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How to write in Cuneiform

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Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#61

Post by pm215 »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #52
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.

> Japan’s kanji alphabet > if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters [...] Kanji are very much not syllabic @2, the reason Japanese speakers use the designation 'Kanji' is the same reason that English use 'Latin', as a reference to their origin. To insist that Kanji are Japanese and not Chinese would be as strange as insisting that English does not use the Latin alphabet: it's not wrong in the sense that Ja…

Though English, French, etc sharing the same unicode codepoints is not as far as I'm aware problematic, whereas Chinese and Japanese characters sharing codepoints does cause wrong behaviour (wrong shape of character used in text because renderer has to guess whether to use a Chinese or Japanese font) and has to be worked around by marking up text as "this is Japanese"...

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#62

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

now see this is an online business.

all you need is essentially a basic website and billing + $0.30 of clay + basic kiln or oven + broken reed or bamboo stick.

chances are the orderer won't even know if you just made it up.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#63

Post by itsnowandnever »

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.

I think about this when it comes to the internet and AI all the time. all of this knowledge we have access to required a very complex global supply chain and surplus of people with specific technical skills to maintain. if the USA has any major disruptive events - natural disasters, political instability, etc - the burning of the Library of Alexandria will pale in comparison

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#64

Post by MikeNotThePope »

OisinMoran wrote: post #60

I made a Unicode Cuneiform clock recently! Watching it for a minute should teach you the important numbers: https://oisinmoran.com/sumertime Some discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280168

This is fun to watch. Question... For 5, 7, and 9, how did you get the right most golf tee to levitate?

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#65

Post by IAmBroom »

beloch wrote: post #46
marc_abonce wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

> 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..

You mean, like "1" can mean one, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... or one-tenth, one-hundredth... depending on the context of other digits and an optional decimal?

Yeah, I guess it could take months to learn the ten digits of our current system.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#66

Post by NoSalt »

Dr. Irv­ing Finkel is an interesting guy. I ran across him shortly after I discovered the Lewis chessmen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen], and I found out that Dr. Finkel had loaned his personal set to the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone filmmakers for Harry and Ron to play Wizard's Chess with. I have since purchased my own Lewis Chessmen reproduction, and it is absolutely beautiful!

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#67

Post by IAmBroom »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #55
DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> count your alphabet, which only contains 19 or 20 off-by-one errors are to be expected... K is such a fringe case. I checked back and you're right, it was consistently used for that specific case 'kal.' and for some names. Interestingly though I don't think any (major) romance language retained that spelling afterwards. It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw th…

> It's a bit like the British 'ö' in 'Coöperative'. Given that I remember one single time I saw that spelling in the wild while visiting the UK, should I now go and write angry letters to all editors that "English really has 27 letters!!"? Well, no. The 'ö' in 'coöperative' is not a single grapheme; it's two graphemes. The same mark, which we might call U+0308 COMBINING DIAERESIS, is used with the same significance o…

You've gotten so nitpicky that you've apparently started mixing your own terms: graphemes, letters; and you're doing so incorrectly to boot (Muphry's Law, perhaps).

There are characters (U+308 in this codepage), letters ("E" and "e"), accent marks (which require an accompanying letter), and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").

Instead of iteratively correcting each other by refining and redefining words in each response, how about we communicate in good faith on the actual topic: cuneiform.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#69

Post by IAmBroom »

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.

I'd settle for "earliest known", without an assumption that there was probably an older one.

Much like fossils, the vast majority of human writing is quickly lost to posterity. Paper, bark, and string decompose; clay and rock break; all writing materials can be repurposed for other writing (palimpsets) or other uses (reshaped to wall stones).

Still, given the paucity of known, independently invented writing systems... We may well know of all of them.

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