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The grammar of the Sumerian Language is characterized by extensive agglutination, head-final syntax, double-marking and elaborate verb forms. Knowledge of Sumerian grammar is still rather poorly understood in comparison to other classical languages, even ones such as Classic Maya or Middle Egyptian that were lost and later deciphered, due to the Sumerian Language being a language isolate without any living native speakers, and the rather defective and polyvalent nature of its cuneiform orthography. Despite these challenges, the meaning of Sumerian texts is normally more or less understood

Phonology
Sumerian phonology is the probably the most poorly understood aspect of the language; despite this, it is basically agreed upon among Sumerologists that the language had the following consonants phonemes, given in the traditional latinization here:
 * *Note that some scholars write the velar nasal as a g-tilde, but, due to this symbol lacking a codepoint for it as a precomposed Unicode glyph, the ĝ|g-caron shall be used here, as is often done in Sumerology for the same typographical reason.
 * **The two alveolar sibilants differed in voicing, with s being voiceless and z being voiced.

The distinction between plosives in Sumerian is now mostly believed to be by aspiration, not voicing, as the series here written never occurs in the coda position in Sumerian syllables.

Sumerian had at least the following four-vowel system:

Syntax
Sumerian Syntax is highly right-branching, with relative clauses, numerals and other modifiers following the modified. In genitive constructions, the possessor always follows the possessed, whether the possessor is a free noun or a possessive suffix: For example, the English "I am your slave and - for the sake of my life, please let me eat" most straightforwardly translates to "Saĝzumenbida namtil3ĝu10še3 gai3bšieku2en", using the first person singular possessive suffix "-ĝu10" on the nominal chain "namtil3ĝu10še3"; however, one more commonly forms genitives in "chains"; for example: In the chain "ensie2kika" - "the lord of the house of the land", the suffix "-ak" (which changes to "-a" or "-ka", according to laws of sandhi), indicates two genitive cases, each stacked on top of each other Sumerian has an Oblique-Subject-Object-Verb (XSOV) word order, though this occassionally is broken in poetry.

Nominals and Nominal Chains
The Sumerian nominal takes the form of a chain. Sumerian nominal chains are defined as the largest morphosyntactic entities that can act as arguments of a finite verb and these chains must consist at minimum of at least a nominal nominal and a case suffix. Yet Sumerian nominal chains can become quite complex, including such elements as subordiante clauses and modifiers (the two are not distinguished in Sumerian grammar), possessive pronominal suffixes, demonstrative suffixes, numerous other types of suffixes and reduplication. Take the following nominal chain as an example:

Lugalaninebir: For those, her kings.

In this nominal chain, the stem is lugal; it is itself composed of two roots, lu2 (the subscript numeral two is standard practice in Sumerological transliteration so that the cuneiform orthography is fully preserved), meaning "human" or "person", and gal, meaning "great" or "big". the suffix -ani means "her/his"; note that, though Sumerian has a binary animacy-based system of grammatical gender, very similar to the rational/irrational distiction found in Tamil, it lacks any sex-based grammatical gender, unlike Latin or Arabic. The suffix -(e)ne (the parentheses around the e indicate that it is elided) makes this nominal chain plural; note that only nominals in the animate gender (that is, only nominals referring to humans or deities) may be made plural with this suffix. Next, the suffix -bi indicates a demonstrative, in this case specifically a generic demonstrative, thus, it could mean "yon", "that" or "this". Finally, the suffix -r(a) indicates the dative case, meaning something akin to certain prepositons, especially "for" and "to".

Cases
Sumerian has a rich system of case suffixes, and this case system distinguishes between two sets of cases: adnominal and adverbal. Adnominal cases do have a corresponding dimensional prefix, as adverbial cases due; dimensional prefixes will be explained later.

Adnominal cases appear before include the genitive case, which takes the form -a(k), and the equative case, taking the form -gin7; these two cases mean roughly "of" and "as, during", respectively. Multiple genitive constructions are particularly interesting: The genitive "stacks" itself, as in the following nominal chain: Ne3munuseneuruka: The strength of the women of the city.

Verbs and Verb Chains
Sumerian verbs are rather complex, exhibiting: polypersonalism for every argument of the verb, both core or oblique, being marked in person, number, case and gender by a prefix or suffix (these are known as "dimensionals" in Sumerology; split-ergativity along aspectual lines; and a complex system of mood.

Compound Verbs
Sumerian also features an abundance of compound verbs - prototypically consisting of a verb root and a prototypical object, with any and all prefixes placed between the two roots (before the verb root); thus, these are most likely something like polywords.