Englund's Sumerian name elements are not rarer in the archaic names than elsewhere in the corpus
Of 540 legible editor-marked names, 12.4% contain a sign from Englund's own list of Sumerian name elements, against a null median of 9.8% (95%: 7.4–12.4%) for pseudo-names drawn from Uruk III administrative entries; the token odds ratio is 1.35 (95% cluster bootstrap 1.09–1.60), and against entries on the same tablets it is 0.97 (0.70–1.38).
What it means
- The names argument can no longer be cited as a measured deficit of Sumerian elements; at most it is an absence of clearly Sumerian name shapes.For: Do the roughly 440 personal names in the archaic texts follow Sumerian, Semitic or some other naming pattern?
- One of the three supports for Englund's agnosticism about the scribes' language is weaker than stated; the other two (no phonetic spellings in Uruk IV, numeral-before-noun order) are untouched.For the key question: What language, if any, do the proto-cuneiform texts record?
Next steps 12
Details
Go through the 27 matched archaic-to-ED names. Drop any that depend on a spelling first attested after ED I-II, such as the EN.E2 spelling of Enlil, and rerun the null comparison. If the excess over the null holds, continuity stands.
Details
Compare the full sign profiles of Schøyen/Brussels names and excavated Jemdet Nasr/Uruk names (shared vocabulary, Jensen-Shannon distance against a permutation null) to see whether they form two distinct naming populations.
Details
For each matched name, estimate the probability of a chance match from the frequency of its signs in ordinary entries and in Early Dynastic names, and rank the matches by strength.
Details
Repeat the bridge only for archaic names that contain a sign occurring in under 1% of names, weighting each match by how unlikely it is under the shuffle null. A surplus there would point to real survivals; none would leave the names with no route to a reading.
How it was found 1 run
The archaic names carry Englund's Sumerian elements at about the corpus rate, not below it
Share of 540 editor-marked names containing at least one element, against 10,000 random pseudo-names of the same lengths; CDLI Uruk III–IV transliterations
Notes from the run
The element list was fixed from Englund 2009 before any enrichment figure was computed; raw sign counts in the names had been looked at while checking the parser. The decision rule is in the docstring of names_test.py.
Sources 3
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Englund's Sumerian name elements are not rarer in the archaic names than elsewhere in the corpus [Evidence EVD0DFQSJB59Z1F]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFQSJB59Z1F
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dfqsjb59z1f,
title = {Englund's Sumerian name elements are not rarer in the archaic names than elsewhere in the corpus},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DFQSJB59Z1F},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DFQSJB59Z1F}
}