (in Turkish) = "God" Böri (talk) 12:06, 31 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

You mean "is it related"? Unlikely, as one word is from 3000 BC Mesopotamia, and the other from AD 500 Central Asia. Why should they? --dab (𒁳) 18:25, 31 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

Turkish language is older than AD 500 : Xiongnu#Turkic_theories_and_possible_relationship_to_Huns (& these years don't show anything! for example, how many years are there between The Hittite language and the Old English? We know that the English language and the Hittite language have many cognate words...) also: Julius Oppert suggested that a non-Semitic, "Turanian" language had preceded Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and that speakers of this language had developed the cuneiform script. from Sumerian language . Böri (talk) 08:06, 1 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think Dbachmann meant that we don't have any substantial attestation of Turkic vocabulary until ca. 500 A.D. (though obviously Turkic languages were spoken before than time), and also there's no evidence that any Turkic language was ever spoken within a thousand miles of Sumeria before Sumerian went extinct. Isolated word resemblances do not prove a linguistic relationship, and the relationship between English and Hittite is secured by a whole web of sound correspondences and grammatical correspondences... AnonMoos (talk) 11:47, 1 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

I know this site (In fact, I have that book... I saw that site now!): Turkic-Sumerian cognates (by Osman Nedim Tuna)

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A3=ind0308&L=language&P=2828626&E=2&B=--------------050000000408020202070501&N=Sumerian-Tuna.pdf&T=application%2Fpdf Böri (talk) 14:40, 1 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

Please see WP:RS. See also Sun-Language Theory and related subjects. For the record, Proto-Turkic is dated to about the 1st century, but there is no way of knowing whether the deity Tengri existed before actual attestation in the Middle Ages. If you read the Tengri article, you will realize that the word is probably ultimately of Chinese origin. --dab (𒁳) 14:46, 1 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

The book of Osman Nedim Tuna is a reliable source. http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osman_Nedim_Tuna and yes, Tian = Tengri = "Sky", "God", "Sky-God" ; it says: The Chinese word for "sky", Tian, may also be related, possibly a loan from a prehistoric Central Asian language but how do you know that it's a Chinese word? The Turkish language and the Chinese language have many cognate words: shui 水(Chinese) = sub (Old Turkic) = su (Turkish) = "water" / you 油 (Chinese) = yağ(Turkish) = "oil, fat" , etc. Böri (talk) 09:30, 2 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

Your reference is not serious. The book of Osman Nedim Tuna is not a "reliable source". The fact that the author has a Turkish Wikipedia article tells us nothing. There is also no need to base our articles at English Wikipedia on Turkish language sources.

However, googling around I find that an interesting point can indeed be made in this context. I will try to present it. If your Tuna simply collects suggestions from old literature of the 1920s and 1930s, there is no need to cite Tuna instead of the stuff he cites, is there. The proposition here is that tengri is not so much cognate with either tian or dingir, but that both these words may be loans from(!) a Central Asian source. This isn't more than random speculation, but if Mircea Eliade can honour it with a footnote, then we can too. --dab (𒁳) 12:04, 2 November 2010 (UTC)Reply

It's also interesting that dingir was noted as a possible "Turanian" element in the "language of Chaldaea" by Rawlinson in 1862, this being even before Sumerian had been identified as a language on its own terms. I am not sure what current opinion on this would be. It is true that dingir can easily be a loanword in Sumerian, as it is rather noticeable how dingir is *not* the Sumerian word for sky or the sky god, but a separate term referring to a more abstract notion of "divinity". --dab (𒁳) 13:04, 2 November 2010 (UTC) Tengri means "god", not "sky god" in Old Turkic. Kök tengri means "sky god" kök=sky, tengri=god. --78.183.195.165 (talk) 12:51, 5 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

Tengri means "sky" > then "sky-god" and "god" / kök (gök) means "blue" > then "sky" / dingir was noted as a possible "Turanian" element in the "language of Chaldaea" by Rawlinson in 1862 VERY GOOD! Turanian = "Ural-Altaic" Böri (talk) 10:15, 8 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

What actually happened was most likely the following (and the footnote at Tengri supports this conclusion): Rawlinson was able to identify the approximate phonetic reading (pronunciation) of the "Chaldaean" (Sumerian) word for "god" as dingir and noticed that this resembles the Turkic Tengri, and that's exactly the reason why he identified it as a possible "Turanian" element (he probably meant no more than to say "Turkic loanword"). So Rawlinson most probably does not actually provide here any additional information at all – he merely identified the resemblance before anyone else.

In view of the geographical and temporal distances involved, it is extremely difficult to even come up with a plausible scenario that would link the origin of Proto-Turkic *teŋri or *taŋrɨ in any way to the origin of Sumerian dingir. It only makes sense if you place Proto-Turkic on the ancient (Bronze/Iron Age) Iranian Plateau, as Pan-Turkic nationalists are wont to do; however, this practice puts faith before evidence, and there is little reason to think that the region in question has ever been home to Turkic speakers prior to the Sasanian period, nor been anything but predominantly Indo-European-speaking since at least the Late Bronze Age. As for Chinese, newer research pretty much rules out the possibility of a link with Tengri. Instead, Georg suggests that *teŋri may be a borrowing from Proto-Yeniseian *tɨngVr- "high" (see Wiktionary); this would make any connection with Sumerian even less likely. We don't know nearly enough about the linguistic landscape of Bronze-Age Asia to rule it out without any shadow of doubt, but the link remains speculative in the extreme and does not rise above the level of most amateur speculation in the field of etymology. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:38, 20 May 2017 (UTC)Reply

Why would a Yeniseian origin make the relationship less likely? *tɨngVr is far closer to dingir than Tengri is, especially taking Sumerian phonology into account, where dingir is about as close as you could possibly get to *tɨngVr, which I found so shocking I decided to see if anyone who knows more about linguistics than me had noticed this connection. Additionally, the Dene-Yeniseian theory, which seems to be fairly widely accepted, indicates that the Proto-Yeniseians likely migrated around a lot, which further improves the plausibility of a connection between the two words. Additionally, among the theories for relatives of the Sumerian language are Austrasiatic, Uralic, and Basque, which are all just as geographically distant as Yeniseian. I tried looking into other cognates between Proto-Yeniseian and Turkic, but I'm not nearly good enough at linguistics for that, and I was discouraged when I saw an etymology of dingir as di(decision) + ngar(to deliver), which is nothing like the given meaning of Proto-Yeniseian *tɨngɨr-, high. However, you clearly know better than me about this, so I just want extra confirmation that this connection is just a startling coincidence like the Mbabaram word for dog. Agwic (talk) 04:06, 5 May 2023 (UTC)Reply

http://lexikon.katolikus.hu/S/sz%C3%A9kely%20hieroglif%C3%A1k.html +https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Heinrich+Tischner&btnG= — Preceding unsigned comment added by Magic Finn (talk • contribs) 18:21, 2 June 2021 (UTC)Reply

From transliterated texts of Mesopotamian/Assyrian texts, as an Independent Researcher who has worked on Ancient Egyptian Texts as well as on transliterated cuneiform texts, I have concluded in my writing on the latter that the word “dinger” which is also written as “zinger” , translates to “what should be told; as a form of the command, “niger/n.ger” meaning tell.” In the early times of writing, (meanings of their words may have been meant to represent related but slightly different messages or may not have had another word for writing especially since their writing system seems to have been made of signs, symbols, and characters more than alphabetical as we use the word writing for today. For example, “dinger” could also mean, “ what should be written down (so the information or story may be told)”, because, at the time that I had understood the use and meaning of the word “dingir or dinger” I hadn’t come across on a word that translates to, “what has to be written” in cuneiform transliterated texts until much later, on other texts that I worked on. Before I realized it to mean as described above, since “dingir/‘dingir could also mean hand and foot though in an abbreviated form, or mean, confuse/d”, it took more work on various texts before settling on what is discussed above. Under all circumstances, the validity of a word depends on its meaning within the context of the whole text in which it is used.” Therefore, more analysis of any word’s usage is sought and followed by this researcher with inevitable revision and correction by self as well as by others at the right time. Besides the accepted name of a region in Mesopotamia, UR/Ur, especially since the ancients hardly used upper and lower case letters (as we do), the word ur, especially if/when it appears with the word dinger in the same sentence, would/could mean, news/information about something, someone or some event that has to be told about.” When analyzed from all angles, single words could reveal information that calls for further analysis. (Excerpts from research previously done by this writer.) Alphalang. Alphalang (talk) 22:05, 25 May 2022 (UTC)Reply

Why does the article in our digital code appear backward when compared to the cuneiform tablet? (Head of the arrows on the left as opposed to the tablet which has it on the right)

Is one actually incorrectly backwards? Which one? Nvlc23 (talk) 14:16, 18 July 2024 (UTC)Reply

Some redundancy between this article and An (cuneiform)? -- AnonMoos (talk) 17:18, 13 August 2024 (UTC)Reply