Editing History of linguistics (section)

=== Babylonia ===
The earliest linguistic texts – written in [[Cuneiform script|cuneiform]] on clay tablets – date almost four thousand years before the present.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Linguistics: An Introduction|last=McGregor|first=William B.|author-link=William B. McGregor|publisher=Bloomsbury Academic|year=2015|isbn=978-0567583529|pages=15–16}}</ref> In the early centuries of the second millennium BCE, in southern [[Mesopotamia]], there arose a grammatical tradition that lasted more than 2,500 years. The linguistic texts from the earliest parts of the tradition were lists of [[noun]]s in [[Sumerian language|Sumerian]] (a [[language isolate]], that is, a language with no known genetic relatives), the language of religious and legal texts at the time. Sumerian was being replaced in everyday speech by a very different (and unrelated) language, [[Akkadian language|Akkadian]]; it remained however as a language of prestige and continued to be used in religious and legal contexts. It therefore had to be taught as a foreign language, and to facilitate this, information about Sumerian was recorded in writing by Akkadian-speaking scribes.

Over the centuries, the lists became standardised, and the Sumerian words were provided with Akkadian translations. Ultimately texts emerged that gave Akkadian equivalents for not just single words, but for entire paradigms of varying forms for words: one text, for instance, has 227 different forms of the verb ''ĝar'' "to place".