Some Sumerian words that many other languages and cultures have borrowed. (Translations are from A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts, by John L. Hayes.)

Mother - Ama in Sumerian, Ima in Hebrew.

Father - Ab-ba, Ad-da in Sumerian; Aba in Hebrew.

Mountain, mountain range - Kur, Hur-sag in Sumerian. Har is mountain in Hebrew. Kur could also mean land.

Alla (Allah), the name of god in Arabic, was also the name of a Sumerian goddess of the netherworld; in Akkadian, Allatu.

Earth - Ki in Sumerian, also known as Gi or Qi. Modern usage: Gaia, for Mother Earth.

Great - Gal in Sumerian; in Hebrew, Gadol means great or large, with the same first and last sound. The three-letter root is GAL / GDL.

Lu-Lu - The Sumerian people were sometimes called Lu-Lu (Akkadian: Amelu), which is said to mean "mixed-up person (being)", because their mythology said we were created from a mixture of ingredients - and of themselves. In English we still call someone a "lu-lu" if they are crazy or mixed up.

Adamu and Adapa are Sumerian names and characters, the original form of the name Adam in the Bible. Adam is always translated as "Man" in English. In Hebrew the word Adama can mean earth (dust of the ground), Adom is red (like blood), and the word Dam means blood. See how the root name of Adam is closely linked to the other words? These double meanings will be important later on.

Heaven, sky, star - An, Anu. The city known as Heliopolis in Egypt used to be called An, or Anu - the chief worship site of the god Re ("Ra"). (Universe is, in this reading, the compound word An-Ki, meaning "Heaven-Earth".)

Dumuzi - Sumerian god, reused as the name of a Hebrew month: Tammuz. Crying for Tammuz is mentioned in the Bible, Ezekiel 8:12 (about the same time as the Babylonian exile). They were not crying for the name of a month; they were crying in remembrance of Dumuzi, the husband of Inanna, who was killed and was not able to be revived.

Utu - The Sumerian god Utu (meaning the [visible] sun) is the same as Shamash in Akkadian; he used the celestial symbol of the solar disk as his representation. The god-name Shamash is the same as the Hebrew word for the sun, Shemesh. Imagine that: the word for sun is the same as the name of the god who used the symbol of the sun.

E-din - E means "house"; Din means righteous or pure. Hence: the Garden of Eden. In Hebrew, Din is law; "House of Law" is like saying courthouse. (Some of you may have heard of the word Moujahidin, an Arabic word meaning holy warrior or righteous warrior - the name of the fighters in Afghanistan that the U.S. supported against the Soviet invasion.)

There are so many Sumerian influences - this page shows you influences in the modern world that began in Sumer.