If you go through older articles on cuneiform, sometimes you have to retranslate (e.g. Upper Hani as "Hani-GALbat"); and sometimes you have to make the retranslation happen in Sumerian itself. Was he UruINIMgina or UruKAgina? Is she MUNUS or is she SAL? It turns out that the Bronze Age found Sumerian at least as alien as does modernity.
Aygül Süel (and Daniel Schwemer) in The Akkadian and Sumerian Texts from Ortaköy-Šapinuwa (2021) illustrated how the Hittites sussed out sumerograms: they understood their pictographic nature. Then they used other, monosyllabic sumerograms as transliterated Hittite, to sound out the sumerograms in question. They did this for Sumerian numbers like "eleven".
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