Affixes in Sumerian and their reflection on Turkish

The earliest source of written records by which we can examine the people of the past, their lives and the legacy they left for the future has remained from the Sumerians. They were the ones who rid forgetfulness from being a deficiency and would revive the memory somewhere in the future. However, the historical legacy they left had remained hidden under the earth until the archaeology of 19th century uncovered it. Since then many experts, researchers or enthusiasts from different nationalities and different corners of the world have made a great effort to understand who they were and what they left behind. Numerous studies have been done on their language. Despite this, all those studies awoking our admiration were not enough to illuminate some aspects of the Sumerian language. The aim of this study is then to fill a gap as much as possible and to contribute to the science by revealing out the blind spots if there are any. The first step is to go over the morphology of Sumerian within the scope of possibilities that the technology we have and our daily life offer. After presenting the suffixes of Sumerian, the second step is to identify the suffixes inherited from Sumerian to Turkish in terms of meaning and function, by comparison. There have been various studies to make inferences about possible affiliation of different languages with Sumerian. Turkish is one of them. To some extent a noticeable relationship of this language with Turkish has been so far proven. However, these studies mostly focused on vocabulary. Studies approaching to the subject from the perspective of grammar are limited. Moreover, the data of Sumerology have not seemingly been subjected to a through examination and evaluation in order to reveal equivalent elements in terms of morphology. Therefore, this study aims to find out as many grammatical elements as can be said to have been inherited from Sumerian to Turkish. The findings are of a nature that will allow us to question the earliest ages of Turkic languages. In that respect, Sumerian suffixes have been classified hereby making use of previous studies on the Sumerian language, documents and the knowledge of the experts in the field. So, an inductive approach had been preferred in this study and the results were obtained by analyzing the collected findings. In order to reveal the results now, the related data is going to be handled in three stages, and the study is divided into three chapters. The first chapter gives information about the general characteristics of Sumerian. The writing system, phonetics, syntax, periods, sources and sentence elements of Sumerian is handled there. In the second chapter, Sumerian affixes are evaluated. Under the title of Affixes in Sumerian, which is dealt with in two phases, inflectional affixes and derivational affixes are explained with examples. Inflectional and derivational affixes in the noun category are thus presented with two sub-titles. In addition, exclamation, preposition and conjunction affixes are put down. The last, third, chapter is reserved to affixes that seem to have remained from Sumerian to Turkish. The affixes whose equivalences we found in the second chapter are listed here with titles and explanations about the equivalences are given. The content presented in this section also constitutes the conclusion in a way. A comparative analysis eventually ascertaines that both languages share many equivalent grammatical elements even if their names are different. It can be said that the epir and esir pronoun forms in Chuvash, of which the exact age of divergence from the other Turkish dialects has been unknown so far, emerged as of the Middle Babylonian Kingdom Period. It seems the derivation of Turkish personal pronouns out of those two are also historically based on the Sumerian. The original source of demonstrative pronouns this "bu", that "şu" and it "o" in Turkish is also there. Again, the negative suffix in Turkish -sIZ "without" and the predicative suffix (copula) -DIr are some of the suffixes inherited to Turkish from Sumerian. The findings of the study are summarized in the conclusion "sonuç" section. Keywords: Sumer, Sumerians, Sumerian, Turkish, Turkish History, Morphology, Suffixes, Inflectional Suffix, Derivational Suffix, Noun.