[JudgePenitent]

A healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include:

"If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!"

"A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!"

"What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?"

Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin.

On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet

Source: Jon Taylor, "The First Scribes"