How to write in Cuneiform • Hacker News Board

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#21

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 1:58 AM UTC

Baeocystin wrote: post #15

Seems relevant to mention https://dumbcuneiform.com/ here. I haven't ordered from them, but was always amused by the idea.

Dang. They lead by saying they'll translate your short message. And their marketing image shows the message "Girl, are you a beaver? Cuz daaaammmm!"

I was really looking forward to seeing how that got translated into something other than English.

But in the fine print, they say this instead:

> We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into [Old Persian] cuneiform.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#22

Post by walledstance » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

DecoPerson wrote: post #6

Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be: How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World The added word being: KNOWN You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards. I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which on…

This is a good hill to die on. I’m a middle school teacher and explain this concept often to my class. I explain that what I say now is what we know, yet these ideas can and do change, so keep this in mind as you continue your education.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#23

Post by tshaddox » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:05 AM UTC

DecoPerson wrote: post #6

Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be: How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World The added word being: KNOWN You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards. I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which on…

> If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!

Of course, if you’re a fallibilist you believe that it’s always possible that you’re making a mistake. It seems unnecessary to always add “unless I am mistaken,” because that hedge always applies.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#24

Post by colechristensen » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:11 AM UTC

DecoPerson wrote: post #6

Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be: How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World The added word being: KNOWN You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards. I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which on…

Sure, but you could also endlessly add clarifying details to be more exact

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known (by the author) Writing System on Earth, the third planet from the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy, as of 2025 as long as you're a human without a major disability that would prevent you from using these techniques or are at least a being with similar hands and arms also able to obtain the necessary materials and can read and comprehend modern English if you aren't too busy doing other things and expect to live long enough to complete the task

You often get nitpickers going after some small technically correct detail which may be true but no reasonable person in the intended audience would ever actually need to be told. No one reading the original title would assume that the author had omniscient knowledge of the whole human history of writing beyond present archaeological fact and this doesn't need to be pointed out.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#25

Post by wl » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:12 AM UTC

canjobear wrote: post #13

gnulinux wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, knowing what we know about anthropology, it's extremely unlikely cuneiform was the oldest writing. What's more likely is that other human groups must have invented ways for storing information, but they didn't survive.

What discoveries in anthropology make you think that cuneiform is unlikely to be the oldest? Writing has only been invented independently a few times in history, so it seems reasonable that cuneiform could be the first.

Writing has been independently invented two to four times that we know of in the last five millennia. (Some scholars debate whether cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese writing were all independently invented, with Mesoamerican writing being the other almost indisputably independent invention.) Anatomically modern humans date back at least 200,000 years and probably would be capable of inventing writing long before our known examples.

Why do we not see more writing in the archeological record? Maybe agrarian societies both motivate writing and are required to provide the free time to invent it? Or perhaps it was written on media that's subject to decay? If some society developed writing on tree bark 100,000 years ago, none of that is going to survive and we'd never know.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#26

Post by zamadatix » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #16

100721 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to harness electricity had not been invented yet, by a few thousand years. This seems unlikely.

Not so hasty - I'm pretty sure this was powering the Antikithera Mechanism and the ancient roman Analytical Engine and other such early AI devices - so they would have needed some sort of schematic language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery The Baghdad Battery is the name given to an artifact consisting of a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron fixed together with bitumen. It was discovered i…

The periods your reference are indeed thousands of years after the periods in the article, before even getting into the debate about any of these needing electronics schematics.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#27

Post by cpfohl » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.

Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#28

Post by wl » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #9

Errrr.... actually that looks like ancient electronics schematics language. Has anyone considered that possibility?

The problem with that possibility is that nearly all the cuneiform we have makes sense as texts or accountancy. There's a vanishingly small amount of cuneiform that's completely indecipherable.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#29

Post by wl » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:29 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #2

"Cuneiform" is a medium, sort of like "paper" if that included the tool you use to make the marks. Writing systems using cuneiform include Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian... The article states that "Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking…

The Babylonians also used Sumerian as a prestige language long after it was dead, much like we might use Latin today. Also, reading Akkadian cuneiform involves learning a bit of Sumerian vocabulary, because texts spell out words in Sumerian that were presumably pronounced instead as the appropriate Akkadian word (Sumerograms).

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#30

Post by hnfong » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 2:35 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

eloisius wrote: post #4

> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic. I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.

Well, if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters. (Japanese characters with a name that literally means "Chinese characters", but still not Chinese characters.) Kanji are very much not syllabic. But Chinese characters are.

You’re right in a politically sensitive context, but practically speaking Kanji and Chinese characters mostly share the same unicode code points, and you might want to ask yourself whether it’s worth nitpicking over for example whether English uses the Latin alphabet when proper classical Latin does not have J or U…