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How to write in Cuneiform

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Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#71

Post by OisinMoran »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #64
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?

Thanks! By doing nothing at all—these are all just Unicode code points :o So if you're quick you can even copy a time as text. The only tricky thing was the symbol for 20 (and just that) didn't work on Android?? so I detect that and replace with two tens

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#72

Post by ahazred8ta »

NoSalt wrote: post #66

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!

Trivia: Le Guin's 'Roke' is an Old English form of 'rook', both in the sense of persian rook, chesspiece, fortress tower, and also rook the bird.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#73

Post by jhbadger »

efskap wrote: post #35
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…

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.

Egyptian did that too (and that writing system developed independently as far as we know) -- it's interesting that multiple ancient cultures did that (and as you mention modern Japanese isn't that different)

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#74

Post by jhbadger »

morshu9001 wrote: post #38
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #9

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

Reminds me of the coincidence between the 5th century Armenian alphabet and the periodic table

Or that the genetic code has 64 codons and the Book of Çhanges (I Ching) has 64 hexagrams. Obviously a coincidence due to the fact that codons are combinations of 3 instances of 4 bases (4^3 == 64) and hexagrams are 6 lines that can either be broken or unbroken (2^6 == 64), but fun nonetheless.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#75

Post by cpfohl »

scroot wrote: post #32
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.

I was responding to the claim in the article:

> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.

Memorizing thousands of characters is a lot more work, but the memorization isn’t the main part of learning a language…

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#76

Post by singularity2001 »

Animats wrote: post #48

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/

it's already in the Training Data but as you Can Imagine a Lot of hallucinations Going on. in fact you can try it out with the examples given on the video. It has gotten significantly better

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#77

Post by singularity2001 »

wl wrote: post #25
canjobear wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Egyptian and the Sumerian culture were very strongly linked with near identical cultic symbols and building plans for temples up until 3100BC. Chinese writing came suddenly over 1000 years later (minus some shamanic symbols), connectable via the Anu seal (which of course is tentative and will be denied by Chinese nationalist)

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#78

Post by singularity2001 »

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…

Good candidates would be the arc of Vinca, Cucuteni, Maykop down to Mesopotamia

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#79

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #34
user982 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

To be sure, 'logogram' is an even worse word than 'ideograph' for what the Chinese writing system is.

Re: How to write in Cuneiform

#80

Post by thaumasiotes »

IAmBroom wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

What do you think I mixed up? I pointed out that é is one grapheme in French and two in Mandarin, and I pointed out that é and è are the same (adorned) letter in Mandarin and two different (unadorned) letters in French. And that ö in English is similar to the Mandarin é, but not to the French é.

You seem to object to the idea that they're distinct letters in French. How would you account for å?

> and graphemes ("e", but also "ee").

Not a universal view, but fully compatible with -- and indeed, suggested by -- everything I said. What are you trying to point out?

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