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How to write in Cuneiform

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Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#31

Post by krapp »

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…

No part of the Antikythera mechanism showed any indications of being electrically powered, rather all reconstructions show it was operated by hand.

There was no "Analytical Engine" in ancient Rome. I don't even know what this could be referring to.

As your link mentions, the "Baghdad Battery" was debunked long ago, it's just a jar for storing scrolls.

The modern symbology of circuit diagrams was invented in the 20th century.

None of those cuneiform structures even work as circuit diagrams.

It's coincidence. The Dendera lightbulb isn't a lightbulb either.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#32

Post by scroot »

cpfohl wrote: post #27

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 o…

The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#33

Post by marc_abonce »

cpfohl wrote: post #27

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 o…

It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform:

All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters.

Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitude of the several hundreds or even thousands, depending on the language[1], so I imagine that the experience is closer to learning to read Chinese or Japanese and less like Hebrew and Greek.

That being said, I've never tried to learn neither cuneiform or hanzi, so I'm just guessing based on the number of characters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#Sign_inventories

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#34

Post by CobrastanJorji »

user982 wrote: post #5
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.

Additionally, syllabaries (like the kana) are not alphabets.

You are technically correct! Alphabets (ABC) are for phonemes, syllabaries are for syllables (hiragana, Cherokee), logograms are for words (chinese characters). Of course, some writing systems are very much hybrids (like Chinese, or hieroglyphics, or even the humble ampersand).

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#35

Post by efskap »

marc_abonce wrote: post #33
cpfohl wrote: post #27

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 o…

It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform: All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters. Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitu…

In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g. for the words for sheep and king. So in that sense it is indeed very similar to Japanese.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#37

Post by thaumasiotes »

user982 wrote: post #5
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.

Additionally, syllabaries (like the kana) are not alphabets.

Nonsense.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alphabet

> al·pha·bet

> a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order

And then it shows an Alphabet Table beginning with Hebrew and Arabic.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#39

Post by pezezin »

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.

Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them, that's why there can be dozens of characters that map to the same syllable.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#40

Post by keiferski »

tshaddox wrote: post #23
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.

In principle I agree with you, but in practice people really seem to forget this basic premise of science and jump right to the “that’s how it is,” stage. So I think it’s helpful to continually remind ourselves that this enterprise is a skeptical one.
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