Like a number of languages in East Asia, Sumerian has an optional nominal suffix that indicates plurality, /-ene/. Only animate nouns and nominal phrases are capable of taking this suffix—inanimate nominals do not occur with the suffix.

dingir-re-ne 'the gods'

Older accounts often describe the reduplication of inanimate nouns and nominal phrases as the primary mechanism for indicating the plurality of an inanimate being, but this is incorrect. It now seems fairly clear that reduplication of a nominal stem is a way of referring to all members of the class defined by the term.

kur-kur 'all the mountains'

There is, however, another expression that can be used with inanimate nouns to indicate a kind of plurality, namely hi-a, which is actually a nominalized form of the verbal root hi 'to mix'. In its nominalized form it is probably best translated as 'assorted'.

udu hi-a 'assorted sheep'

Although these additional mechanisms can be used to indicate that more than one of some particular kind of entity exists, they are not, strictly speaking, forms of number marking. Particularly from a typological point of view, only the /-ene/ suffix is a true marker of plurality in the nominal part of the grammar.

• Schramm, Wolfgang. 1983. Die Pluralbildung der Nomina im Sumerischen. In Althistorische Studien: Hermann Bengtson zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht von Kollegen und Schülern. Historia Einzelschriften 40. Eiesbaden, pp. 1-7.
• Sollberger, Edmond. 1969. Genre et nombre en Sumérien. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 26: 151-160.
• Thomsen, Marie-Louise. 2001[1984]. The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to its History and Grammatical Structure. Akademisk Forlag. [see in particular pp. 59-63]