I was chatting with a friend the other night about some Sumerian poetry I’d been reading, and how I liked that it was translated in a poetic way, while usually that sort of thing was so dry - and she (being an ancient Near Eastern scholar at the British Museum), exclaimed, “Oh, the original’s not like that, you should read it”. And went on to convince me that it wasn’t that difficult to learn at all.
So I went on line and found this: Wikibooks Sumerian Grammar. My problem now is…I’ve finished all the lessons on that site. It was really good, it went through some of the grammar with real examples, and exercises going both ways (Sumerian -> English and vice versa). The only thing that was missing was the actual cuneiform. But I don’t know where to go from here. There are lots of books on the internet and on Amazon, but none of them look like practical introductory guides to me.
My daughter took a class in Hittite cuneiform at the University of Chicago, for fun. She was the first undergrad the professor ever had. The professor was involved in a multi-decade project creating a dictionary.
The readings were mostly accounts of battles.
It was not easy, since the students mostly had a background in ancient languages - I think they all knew Aramaic.
So, if you live near a university with a good classics department, you might convince the professor to let you audit a class. I suspect they’d be pleased that someone is interested, and they are not exactly deluged with students looking for cuneiform to get that hot new Internet job.
That might be a good idea…I was looking into unis (which seem to want Akkadian as a prereq…which confuses the hell out of me, as Sumerian’s a language isolate. Maybe it’s the grammatical structures, but I’m already familiar with those). But auditing…that could work.