Reddit mentions of A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts (AIDS And Research Tools in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, No 5)

Not OP, but I learned Sumerian in school, from this book. You can definitely teach it to yourself.

http://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Grammar-Research-Ancient-Eastern/dp/0890031975/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374630469&sr=8-1&keywords=hayes+sumerian

The two books I'd recommend are

http://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Grammar-Research-Ancient-Eastern/dp/0890031975/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3

and

http://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Grammar-Handbook-Oriental-Studies/dp/1589832523/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_2

The former is probably more useful for actually teaching yourself, the second is useful in conjunction with the first or with a professor. It'll teach you quite a lot about the grammar. I would consider looking into Akkadian if you're planning on teaching yourself, in which case these are what you want: http://www.amazon.com/A-Grammar-Akkadian-John-Huehnergard/dp/1575069415/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374683864&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=akkadian+john+heunergaard

There's more resources and a better understanding of Akkadian, so it's less of a clusterfuck to learn.

This is quite late, but now that I'm more knowledgeable about resources for Sumerian I would like to recommend some:

Thomsen's [The Sumerian Language] (http://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Language-Introduction-Grammatical-Multilingual/dp/8750036548/) is very useful to have even as a beginner and has been the traditional way of learning Sumerian. Good luck getting a hard copy of it though, its been out of print, so it's very difficult to obtain. Maybe try looking for it at a library? I'm sure there are online sources for it though.

Jagersma is also a good source for learning the grammar if you can't get your hands on Thomsen. Fully available online. It was his dissertation, so expect more up to date terminology and currents trends for understanding the grammar.

Edzard's Sumerian Grammar is also good.

With respect to each author, there will definitely be different perspectives on how to understand Sumerian, such as verbal forms, dimensional prefixes, conjugation prefixes, etc. It's up to you to decide what suits you best. My experience with Thomsen is that some of her explanations are ambiguous and the examples she uses can be overwhelming for a beginner (at least it was for me). There are definitely strengths and weaknesses to each of these grammars. Nonetheless, the resources provided are the basics to understanding the grammar and are no doubt useful and adequate for transcription and translation.

I want to stress that in order to the learn Sumerian grammar you need to work side by side with texts/cuneiform. It's definitely difficult to get a grasp of everything while reading the grammar without having lessons similar to Hughnergard's Grammar of Akkadian to guide you. It would be useful to start out with brick inscriptions and such. This is where John Haye's Manuel of Sumerian Grammar and Texts is useful because it provides lessons and such. I'm also confident you can find this easily. Hope this is helpful. Good luck.

Edit: How can I forget Labat. Definitely essential with understanding the development of sign forms and also provides signs values (French). There's also EPSD, but there are plenty of weaknesses of using this due to a lack of context, but nonetheless useful. Yeah... unfortunately there are a lot of expensive books in this field.

>but I can see why that political slant would make you hesitant to purchase the book. I'm glad to hear it's been of use to you, though.

Yeah, this was a big thing. My friends said they would stop talking to me if I bought it because of the politics of it, but I knew they would change their minds once I started speaking their language :-)

>I'm interested in all ancient Mesopotamian languages. I've tried to teach myself the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian from this book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Babylonian-Yourself-Martin-Worthington/dp/0340983884 but found its approach to be a lot like those old Latin primers from school: lots of rote repetition, and very little in the way of conversation or topic-based teaching. I'm sure that's a limitation of the source material, to some degree; but I still think it should be possible to teach any well-understood language in a way that emphasizes natural speech production rather than long vocabulary lists.

>Sumerian is a whole different story. I've had some success learning to read it with this book https://www.amazon.com/Sumerian-Grammar-Research-Ancient-Eastern/dp/0890031975 but its grammar is still poorly understood, and the fact that it's an agglutinative AND ergative-absolutive language makes it... well, quite the adventure for anyone used to Indo-European or Semitic languages.

This is really cool! I admit I haven't looked at many ancient languages, but they do fascinate me in some ways.

>In terms of the grammar, I got a little help from my understanding of Turkish, in which I used to be semi-fluent (I lived in Istanbul for two years) -- but most of it is utterly alien compared with any other language I've ever studied.

I've also done a tiny bit of Turkish, but haven't gone too far with it. It didn't really "click" with me for some reason, despite liking Turkish music and having Turks all around me. I think I just got a bit frustrated with the agglutination, which never seemed to work well for me. I could definitely give it another chance though.

>My knowledge of Arabic is minimal, despite the fact that I'm currently making my third attempt at studying it. I made more progress with Farsi, where I was relieved to be working with ordinary subjects, objects and verbs again. I've never studied Hebrew, aside from the writing system. But it makes sense that you'd see loanwords across all these languages, as well as Aramaic and Amharic (and Ge'ez, etc.). Traveling in Africa, I was constantly surprised by how many loanwords from Turkish, Arabic and Farsi I heard in local languages.

I love Farsi too. I've lost a lot of my abilities in that language, but I still manage to maintain basic conversations when necessary. How far did you get with it?

Hebrew and Arabic have almost the same grammar - especially Arabic dialects like Lebanese and Palestinian.

To be honest, Ethiopian Semitic languages are another world completely for a speaker of Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic. I mean, I've met people from Eritrea who speak Tigre and Tigrinya, and they manage to point out lots of similar words to me (for some reason lots of them have knowledge of Hebrew and/or Arabic, and not just the Jewish/Muslim ones) and a little bit of grammar here and there. But honestly, the overlap between these Semitic languages is quite small compared to that of Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic, and I can't get a grip of anything they say at all.

I guess the "good" thing about Hebrew is that it's really got only two major variants (Biblical and Modern), which are actually very similar. In Arabic you have Fus7a which differs wildly from each dialect, which differ wildly from each other, and in Aramaic you have very different dialects too. I'm actually just discovering that - Assyrian neo-Aramic is more different than I was expecting to Suryoyo, and Western neo-Aramaic is another story altogether (which sounds much more Arabised). Then there are the Jewish dialects (which are unsurprisingly closer to Hebrew). Then, all the dialects within Christian Eastern neo-Aramaic under the banner of Assyrian (Urmia/Iranian dialect, Iraqi Koine, Chaldean dialect, etc).

Nonetheless, the overlap between vocabulary and grammar is really huge within these 3 languages, particularly compared to the other Semitic languages.

Where did you go in Africa? Swahili definitely has those loans, and I'm sure others do too. There are also a lot of Arabic and Farsi words in Hindi, which is cool.