Sumer in Mesopotamia (now mostly Iraq) was the home of the earliest known civilization, and the now-extinct Sumerian language is widely considered to be the earliest written language. In my research, I also managed to weld together the fascinating but cohesive history of how this amazing association came about.
To effectively illustrate both these aspects of my research, let us briefly revisit the ancient ‘proto-term’ lomega (‘join together’), which definitely betrays vestiges of having once been a common global term. Its Indo-European equivalent is embedded in the noun nomego. I purposely revisit this term because we last week we were yet to explain the l to n sound-shift from the verb (the ‘doing word’) lomega to the noun nomego, which noun would otherwise be lomego. I had noted that the best way I will do this is by providing another example of this shift in order to show that it is not uncommon. But before getting to the other example, I will firstly relate numego to the Latin term numero: the root of ‘number’ in English. Numero is also a French term, and the way they presently pronounce the ‘r’ is exactly as we pronounce the ‘g’ in numego. But how does ‘joining together’ relate to ‘numbers’? Numbers are an itemised string, or joining together, of individual figures or quantities!
