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How to write in Cuneiform

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Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#41

Post by yujzgzc »

pezezin wrote: post #39
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or multiple syllables for some characters depending on context, like 了 being le or liao. Chinese characters really aren't syllabic.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#43

Post by thaumasiotes »

yujzgzc wrote: post #41
pezezin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or multiple syllables for some characters depending on context, like 了 being le or liao. Chinese characters really aren't syllabic.

What? Le and liao are both syllables.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#44

Post by thaumasiotes »

pezezin wrote: post #39
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

Well, there is semantic information included in the spelling of Chinese words. Far more than is included in other, non-Japanese writing systems.

But that won't stop the script from being syllabic any more than the same phenomenon in every other written language will stop its script from being syllabic or alphabetic. English script is alphabetic even though way is spelled differently from weigh.

Meaning is not used in determining the pronunciation of a Chinese character. (Except to the extent that the same character may have separate uses, as when 長 is pronounced zhang3 if it means 'grow' and chang2 if it means 'long'.) A character indicates a sound, and it always indicates that sound regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appears. This is as pure as syllabaries get.

Kanji do not share those properties. They are not restricted to single syllables. They frequently stand for several different unrelated words. They do not represent any particular sound. They may be drafted into any word with a vaguely appropriate meaning, even if that word is conventionally spelled with other kanji.

> most Chinese words are just one syllable

This is false; they're mostly two syllables.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#45

Post by jrapdx3 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #3

Back in the days when a wide variety of removable digital media flourished (floppy disks, various flavors of tapes, ZIP and JAZ drives, Syquest and Bernoulli cartridges, mag-op WORM, etc) a friend and I joked about how we needed a "Cuneiform drive" to write to and bake sheets of clay because, compared to all the storage formats we were using, Cuneiform actually held up over time.

Yes indeed, holding up over time is not characteristic of digital technologies. To be sure I owned all of the "ancient" storage formats you mention, and down in the dark corner of my basement some of the old denizens still abide if not actually used. From time to time it's painfully evident that optical drives have all but disappeared too. We're all writing in electronic sand, endurance of our messages, ideas and creativity seems hardly a high priority.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#46

Post by beloch »

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…

Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..

Cuneiform was also used over such a vast period of time that significant evolution took place. e.g. As numbers and mathematics evolved, there were sometimes different symbols for the same numbers depending on what was being counted. Scribes often had to learn several sets of numerals and when it was appropriate to use each of them.

The modern reader needs to learn, not only languages, but contexts and also be aware of how the script evolved over time.

Cuneiform generally evolved to become simpler and less contextual as time went by, but there remained a lot of characters to learn by the common era. The Phoenician alphabet was a huge step forward precisely because it was much simpler and easier to learn. Shaving years off of the learning process turns literacy into a common skill that many can obtain, rather than a select few whose families can afford to send them to a school for many years.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#47

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
user982 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#48

Post by Animats »

There are cuneiform code points in Unicode in the supplemental multilingual plane. Fonts are available.[1] There is keyboard input for MacOS.

Now all we need is LLM support for translation. Is there enough cuneiform content available for training?

[1] https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#49

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

hnfong wrote: post #30
thaumasiotes wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No J, U, W, and, prior to ~230BC, also no G; around that time also no Z which had been disfavored; almost no K which was barely used if at all, and Y was a distinctively Greek-only letter in Roman times, so that gives you 20 or 21 letters: ABCDEFHI(K)LMNOPQRSTVX for the Latin alphabet.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#50

Post by inkyoto »

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…

Other than the usual suspects being Lemurian and Atlantis civilizations from which everyone and everything have descended from, what actual evidence do we have for and against earlier writing systems?

Petroglyphs are not a form of writing, and the Kush tablet along with a few others are considered to be precursors of the proto-writing – at best.

So I reached for my trusted Ouija board to ask whether writing predates Sumer. It spelled, with unsettling clarity: «Y E S . B U R I E D . D E E P». Then it paused. «N O T Y E T M E A N T T O B E R E A D». Mysterious? Yes. Confirming? Not quite.

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