Umman Manda — Mesopotamians Called IE People “The M-N-ers”

“Scholars have struggled for decades to explain this moniker for communities we now know are Indo-Europeans. Fans of Finding Manuland might intuit my hypothesis: Whereas the N-N- sound is ubiquitously immanent in Babylon, Sumer and Akadia terms, even in the second millennium BCE the M-N- semantic signalling sound was so immanent in the words used by the Indo-Europeans the Mesopotamians interacted with, they just called them the M-N-ers.”

Source: The M-N- Sound · Substack “Enheduana, the Moon, and Me”

The “Umman Manda” hypothesis: ancient Mesopotamians nicknamed the Indo-Europeans “the M-N-ers” because the sound was so pervasive in their speech. External evidence from a non-IE culture.

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